[hyperbovine]

No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.

[geofft]

> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.

The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.

When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.

It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.

Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.

[beatgammit]

I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.

An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.

I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.

[joegahona]

> An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.

You sort of described Apple News+

[m463]

> I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.

Taler should allow anonymous payments, which means a possibility of one fix to the present model: you can read the news without the news reading you.

[mcny]

Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous at all.

[m463]

I was told Taler is anonymous - for the customer.

[profalseidol]

Maybe Brave and BAT. I believe they already have the system up and running but not fully.

[magduf]

If the end product of this is that society collapses because of the eventual effects of only fake news succeeding, then I'd say their model isn't "fine" at all.

[creato]

If that's the outcome we are headed towards, then I'd say it's an inevitability, and the problem is not with the business model of news providers.

[flukus]

> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.

The problem is how much of their model is built on giving away their product for free, they want all the benefits of being open and free to access (in googles index, shared on sites like HN) but they also want to be closed to non-subscribers, the two are mutually exclusive and they need to pick one.

Either way I consider this a solved problem with the BBC and/or PBS model, news is an important public service and shouldn't be left up to commercial behemoths.

[dredmorbius]

If your Plan for Saving the World requires on changing human nature, overall intelligence,[1] or mass social behaviour, you're going to be Having a Bad Time.

Markets and information play poorly. Always have, always will.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Also known as the Lake Wobegon Fallacy. All the children aren't above average.

[literallycancer]

Newspapers don't know how to sell properly and it's the users' fault for not buying?

[manigandham]

People, through their actions, have proven they want free and easy sensationalism. Not in-depth investigative reporting. You can't really just sell into that.

[Spivak]

The popularity of investigative journalism podcasts from NPR, Gimlet, ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, etc. seem to disprove this theory.

Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigative journalism gets totally buried by "stories" or "updates" that are basically just a headline and a sentence or two of actual content.

[sumedh]

> The popularity of investigative journalism

Pretty sure sites like buzzfeed and other tabloid news would more popular than the sites which you mentioned.

[Spivak]

So? Tabloids have always been popular because they're entertaining. Movies are probably more popular than news too.

And BuzzFeed is a no different than NYT it WaPo at the macro scale. They just have a different idea about what the filler content should look like. Print news is really behind and have been fruitlessly playing catch-up due to a prestigious culture that holds reporting the most boring least relevant news as the highest ideal. The paper should be pushing a handful of super in-depth issues and putting the 'reporting' straight in the archive for news nerds.

NYT's Wirecutter is the most interesting innovation from an old guard news org I've seen in a while and is a good candidate to be some of that filler -- relevant, useful, and sometimes genuinely interesting.

[manigandham]

The people who listen to those are the same people who would be reading it in the first place. They are a fraction of the population.

[Spivak]

Other than a few long-form pieces from investigative journalists that show up in my Twitter feed I would never actually read a newspaper. Print news 'content' is uninteresting, unimportant, irrelevant to anything that actually matters most of the time, just as sensationalist as the tabloids, mostly rage bait, and disempowering.

Podcasts where the format is they have to pick a single story to tell for the whole week gets this right. A daily book where on a typical day you can shread the whole thing without looking and not feel like you missed anything is only being kept alive by feaux prestige.

[slang800]

I don't think that paying a monthly subscription gets me news that is any less fake or higher-quality than what I can find from non-paywalled sources.

I guess I'm a "credulous moron".

[tasty_freeze]

Are claiming that the Breitbart News (free) and the NYT ($$) are of equal quality?

[mjn]

If those were the only two options, sure, NYT wins. But there are plenty of free options better than Breitbart. BBC News, NPR, and The Guardian are all decent, on par with NYT in my opinion. For local news, I've mostly found small sites that follow specific local issues to be better than the newspapers, e.g. in Houston the best weather news is Space City Weather [1], and in DC the best source for transit/urbanist news is Greater Greater Washington [2]. There are pretty good smaller news sites and blogs for specific issues too, e.g. I read SCOTUSblog for Supreme Court news, and FiveThirtyEight for stats-oriented sports and US politics coverage. For "ongoing" world-news events, I usually just read what Wikipedia has synthesized. None of these have paywalls, though some do ask for donations.

(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)

[1] https://spacecityweather.com/

[2] https://ggwash.org/

[jmccaf]

Huh, I have a different experience, I hit a paywall (or a free article limit like NYT or Bloomberg) on most news stories I follow