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Comment by jonstokes | Hacker News Reader

I guess my biggest question as a journalist is not, "what is the point of blendle?", but rather, "what is the point of the NYT, Times, etc.?"

I'd be happy to just publish directly onto their platform and let readers pay me directly for the stuff of mine that they want to read via blendle (vs. paying a publication via blendle, then the publication pays me).

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Nuance and variety. A (quality) newspaper has its own signature, and presents you with a variety of articles (including news, investigative journalism, and op/ed articles). Some of these will be very popular, some of these will only interest a subset of the readers. Sometimes an article about something completely unfamiliar to you will turn out quite interesting. That is the serendipitous effect you get with a newspaper — although you do apply some form of filter by choosing newspaper X over newspaper Y.

If only economic concerns where a factor in determining what to write about, you would end up with a few insightful articles about widely appealing topics widely shared, but fewer high quality articles about niche topics.

A newspaper for me is a convenient shorthand for “a group of journalists and columnists who write good quality articles”. I would hate to have to hunt down individual articles and authors! The risk of getting locked up in my own private filter bubble is way too high.

I have a subscription to a newspaper I read daily, but sometimes I want to read an article from another (Dutch) newspaper. That is when Blendle is really useful (Blendle is a Dutch company, and all major Dutch newspapers make their articles available there).

The situation may be bleaker in the US. I am not overly familiar with US newspapers.

Posted above by JeanMertz - "... in The Netherlands, there's already a collective of journalists who created a non-profit umbrella organisation to represent freelance writers, who have been onboarded into our system."

Seems like a good case study is in the making.

NYT is income insurance, aka an employer. They will pay you a reasonable wage even if you aren't writing stuff people read.

The number of people in the NY media establishment getting paid a reasonable wage to write stuff that people aren't reading is a few orders of magnitude smaller than it was even five years ago, and in another five years it will be zero.

Uh no. While revenues and thus hiring have certainly dropped, it is by no means on a few orders of magnitude. I'd be surprised if it were even on a single order of magnitude. Even the newspaper I worked at that is in much more dire straights compared to 10 years ago is about a third its size.

Besides new online outlets, legacy companies are still chugging along. Starting wage for a reporter at the New York Times is around $70K last I heard (too lazy to look up the union site)

I think you misread my comment. I wasn't saying that the entire NY media establishment is approaching zero employees. I was strictly speaking of the classic "guy who gets paid to write stuff that nobody reads because it's good for the community/country/brand/whatever, while people on some other beat bring in the eyeballs and pay the bills." That's the population that's shrinking really fast.

Ah, OK. Sorry, I overestimated your cynicism...I read it as, "the New York media establishment writes stuff that nobody reads" :)

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