The Atlantic to Install Paywall | Hacker News Reader

The Atlantic to Install Paywall

wsj.com

28 pointsdanso46 comments

> A spokesperson for the Atlantic said the magazine will launch with annual pricing equivalent to “one fairly nice cup of coffee per month.

If every online property asks me to do this, I would be buying wayy too much coffee and losing too much cash.

That being said, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure what the answer is. I pay for my NYT and WaPo subscription, but probably can't (or won't) be paying for Atlantic.

I really really like Vox media though, but they don't seem to have a subscription based option. Also: Politico.

I say pretty much the same thing when charities try to get me to sign up for a monthly payment.

If I gave money to every charity that asked for it, I wouldn't have any money left myself.

Maybe what we need is a sort of central payment system for news media. Sort of like Spotify for news, except that the outlets keep their own sites and you have a single sign on for all the sites. Your monthly payment would be distributed according to how many articles you read on each site (or some other, more fair metric to reward high quality articles, maybe time spent?).

There's already an app that I know of that does that - or at least close enough. Blendle is an app where you pay per article you read, paid through your in-app account. My uncle uses it to selectively read articles from some large publications.

I think one downside is that those publications don't let you sign in on their systems, so you have to rely on the availability of the articles through a third-party. I agree that it would be great to have publications allow you to sign in through a third party system instead of their own. Maybe we can hope for one in the future?

Also, while I'm sure it's there for practical reasons, the per article price makes me very uncomfortable. There's this split second decision that I make as open an article - is it worth my time? To ask "if it's worth my money?" before every read seems less than ideal. For instance if my music service asked me a penny for every song I play, I'd probably end up listening to a lot less songs than I do.

Blendle offers instant refunds for this reason.

Blendle offers this service, it's called Blendle Button: https://pay-docs.blendle.io/

I wish I could just pay the sites I go to the equivalent of what they'd get from me in ads. How much could that be worth per month? Like $10? I'm sure loads of people would be willing to pay that to support and get ad-free content from all the sites they read. There's just no easy way to do that.

There is one called Google Contributor.

I think charities also become less frugal when they have many monthly subscribers. If they know they are getting a large repeat income every month, they will hire a chief executive with a big salary, and generally become inefficient with doners' money.

If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it. I think the same is true for online news.

>If instead they have to ask repeatedly for money, they have to continually justify why they should receive it.

They also have to repeatedly spend money on fundraising. Monthly donations are good for charities, just like monthly subscriptions are good for software businesses - they have a very high LTV if churn is properly controlled and make the finances of the organisation far more predictable.

Many still spend vast sums on fundraising even with healthy recurring donations - it just means they spend more on prime-time TV advertisements. Charities should not be trying to sell their services along side perfumes, car insurance and supermarket advertisements - single-use "things" - they should be going for the long term organic growth by fostering a great reputation for efficiency ("good done" per unit currency).

People selling perfume and car insurance clearly believe that prime-time advertising is cost-effective. Why shouldn't charities use the same media?

If I give $1 to a charity, I'm more than happy for them to spend it on fundraising if they're getting $1.05 ROI. That's a fantastically effective use of my money, as long as the $1.05 gets used effectively to deliver on their charitable purpose.

There's probably a good game-theoretic argument against fundraising activity if charitable donations are zero-sum, but I've yet to see any evidence that they are.

Human nature rears its head.. cant we optimize this, by breaking long articles up in thousand small ones.

We are going to make soo much money. Hey, HN- Reader who suggested this, can you make a FlyWeigth implementation that treats every letter as a article?

You don’t have to subscribe to every publication out there. Find two or three which provide diverse viewpoints and suitable to your taste and call it a day. Bar few, I don’t think most of the population has the capacity or time to read hundreds of articles per day from tens of different publications

I don't want to read hundreds of articles per day.

I want to read maybe 50 articles per month, from tens of different publications.

> I pay for my NYT and WaPo subscription, but probably can't (or won't) be paying for Atlantic.

Ironically, I think the way the Atlantic iterated on their model put me off. While NYT and others went to a paywall with limited free views, Atlantic blocked anyone with an adblocker.

So, when I chose to subscribe to some journalism outlets, I was engaged with the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. I was already trained by the Atlantic’s adblocker blocker to ignore them.

Now they’re moving to a reasonably hefty-sounding subscription model. Great, but my media budget has already been consumed by NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, and a handful of professional journals. And, again, they’ve already trained me to ignore their site.

I have no trouble imagining an alternative timeline in which they had my money, but the manner in which they iterated on their model killed it for me.

I would really be happy if there was a journalism company that I could pay for quality articles.

Unfortunately, most articles are low quality. Clickbait journalism is like this - a lot of people produce things that people would be willing to pay to not read.

The quality articles are also extremely rare; most media sites are one hit wonders, creating only one or two quality things. So a subscription would not be helpful either.

I think a better way to monetize would be to write a book or something, collecting the best of the best, or digging deeper into an idea that went viral. Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport comes to mind.

You’re looking for things like blendle.com. I don’t use this particular service because they don’t allow “+” in email addresses.

LOL that's the reason that I gave up trying to subscribe to the WSJ digital edition, even after as much Imliked heir Theranos investigation.

Quality content takes time and effort to produce, so it's very expensive. A serious long-form investigative piece could take several man-months, whereas a clickbaity opinion piece can be knocked out by an intern in a couple of hours.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. If you don't pay, they can't afford to produce quality journalism. If they don't produce quality journalism, you won't pay.

it'll never happen, it's all listening to what YOU want to hear.

I see paywalls as win-win deal.

The abundance cliché tells us that more news outlets reaching more readers is always a good thing.

In reality though for the news producers, what's the point of reaching many millions if you become a slave of advertisements and of the competition for people's attention?

And from our perspective as readers, we should drop the abundance mentality and understands our news consumption much like we understand our food consumption. There is the equivalent to consuming too much food and to consuming unhealthy food. Consuming more don't make us more informed. As Steven Pinker says, even when it's honest and good, "News is a misleading way to understand the world". It's all about dramatic events that just happened and slow but powerful and meaningful evolutions naturally take the backseat. But they do make us meaner, angrier, more pessimistic.

I prefer to choose to consume less news, but to really enjoy the ones that I do consume. And "I am ready to pay for it?" is a very good assesment of wether that's the case.

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/16/12486586/2016-worst-year-ever-...

Agreed, paywalls are a win-win because it has the potential to remove the chains of clickbait and pulp. Except that "a cup of coffee" is a US-centric term which doesn't apply everywhere in the world. Not everyone in the world (or even the US) can afford to spend those few USD a month on a news outlet. And if they, they can only afford to buy so many cups of coffee. So a lot of people who can't afford won't resort to it. Except, perhaps, in their native languages.

(Comment written on the cost-free, advertisement-free website Hacker News.)

I found I was reading a few Atlantic articles here and there so I thought sure why not support journalism and sign up for subscription. Signed up for print and digital.

The whole experience was awful.

After three months I never received a single print copy. The only digital edition I could access under android was the one that was freely available anyway. I couldn't access the premium content. For that I had to go and download the PDF which is quite suboptimal. The IOS app wasn't great either.

(EDIT: I should say that I was back and forth with their "support" numerous times about my issues before I took the decision to cancel)

In the end I cancelled, but it took a few goes to get in touch with anybody about it... I figured out how to do the cancellation myself on their "site" but even then had to go through some third party fulfilment agency to get the full refund. Promised me a cheque. Cheque never arrived and eventually I kicked up a stink and they just refunded to my credit card.

Good luck to them I suppose. They do some great long reads and those writers have to be paid. Hopefully this paywall signals transition to a more solid commercial framework ... totally put me off them though.

Maybe now they'll stop gaming the system on sites like Reddit and HN. They were banned from reddit for shady practices for a while, and went so far as to switch to different domains to get around it.

> “More than a million people come to our site 10 times or more every month,” Mr. Cohn said. “What we’re doing now is we’re saying to that group: ‘Help us continue to expand our journalism.’”

No, what they're saying is: $-)

It's hard to expand journalism without hiring journalists.

I would gladly fork over money for them and other news sites to keep the servers running in lieu of ads.

Where is the Spotify for online newspapers already?

Well I think that both Apple and Google have tried to do this with their respective newstand apps but I'm not sure how successful this has been.

Also revenue I guess, for such a service is probably a good bit less than getting your readers to pay soley for access to your publication.

Blendle offer a pay-per-article model. It's very hard if not impossible to make a sound business case for the Spotify model in journalism. The running costs for creating new content on a daily are much higher.

It’s funny how initially everyone thought those media barons pushing their sites behind paywalls were seen as crazy. They seem to have achieved their vision though - if everything is behind one then it no longer looks abnormal.

What we need is a central payment body that we can 'subscribe' to and then select the websites with paywalls we want access to.

Then its a) easy to manage your budget as it's one payment per month/six/yearly, and b) reduces reader friction, as a SAML/oAuth type logon can be performed when you click through the paywall notice on your selected news sites.

All that needs to happen is for someone to stand up and be the payment body, and for a critical mass of news sites to sign up.

Doesn't seem that hard really.

Blendle provides something close to what you describe: https://pay-docs.blendle.io/ So it's mostly a matter of these publication signing up.

Thank you. I have already been getting some pretty good practice in ignoring any of the current paywall sites. It's a great way to cut down on distraction. If the best content sites do this, then I can ignore the rest as well.

I feel they should all get paid and I would rather that model rather than ads. My comment sounds negative, but I think it's a good move. I have switched to newsletters which give headlines and summaries.

Despite what these publications tell you, the oversupply of people wanting to write things on the internet means you actually do not need to pay for "quality" journalism.

For every grizzled vet that throws in the towel, frustrated with adblocking freeloaders...two young idealists take their place.

Anyone can publish a blog. Mastheads don't have a reason to exist anymore. My advice to a young writer is to build your own brand and forget about print operations trying vainly to stay relevant but have no reason to exist anymore.

On any given day, on any given topic, I can usually look around for a few minutes in any Reddit thread and find something genuine, well written, and useful that is equal to or superior to "quality" journalism that apparently won't survive without my money

Investigative journalism takes money.

Freelance bloggers can’t be expected to put in the time to do the job while they pay for their hobby writing.

In 2017 you learn things when they are leaked, not when they are investigated. How much was Edward Snowden making for the story of the year?

Atlantic on the other hand publishes long form opinion pieces

Leaks still require investigation.

Where was Snowden initially published?

When was the last time you saw real investigative journalism? These days it's a race to get what ever click-bait headlines you can get from 'unamed sources' (or my favorite 'sources close to X') up and out the door. Gotta get those sweet sweet ad views. Journalistic integrity is long dead and what's left are those Freelance bloggers; except they no longer write for blogs, but major entertainment outlets.

Paradise / Panama Papers was a good example of recent modern investagative journalism.

Take this story about the "banned words at the CDC" which double checked a story by the Washington Post:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-trump-banned-w...

The NYT contacted the agency spokesman and several present and former federal officials. They contacted the agency spokeswoman of the FDA. They quote a former Surgeon General and an outsider expert.

> Sheila Kaplan reported from Washington, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Pam Belluck contributed reporting from New York.

Three people wrote the article and pooled their contacts or input. It was likely edited to make it short and concise. How many blog posts care to do that instead of rehashing or just spinning opinion?

I don't think calling people up and asking them to make a statement is beyond the reach of a blogger. Investigative journalism does take a lot of effort and it needs to be encouraged, however vast majority of journalism produced is not investigative and could be made more efficient and democratic

BuzzFeed have a superb investigative team. This year, they broke the story of the alleged assassination of 14 Russian citizens on British soil and a subsequent cover-up. Six journalists were credited for the piece and it's clear that they spent months on it.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/investigations https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...

Inside Housing revealed that tower blocks were being fitted with unsafe cladding months before the Grenfell Tower disaster. They uncovered the issue through lengthy reporting of previous fires in high-rise buildings over the course of several years. This obscure little trade magazine has won a shower of national awards for their doggedly determined investigative work.

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/inside-housing-bea...

There are hundreds of superb investigative journalists working for local and regional newspapers, doing crucial work under severe constraints. They're underpaid, underresourced and underappreciated, but without their work, all manner of injustices would go unreported. Numerous national scandals have been identified because of the work of one local reporter, doing the dog-work of sitting in courtrooms and knocking on doors.

Mother Jones did a big private prison story (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/08/whats-missing-from-...).

> Conservatively, our prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared in it brought in $5,000, give or take.

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