How we should pay for newspapers | Hacker News Reader

How we should pay for newspapers

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

36 pointsAndrewDucker54 comments

The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month

Consider changing your habits. I felt this way before, too. Then I subscribed to the Washington Post and New York Times and weaned myself off news aggregators and CNN.COM, in favor of just scanning the front pages of both. I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was before.

Something that was easy for me to miss before was that the selection of stories on aggregator sites is itself a form of editorial control. The algorithmic aggregators do a pretty terrible job; the popular vote aggregators... yikes. If you want to read a couple of articles from a lot of different sources, you're going to need to pay somebody to "design the menu" for you.

The major newspapers have spent the last century working on that problem, and I'm not sure anyone's really giving them a run for their money. Consider an NYT, WaPo, or WSJ subscription.

Popular curation is awful, you're right. But it remains unfortunate that old media still bundles their curation and authoring services. I'd like to see expert curation applied to the entirety of news articles.

Or you could just pay literally less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month --- with the first months free --- and use your Amazon Prime subscription to get WaPo. NYT all-access is a little pricier; it'll cost you two cups of coffee a month.

I'd understand the resistance if you were constantly having to authorize and approve these charges, but really you just sign up and forget about it. I use the subscriptions at least as much as I use Netflix. I am sort of kicking myself for not having set this up earlier.

Very interesting, I wasn't aware of this option. Here's the WaPo link: https://www.amazon.com/The-Washington-Post-Digital-Access/dp... Only $3.99/mo.

I can't find the New York Times on Amazon, though. I pay $7.50/mo for a digital subscription directly to the Times. A pretty great deal, if you ask me. They run a sale every week or two.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? You didn't address what I said.

WaPo bundles authorship and curation, which is exactly the problem I'm describing. The problem isn't cost, it's incompleteness.

> I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was before.

Haven't you just traded one set of biases for another?

Every news source—even crowdsourced ones—has a bias. However, there are news organizations that strive to present the facts, as best as they understand them. Of course, they miss the mark—and their worldview inevitably bleeds in—but the top-shelf organizations do their best.

I subscribe to the NYT (the print edition—trying to figure out how to make news more accessible to my kids to stumble upon, and I like how it helps me focus on reading). As a Michigander, I definitely detect a progressive New England lense at times, but the quality of their journalism is generally superb.

but the quality of their journalism is generally superb.

What's an example to you of an article on a hot-point issue where you think the quality of their journalism was superb? And how do you know the quality of their journalism in that article was superb?

I have noticed that on topics that I have independent knowledge of, particularly topics relating to race, sex, or politics, I often find their reporting to be slanted and misleading. They care more about selecting anecdotes and statistics to fit the narrative, rather than starting from the perspective of picking representative anecdotes and a full composite of statistics that give you the actual truth of the matter.

> Haven't you just traded one set of biases for another?

Shh. He's found peace and reassurance. Invaluable.

That's a very interesting take. I've been a subscriber for a long time (and have worked in journalism, which often involves sitting in front of a computer and browsing news sites until something happens). I take front pages for granted, but still appreciate them compared to any feed.

The NYT (and the Wapo, to a lesser extent) is still a daily visit because it is a homepage that features a lot of manual curation with a ton of change over the day. There's a few feed like sections to see latest/breaking news. But I really like the serendipity.

Right now, the top news story (top-left column) is the Austin serial bomber. But the centerpiece of the page is an augmented reality feature with David Bowie.

I don't know if it's just for me (an old person), but the thing beneath the main centerpiece is a "Smarter Living" section that has random evergreen features like "Is it Better to COok With Coconut Oil or Olive Oil".

The Washington Post has a decent front page, with quality reporting and decent variety. It does feel less hand-placed than the NYT. I do think I've gotten in the habit of going to the WaPo for breaking news coverage, while visiting the NYT for random interesting features.

That's roughly where I'm at. WaPo takes the place of CNN.com for me, and NYT takes the place of Slate or The Atlantic, for when I just want to burn a few minutes reading.

In addition to the NYT, I also subscribe to my local newspaper (The Daily Freeman, http://www.dailyfreeman.com). It doesn’t have the resources of something like the NYT or WaPo, but I feel like local newspapers are essential for local democracy, at the very least by keeping local politicians on their toes. Also, local drama is always entertaining.

I'm curious, how engaged are you with your local paper, in terms of how often/regularly you read it, and how useful it is in your day-to-day life? It's been awhile since I've used my local paper (didn't really have one in NY, and I'm not really engaged with Palo Alto). I know my hometown newspapers, now owned by Gannett, are more or less gutted. Both in terms of physical paper and shallow (and ad heavy) websites.

I read them daily. I would say it’s actually more useful in my day-to-day life, what happens on a national level rarely affects me directly the way local happenings do.

> you're going to need to pay somebody to "design the menu" for you.

In the proposed model, you are paying New York Times to design the menu, if it so tickles your fancy. You can browse to their homepage and feast on an all you can read buffet, thereby increasing their statistics in the system and giving them a proportional larger share of the revenue stream. But you can also read the occasional WSJ or FT article.

That's the point.

Not to disparage your choices, but do you worry that limiting your news feed down to two objectively left-leaning sources is going to put you into a bit of a filter bubble?

On paper, one of the reasons I like aggregators is that they should be showing me news that I otherwise might miss. Unfortunately, Google News seems to be pretty bad about that and I think it's just reinforcing my own culture bubble.

First, I'm not reading the NYT editorial pages. I trust the reporting at NYT, WaPo, and WSJ about equally.

Second: if this concerns you, subscribe to the WSJ.

Third: the idea that you're getting exposed to valuable non-mainstream news sources from aggregators is pretty dubious. What I think is more likely is that you're being exposed to a lot of marginal stuff that doesn't hit WaPo because it doesn't pan out, and, much more importantly, that the selection of what deserves your attention is being made in a much dumber way than it is at a real paper.

I don't live in Washington or New York. I live in Edinburgh.

And I want to read local news from all over the place. I want to read multiple takes on things. I want to read the articles my friends share with me, and not have to go and find the New York Times article which is closest to the thing they want me to read.

I absolutely agree with one caveat. I think it’s important to be able to read an historical article even though you are no longer paying the subscription.

I think there’s subtleties to the subscription model though. Will it really cover all newspapers, even the super expensive and rare ones? The aggregator will get to choose what you could read on its platform. Also, certain articles are likely to be of higher quality, so there should be a good way to “fairly” distribute the subscription that is beneficial for you and humanity.

I love Spotify. I think it does the subscription model really well, and I like how it does not restrict you. At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions. I refuse to use Netflix (and Amazon video) because of the pain it has caused. It’s still not perfect because I want to play the songs using my own choice of music player.

There are two different services that I know of that might be of interest. The closest service that I have found is Blendle which charges a small amount per article rather than a subscription. The second is the basic attention token which, I think, could be used for this though it is much broader. I haven’t tried either.

> At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions.

Netflix has to honour its contracts with media providers, who have been accustomed to regional contracts and blackout clauses for decades.

Yes, absolutely. However, regardless of the reasons, it when I run into an issue I feel annoyed and it makes me want to not bother.

As somebody who has some insight into the inner thoughts of the revenue departments of newspapers, the suits running newspapers would rather die than accept Spotify for newspaper.

We were offering something like $0.20 per article. We ran a small scale test. The users loved it, it allowed the newspapers to monetize users that would otherwise not pay, it let you read the article without a bunch of ads loading slowing down the page. We thought this is great, we're making the digital newspaper experience better and making them more money, this is a wonderful success. They noticed that our product was loved too much by the user that they were cancelling their subscriptions in favor of it.

They would rather have that guaranteed $1/month from a subset of their users than rely the unpredictability of hoping the user reads 5 articles a month. And it wasn't just one newspaper, half the top newspapers 15 by circulation said the same thing. Throw in an aggregator service like Spotify on top so the newspapers can't even control the look and feel on top? The idea's dead in the water.

Mmmmm. Kind of. That insight is pretty accurate, in my experience (I work for PressReader, disclaimer) and what we're building is basically the Spotify for News. But for real.

It took some doing, and we definitely had resistance at first, but we have more than 7,000 newspapers and magazines now. And more every week.

Where we've really found success is taking the time to build strong relationships with the publishers. I totally get that they don't want a Spotify-like service to eat at their regular subscribers.

So - part of our benefit to them, is the way we let big brands buy access for their customers. That way, newspapers can reach hotel guests, airline passengers, people like that, that they couldn't before.

Whatever product you build, you have to consider BOTH the reader and the publishers.

It depends on the scale, really. When you only account for a small % of traffic, your impact to subscription revenue is also small, to the point where they can just bucket any cost or revenue loss under the marketing budget.

We still integrated with many of them (for years now at this point), with quarterly meetings with their senior management. They limit our integration to some small % of their traffic, undesirable articles, low flight risk users, or low loyalty users.

We're letting them control their revenue risks, and they're all just slow, risk-adverse, engineering resource limited, and enjoying the high Trump brought back to the press.

> the suits running newspapers would rather die than accept Spotify for newspaper

Then let them eat cake.

Clearly, a subscription of a few dollars a month is MUCH more valuable that aggregated article hits to the same total value: a subscriber is someone who will return because he chose you from the alternatives, he has a sunk cost in the subscription and will keep consuming, building familiarity and brand loyalty, develop favorite columns and writers, bookmarks and homepages etc. All these will make him return in the future and extend the subscription as long as you don't screw up in a major way.

A pay-per-article viewer is a mercenary that will come back only for a viral or exclusive content. These could be quite profitable when they happen, but are highly unpredictable thus have lower present value.

Maybe the correct approach to this market is via the lower value, ad supported content, where publishers would gladly accept a few cents instead of displaying the ads. Ad blockers seem uniquely positioned to bootstrap this business, the publishers are deeply aware of the ad blockers to the point they modify their sites to detect them - an API to accept the micropayment instead of nagging the user to turn off the blocker would be golden.

Once the system is in place and develops large revenue streams, the owners of premium content should grudgingly fold and accept pay-per-article.

Funny you mention adblocker. You'd think it's the biggest concern for publishers, but they're not scared of what they don't know. News publishers don't exactly have nimble cutting edge engineering departments dedicated to min/maxing advertising revenue. Adblockers also block many general purpose analytics scripts that would inform the publisher that the adblocker is a threat.

Very few publishers are willing to implement a hard paywall that could only be passed via confirmed payment. Especially when it relies on some 3rd party integration working. When there's a chance that that micropayment API doesn't work, no one thinks it's the payers fault, the blame always lies with the publisher in the user's eye, even when it's almost always the payer's fault. And there's nothing worse than pissing off a paying user.

And hard paywalls require engineering investment, which newspapers tend to not have. It's practically effortless pushing static content up to a CDN with some ad serving scripts. It's a lot of work accepting micropayments on every request.

The only thing I know about in this arena other than prior mentioned in the thread is Civil, a blockchain for journalism payments. I think it's super interesting. https://joincivil.com/

They're one of the blockchain projects coming out of Consensys.

Google tried this model some years back (I forget the name). The problem ends up (as always) being around the money.

You need to sign up ~all the newspapers for it to be valuable for users (otherwise they're paying $20/mo for access to just a random subset of the news), but the more newspapers you sign up, the more you need to split the user's subscription fee between an increasingly large pool of newspapers.

In the post he writes that the papers should get their "fair share", but how do you compute that? If you do it based on pageviews you create an incentive for participants in the program to juice their pageviews, either through low-quality clickbait or technical means like splitting a single article into a multipart series. And so on.

There should be an ecosystem like YouTube, but for long form text, where individual authors can have subscription relationships with subscribers.

I think this is what Medium is trying to be. They introduced members only articles a few months ago where a portion of the subscription goes to the author.

That's essentially what Medium is. If you consider that their goal is to get newspapers to publish on their platform, their premium subscription is basically what OP is describing in his post.

Edit: Samschooler beat me to it.

Check out Substack, they're working on exactly this: https://on.substack.com/p/a-better-future-for-news

That's super interesting. I think others are right, that's a lot like Medium.

But, what about when a reader doesn't really know which author they like. What if they just read the entertainment section of one newspaper, fun stories from some other magazine, and whatever's dominating the news cycle from that national paper somewhere else?

What happens on YouTube? People can look at the "home" page and see recommended articles. Also, sites like HN and reddit can link back to articles.

I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction.

There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers (or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them).

The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly. From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.)

At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My inclination is to feel similarly about print media.

Suuuuuuuuuure, although this will undoubtedly result in newspapers being paid less, not more. Given the currently bleak situations for newspapers, I'd doubt this would work.

There's also the issue of unions that have been popping up since DNAInfo got shut down. I don't think they'd support a "Spotify" for news.

Well there's Texture, a kind of cable package for magazines, bought by Apple last week. [0] If it works for magazines it could work for newspapers but the tricky part is that it has to be shared ownership and there are a lot more newspapers than magazines.

[0]http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture-acquisiti...

Exactly this. For Spotify to succeed they only needed to get a handful of label conglomerates on board. It could be done, but getting all of the heavyweight newspapers just in the United States to sign up would be a herculean effort. There is consolidation in the industry (particularly among hyperlocals), but it's not as consolidated as major label music.

It is!

But Hercules lives! Sort of. PressReader (disclaimer, I work there) is doing exactly this. Think Texture, except way more content. We have more than 7,000 titles right now. About half are newspapers.

You're absolutely right about the US news brands, though. They've got some good things going on their own already. But, we're working at it. This month, we added Variety, Robb Report, and a bunch of Meredith titles (mostly newspapers).

I'm loving this thread, though, you guys. It shows there's a serious interest for what we've got going on at PressReader. Awesome, awesome.

Awesome! Best of luck to your team.

We need Netflix for newspapers. $10 a month, gives you access to read hundreds of news articles.

There is Blendle, although I can't find a list of newspapers and magazines that they publish.

I think this is a great use case for blockchain and in-browser wallets. I imagine a not too distant future where Newspapers can add a bit of open source code that controls access to their content. If I want to read an article, I pay like 50c to unlock it.

I've called this model "microsubscription", on the idea that it combines features of micropayment and subscription. It's arguably bundling and it arguably isn't, so I'm going to go ahead with the cool name.

Flattr are doing it, Google Contributor was doing it drifted away. Readability used to do it. In fact, so many people have thought of this model that I have kinda lost track.

Google Subscriber splits the middle. It's not really a walled garden, but Google's reach and interpenetration of the open internet is so total that it feels and behaves very much like one.

I was granted a patent last year on a technical aspect: how to (1) log the visits, (2) let visitors through a paywall, (3) without revealing their identity to the publisher. This is easy (but potentially expensive) if you have a walled garden (Netflix, Spotify, Texture). It's more difficult if you don't.

If you want to contact me about it, use jacques@robojar.com.

I'd sign up for "Spotify for newspapers".

Friends of mine run Inkl: http://www.inkl.com

Google News?

Try PressReader, my friend. Shoot me a DM on Twitter (@jordanpowpow) and I'll get you started with some free access.

If you like it, awesome. If not, that's cool.

It's unlimited newspapers AND magazines. 7,000 of them. You can create 'playlists' and set auto downloads.

And every time you read something, the publisher gets paid a royalty.

This is the business model of cable TV providers.

How we should pay for the telegraph and the pony express?

This is exactly what medium is doing.

Err...not really.

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