How the Guardian improbably put itself on the path to profits
digiday.com
digiday.com
OTOH, most countries have a public broadcaster funded by a TV tax or somesuch. These are (IMO) hard to justify as public services in 2018. Newspapers are becoming the place where the gap is, and I think public funding is justifiable. The trouble is finding and implementing a good way of using it, one that preserves independance.
On the third hand, I think it is very dangerous guaranteeing business continuity to any business or sector. Disruption happens and the publications themselves need to figure out alternatives. Like the Guardian found, the type of revenue model is intertwined with content and quality. I feel that independant publications scraping to find business models is likely to yield some important finds, like this patronage based model.
We need to remember the distinction between currently important publications and journalism. Like the difference between pro business and pro economy. These can be at odds with eachother in some cases.
I'd pay around 50€ per month for this.
I know there's Blendle and it actually does have a good selection but I don't want to pay per article because that leads me to not read as much as I would with a flat rate.
Also I'm not sure if you provide all the content from these sources or just a selection.
I'm curious because of the price. 15/months seems very low so I'm expecting limitations.
Can you elaborate?
Is the premium you'd pay equal to or greater than the sum of the 15 services you'd subscribe to? If not,then you've answered your subsequent question (why haven't they done this) -- between one and all of the 15 would take a hit.
Sure, it may be overall better for each to do this, and obtain your patronage, but it's a trivial assumption to make that they've collectively run the numbers and determined it's not that compelling a path.
What's the problem, by the way, of having 15 subscriptions? Is it the 15+ emails a year to renew, the hundreds of spam emails you're likely to get (you'd still get those with an aggregated subscription model, I suspect), or some other factor(s)?
I'd never pay that because there's at least 60% of content I don't read because it doesn't interest me or I have no time. To get a full picture I'd need multiple subscriptions which is prohibitively expensive. So instead I pay none (at least no daily) and just read what's free on the net.
A flat rate subscription model could also prevent a bit of the filter bubble because it would allow me to read at no further expense different views from paper that I'd never pay to subscribe to separately.
I disagree with your assumption as well. Maybe they have room their numbers but in my opinion their are missing out on a new business model. Feels very much like the early music business.
All these new digital portfolios (including okay ones like the guardian) are only the very first and limited step the industry should take. They are really very limited in functionally and vision.
I know there are others like me but I'm not sure how many. I'm hoping for a change. Good information and well paid journalists are getting more and more important I think.
Probably not but I would be happy to do $30-$50 depending on whats included. I prob only read a couple of articles on each which is another reason.
> If not,then you've answered your subsequent question (why haven't they done this)
So take $0?
I'm not sure I follow.
Are you assuming that parent's desired 15 resources are included in inkl.com, or do you think that I'm claiming that they're not?
A NyT/Guardian type outlet can live through subscriptions. A local newspaper could thrive in a city with 100k people and decent ad market - but not now that Facebook eats their lunch. That’s the problem that desperately needs solving.
I’d love to pay for e.g a guardian sub that includes personalized local bits from my country, city etc.
Local news already is largely owned by a few very large conglomerates, which often also own major national outlets. In fact, that's a big part of what was killing newspapers long before the internet came along to help; those conglomerates cut local newsrooms to the bone as cost cutting measures to boost short-term numbers, turning local newspapers into a thin layer of local customization over shared (often mostly wire-service, even the national news desks at the papers were cut deeply) content.
Kudos to Neil44 for the link above.
But hey there is https://blendle.com I think it works pretty well
"Mastercard, originally known as Interbank/Master Charge, was created by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc."
SWIFT:
"SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1983) and was supported by 239 banks in fifteen countries"
Several others I can't think of right now.
Car2Go will probably soon be owned by Daimler and BMW as well.
This is the readability/brave model. I don't know why it hasn't taken off yet, but I really want it to.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bmw-daimler-carsharing/bm...
At inkl (www.inkl.com) we rank articles based on news value by tracking and understanding heuristic choices being made across the world's top newsrooms in real time.
So what any group/alliance should solve is micro-payments on web.
I can't find a list of partners anywhere (not counting the header image)? There's also no mention of how (much) the publications get paid. I don't want to support this if they take say 30%. I might as well pay with a credit card.
There doesn't seem to be any backlink from the publications to the inkl service, which makes me a bit suspicious.
The fact that they filter stories is weird too.
Overall, I'd prefer sort of an embedded platform where I can visit any news service and pay for an article there. Ideally it wouldn't be tied to news at all.
You can use it to pay 10c per article, or get unlimited access for $15/month.
The current cat-and-mouse of paywalls but with exemptions for facebook, search links, n-visits... it's an inevitable mess trying to do both wide distributions and access restriction.
A paywalled article can't be discussed on HN, retweeted and such. This isolates it from the wider conversation. That doesn't work with what media is today.
You're right, of course, but the Scott Trust is not philanthropic in itself. It only exists to keep the Guardian and Observer going as they are. As such when finances become tight there are undoubtedly tensions between the overall philanthropic aims of the Scott family and the brute need for the trust to survive so the papers survive.
The intentions of the Trust were explicitly carried over to limited company in its constitution. Whether that's sufficient to protect it, well we'll see.
>>The Trust was established in 1936 by John Scott, owner of the Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and the Manchester Evening News. After the deaths in quick succession of his father C. P. Scott and brother Edward, and consequent threat of death duties, John Scott wished to prevent future death duties forcing the closure or sale of the newspapers...
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2008/mar/06/...
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/...
The Guardian benefited from two very politically-charged years where left-leaning groups were dramatically beaten. This sort of event traditionally results in increased attention for left-leaning media in the aftermath. They've also reigned in their all-out campaign against the current UK Labour leader, under pressure from their own readership.
These factors are pretty big on their own. I'm sure the internal reorganisations and wikipedia-style appeals helped, but going where the readers actually want to go likely helped as well.
'The Guardian has halved its operating losses compared to two years ago, now looking at breaking even by 2019.'
It’s funny because if you take an objective look at the Graun - based in a tax haven, all its writers seem to have double-barrelled names and went to Oxbridge from an exclusive boarding school - it’s clear that their left-wing schtick is just an act, a product they sell to a gullible audience. They’re as establishment as it gets.
I don’t buy any Murdoch products either but don’t kid yourself that the Graun is any different
It depends on your definition of "establishment". The Guardian writers tend to represent middle- and upper-middle-class istances, which are not the same as working-class ones but can also be pretty divergent from proper upper-class objectives.
I disagree on that. Some of them do, some of them don't. The work they've done on Panama Papers and other stuff was pretty good, and overall unmatched in the UK. I have my complaints with the Guardian, but I wouldn't brand them with a scarlet letter.
It's left wing, not working class. The sun is working class, tits and all.
Your root cause argument I suspect is true: because I value the editorial message I overlook the flaws. In this regard, the News Ltd and Guardian are the same thing: they are newspapers. But, my root position also remains. I chose to give one money and not the other. I should just be more open to the reality behind that decision. The only person I am fooling, is probably myself.
It’s one particularly egregious example but there are plenty more: education is another, why are state comps good enough for The Workers while Graun types go private? Or housing.
Oxford is biassed to private school entry because its competitive. But it is emphatically not closed to state school pupils, and never has been. But in any case, whilst a lot of guardian journalists and columnists went there, I doubt all did by any stretch.
The Sun targets the working class, it doesn't necessarily represent it. Like the Daily Mail, they lie and spread hate in a more accessible language.
What I did was to divide the total revenue by the number of employees. Then if we make a reasonable guess for average loaded labour rate, say 70K GBP (which I think is probably generous for London) that still leaves us 70K per employee for external costs and various operating costs that are not included in the loaded labour rate. That seems quite high to me. Like I said, I'm not in the publishing business, but even when I worked on shrink wrapped software, I would consider that level to be bleeding money. I could easily be wrong. It would be interesting to hear from someone in publishing.