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Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

On the same front-page on HN for me right now is:

"Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M"

It is a shame that the difference here is so big. Many people would rather pay $3 for a cup of coffee multiple times a day, than pay a fraction of that for valuable content.

Edit to clarify:

I understand that consumer products are different than content and that news is not a direct competitor to coffee products. What I mean is that news companies are struggling to get enough out of the advertisement model whereas nobody expects to get coffee for free/less in exchange for advertisements on their cups.

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These shops don't sell coffee — They're real estate companies for ultra-short term coworking and third-place/feel-good lifestyle. Just like McDonalds (in some European countries at least).

Joe and the Juice is innovating on interior design/aesthetics, product (juice and coffee) and margins.

I always found Joe and the Juice absolutely unbearable because they always seem to play annoying music far too loud. Not at all comparable to Costa Coffee or other places where you can drink a relaxed cup of coffee, let alone work.

J&J have started moving into the Netherlands lately too... they have opened four or five stores just in Amsterdam (annoyingly kicking out some really great local places in the process). The coffee scene there is crazy compared to the UK... way more independents. I could see Costa popping up here soon as Coke take on Starbucks at a global level.

Agree about the overloud music, but I find J&TJ's coffee absolutely the best you can get on the high street.

Fantastic stuff, but totally agree with your point about the music. I would love to be able to post up there and work, but I unfortunately need almost complete silence to focus.

Noise-cancelling headphones? The volume seems to vary by city, it was low/background in a city location with plentiful floor space when they were at 20% capacity, super loud in another city where the location had much less square footage and were at 90% capacity. Could be a crowd control mechanism.

...but they actually charge for coffee and attendant consumables; not the third-place space.

- ed

Or, rather, the latter promotes uptake of more of the former.

You can go in and take the coffee out, but yes if you want to look at it differently that 'coffee' is part coffee part rent.

Yeah, this concerns me as well. I do think "bundle" deals (coffee + $1 more for a newspaper) might actually work. I know that I pick my local coffee store just because it has free newspapers and magazines to read (it is part of a local bookstore).

But I know plenty of people that are not willing to pay anything for "news", and their argument is always that there is enough free content on the web. The quality of news is something that is very difficult to assess, unless you are a domain expert.

There is lots of free content on the web though. TinyTinyRSS keeps me in the loop with bigger outlets and then communities like Hacker News/Reddit for everything else.

> valuable content

If I could buy a paper here in the UK that gave me a good mix of local and broad global coverage, focused on the facts rather than pushing its own agenda and stopped telling me how to think, speak and behave, I'd buy it, but that paper doesn't seem to exist.

The FT might be the closest? I recently switched from the Guardian. But it plays up financial issues and plays down social issues, as you might expect.

That's a good suggestion actually, but still probably more anglosphere focused than I'd prefer.

The Economist is the closest thing I can think of. They seem to be doing fine so maybe it's a good business model.

I'm still boycotting the Economist after they came out in support of the Iraq war!

> but that paper doesn't seem to exist.

The reasons for this are plenty of course, but having to rely on advertisements for survival makes it hard to focus on facts. Instead you have to focus on sensationalist news in order to garner more views/clicks/readers in order to sell more advertisements.

Even non-commercial BBC seems to be going clickbait, apparently scared to death of declining relevance.

>stopped telling me how to think, speak and behave

Well they don't directly usually say think this and given that there is 1000x stuff happening over what you can write up on a couple of pages it has to be filtered according to some view point. I'm not sure there's a way to do it with no bias.

Such a thing is not possible, because news is not neutral. Specifically, the decision of what is newsworthy is not neutral. I understand that certain US papers - NYT? - are considered mostly value-free in their reporting, but from my (left wing) perspective they appear highly ideological.

I have some sympathy for UK newspaper attitudes that "we have a point of view and we're proud of it". The fact that they are all terrible rags written by the worst kind of hacks is a separate problem.

As for sibling argument that the FT have no agenda, well, the clue is in the name. It's written for upper management. The fact that such people don't need or want their news as heavily filtered as their underlings is more an expression of the requirements of capital that anything else. Upper management can't afford ideological flights of fancy when they need to keep the system running.

> Specifically, the decision of what is newsworthy is not neutral.

Something of a defeatist position I would say: just because perfect neutrality is not possible, doesn't mean we cannot strive towards it, and even come close.

People value living their own lives over reading about other people living their lives

And I don't care about Trump's policies or Brexit anyway.

I wish I didn’t have to care. Unfortunately, I have to block myself from accessing quite a lot of newspapers because despite it being highly relevant, none of the news about Trump or Brexit is actionable.

Cola Cola is Sugar, Coffee is Caffeine. You're never going to go broke appealing to evolutionary biochemistry.

Coca Cola contains caffeine too, 32mg per can.

Costa coffee contains sugar too, 49300mg in a Chai Latte..

A 600ml bottle of Coca Cola contains 6.49e+13 picograms of sugar.

I recently discovered that 100g of red apples have more sugar than 100ml of coke.

Yeah wow!

This¹ website says a Fuji apple, my favourite, my dogs also love them too, contains 16.6g of carbs of which 12.7g are simple sugars, whereas Coca Cola contains 10.6g of sugar per 100ml.

Amazing!

Rather than quote nutrition difference between the two I'll just give a subjective opinion: when I eat an apple I just generally feel ok, nothing different really. Coca Cola makes me feel ill, it upsets my digestive system and makes my nerves feel a bit jangle.

I don't think I'm alone.

>rather pay $3

It's not so much that I'd rather pay $3 for a coffee than valuable content but that the content is available free and nice coffee isn't so much. I used a long time ago pay cash each day for a paper copy of The Guardian and similar but there's so much free info now it doesn't really make sense anymore. It's a bit like air to breath. It's worth a lot but why pay if its free everywhere?

Link to the discussion about Time Magazine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001786

> nobody expects to get coffee for free/less in exchange for advertisements on their cups.

Some services actually give away coffee without requiring advert revenue of any kind.

Moreover, coffee vendors such as costa coffee or starbucks aren't mere coffee vendors.

Edit: I'm really interested to know what exactly did I said in my post that could possibly justify the downvotes.

Maybe Time wasn't so valuable after all, don't you think?

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