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Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

I want a service where I can subscribe to journalists not news papers. I want to know that they are getting a portion of my subscription and being successful. I want 0 advertising in this news paper.

Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen.

Anyway, I don't subscribe to newspapers because I don't like their model, not because I don't want to support the journalist. I have no clue if I'm missing a massive part of how the newspapers actually front a lot of money to make journalism better by paying expenses for journalists. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of journalism. I just see a lot of crap reporting that doesn't hold water and I'm tired of reading op-ed pieces falsely labeled as journalism.

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I tried building a version of this in 2015 called Uncoverage. Beacon did too. Not enough people cared enough to support individual journalists. real stories take too long to write, all journalists need editors, and the value prop feels unfamiliar and seems thin for subscribers. Some are trying now on Patreon.

I think that's an important point that you'd have to support a small group like, editor/journalist combo.

I imagine you could get a pay scale based on page views, and a model where if you don't use the subscription you get ads.

It'd be interesting to see built.

I was also thinking it'd be nice to see recommendations separated from the hosting. I guess there just aren't enough people interested in it.

That sounds like your feed would become a series of blogs by the same authors. Perhaps if kept under the thumb of a responsible organization and editor that could work, but in my experience whenever a respected reporter goes off to create their own blog their writing tends to devolve into fringe posts crafted just to please their niche audience.

You are correct. I think that introducing more silo's into a system would be a bad idea.

I was thinking about this last night and I think it'd be interesting to see authors actually have to cite another post that has a good strong counter argument to theirs and point out places where they disagree. It probably wouldn't work on a systemic approach but might work if an individual with this sort of temperament did it.

Despite not liking their model do you still read their articles?

Yes - but I'm not subscribing to 10 news papers. I try to reference CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, Bloomberg, Guardian, NY Post, NY Times. I will even read some of the alt-left and alt-right stuff as well.

I find there are some journalists I'd like to block and never read their trash again from each paper and some I would like to go back to over and over again. (Chris Wallace is a good one)

The fact that I can't get consistency from any one of the above is frustrating and I'm not paying 10 bucks a month per newspaper, the most I'll do is turn my ad blocker off.

I want to give journalists my money, but I don't want to give a newspaper with a single agenda my money.

(as per my other post) crowd sourced investigative journalism... money gets pooled and goes directly to the journalist doing the research...

plus a reputation system

that's it, that's all we need to change right now... seriously, it will work

How does the reputation system work? And what depends on it?

I can't name many journalists off by heart. I'd like stories (or writers) to be rated based on quality (the way StackExchange does with answers) so that I never have to see the chuff. I don't care if the content comes from a trained journalist or a blogger who happens to be a subject matter expert.

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