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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

Well, how would you incentivise journalism? I can’t tell where articles i might want to read come from; i know that any given newspaper will have plenty of content that i find head scratching—that’s your editorial independence for you. There’s no good model right now to patronize journalists or topics.

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For instance, i like some journalists on the NYT, but i think i’m supporting poor journalism more than good journalism by funding them at all. The editorial independence is the source of the problem there.

Editorial independence refers to an outlet's freedom to cover topics of their choice with the coverage they judge best. So, is your concern the quality of the reporting, which is an problem of poor editorial practice, or the focus of the coverage, which is a problem of poor editorial independence? Or is it simply that you don't agree with a lot of the coverage?

The coverage itself is acceptable. It’s the way the headlines are written to subtly nudge tone in ways that alter perception of the front page (ie clickbait headlines) and the opinion section (most of those people I don’t give a damn about and I actively resent their continued employment.... anywhere. Get a damn blog.). In my understanding, both of these thing fall into the category of editorializing.

That doesn't scale particularly well. It's fine if you like one or two media sources, but there are thousands of them, and many are high in terms of quality. Having people buy subscriptions for all the media they like would be financially untenable, and probably hurt many of the less popular ones even more.

> but there are thousands of them

There are thousands of restaurants in New York. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat out.

The people who I know who subscribe to news subscribe to multiple publications. The set of people who (a) want limited access to lots of publications and (b) would pay for them is limited.

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