Hacker News Reader

FWIW I subscribe to the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Economist, and New Yorker. I buy books and music (I think I might be one of the few left who still buys albums despite listening to them on Spotify, too).

This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.

> You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.

Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.

You should point your snark cannon at each person who chooses to read a journalist created piece of content over the web without paying for it (as I'm assuming you just did with this article). It's very easy to point to those "wealthy tech bros in Silicon Valley" for all of society's ills when, for the most part, the real culprit is staring at you from the mirror.

>So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?

Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.

Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.

Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.

Are you arguing that New York Times and Washington Post of 20 years ago were secretly just as vapid and outrage-focused as the stars of modern clickbait media?

>"the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone."

Its just being exposed for what it is... the only new thing is discussion about it became common enough to pass the threshold for you to hear about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect