[locallost]

> Why is it that people like Adriene can make this work, and get young people to pay this much money when traditional publishers struggle to get people to pay anything at all?

Because "Adriene" sells yoga classes, not news. I do agree that a lot of the publishers mentioned are screwed because they are no longer needed. A yoga magazine needs to figure out what it can sell, but if anything it cannot compete in yoga classes, those are available in simply a better form online. But this is not news.

News is a newsroom reporting on things of interest. This is difficult because there are many things to cover and good people covering it are expensive. So would Spotify for news work? I worked for a relatively large newspaper and tried pitching this idea years ago. By pitching I mean I chatted about this with people at parties, but whatever. Anyway, the feedback I got was that these ideas floated around years ago, bit didn't stick. My feeling is that most newspapers are trying to find subscribers who will trust the newspaper with their life and use it exclusively to get news. There is logic in this, e.g. it's better to have 100k subscribers that will be your core audience than to have potentially millions of users but you have to fight for them and their clicks every day. Long term however I don't think it will work. This idea is becoming too foreign for people, especially young people.

I did not actually call this Spotify for news, instead I called it cable for news. After all mostly you do not pay for every single program you get on cable, it's bundled and everyone gets a piece. I think this will end up happening one way or the other because newspapers are increasingly concentrating and it's only a matter of time before someone offers a subscription for all the products in their portfolio, if they're not doing it already. To this I also feel there is a big technical obstacle in that because all of these products run often on different technical stacks and integrations that make it often too painful to implement.

[jsnell]

I agree that the author's framing of having random Twitch streams be "news" because somebody might learn something they didn't is absurd, and the essay relies so heavily on this idea that it is basically unsalvageable.

But...

> News is a newsroom reporting on things of interest.

This doesn't feel right either. It's... not quite circular, but nearly so. It's basically saying there's a single specific historical organizational structure that can produce news, and nothing else. Sure, if you want to provide a steady torrent of news on a huge variety of subjects, you need that huge edifice of journalists, editors, support personel, etc. But why does the same organization need to be producing all the news? What makes the writings of a single individual on a single subject and following reasonable journalistic practices not news?

[usrusr]

I've been talking about this for some years as well, but mostly without that audience of news professionals. I absolutely agree with your assessment that people won't be going back to that model of getting one subscription to pre-select what they can see that was the way in the paper age. Perhaps that could be the future if a past in which the decades of ad-funded free online news had never happened (I include "let's have an attractive web presence to lure people to our paper subscription" in ad-funded), but now that we are spoiled by having been able to read through the full political spectrum of publishers (and from every nation where they also write something in English), paying a subscription feels like paying to narrow access and that's just not very attractive.

What I imagine as an unlikely best-case model for reader-funded news isn't "spotify for news", but a "spotify for news without spotify": a step back to the print age where you'd have exactly one news subscription (unless you were particularly rich), but with what might be called reverse syndication, a profit share access scheme where every publisher acts as a spotify for its competitors. Provide proof of subscription with publication A to get a well-defined level of access at publications B,C and D, with a fixed part of the subscription fee divided amongst peers. The exact level of access would have to be well-defined of course, to prevent abusive strategies, but it could be something noticeably below "home subscription" (not ad-free perhaps?) but clearly above the free tier.