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The shady billionaire can continue brainwashing you even after you paid $30 a month, right?

In my opinion, the main difference between the bad journalism that used to exist before, and the utterly horrible journalism that exists now, is that previously people treated the newspaper as a whole, and now they share articles on social networks separately.

Why does it make a difference? Because when you have a package of 20 articles, and you understand that 3 of them are complete bullshit (because they are about a topic you know something about), you become less likely to trust the remaining 17 articles even if you see nothing wrong about them (because they are about topics you know little about). When a bad article can ruin your impression of the entire newspaper, the newspaper has an incentive to avoid at least the most obvious nonsense.

The same mechanism mostly doesn't work online. People share one article at a time. You won't share it if you understand that it is nonsense. But the fact that some other article on the same online newspaper is obvious nonsense won't stop you from sharing this specific article. On paper, those articles are part of the same thing; online, each of them lives a separate life. (Actually, an online company such as Gawker can split their content among multiple websites, to further avoid bad impression from one article hurting the remaining ones.)

Perhaps paying for online newspapers could return this perception of a newspaper as a package. (Assuming there would be no deals like "pay $100 a month, and get access to these five newspapers".) Maybe.

I have a response to this comment which represents the result of 16 months of dedicated research, and will have a positive effect on both the discussion and also the industry as a whole, provided my content gets the attention that it deserves.

It'll cost you $15 to read it though. Research like this is expensive, and since you're the party who will benefit, you have a duty to pay me.

If you refuse to pay me to read what I have to say, it means you hate the truth.

I doubt it. Why would I believe you?

This is the problem with news and I don’t know the solution. It’s hard to trust a company that is spending lots of effort explaining how valuable and worthwhile they are.

Many of these arguments boils down to “pay me or lose me.” While it’s true that good journalism costs money that doesn’t mean we should pay for mediocre and bad journalism. And it’s pretty hard for me to tell good from bad.

This reminds me of site that when you fire visit them put up a window that asks you to subscribe. I don’t know if I want to subscribe so how would I be able to choose. But if a site relies on people subscribing without good judgment then that’s probably a sign that they don’t have a good feedback loop for value.

Even the nytimes asks me to subscribe just to read for free. I’m not willing to do that to read the infrequent article from them and they are one of the world’s best. I used to subscribe but it was a chore to read regularly because of all the fluff.

Unless there is a micropayment tip jar, I’ll continue to read only the journalism that is able to survive from non-targeted ads. Which, I think, works out ok for me as I don’t regret very frequently choosing the “lose me” option.

> Unless there is a micropayment tip jar

Blendle [1] tried this model. It did not work for them. They're now using an all you can eat model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

What is this logic? There's zero push back when an author sells a book for $20. You want to read the wsj for free? Go to your library where you will also find that $20 book for free.

IMHO no newspaper is independent. Each has an owner that most of the times has a political agenda they try to push. So the best strategy is to read most prominent ones from different countries and create your own conclusion.

But if I had to trust one, I guess it would be a The Guardian or DW(Deutsche Welle).

DW is particularly interesting as every household in Germany has to pay a radio free(~17 Euros per month) that also in part supports DW(Along with their documentary series which as far as I can see don't hesitate to criticise the government or BND(secret service)).

It is not a tax and as a result the German Government would have a hard time pushing its agenda to it.

Hi, made an account for this reply. I have no idea about DW but I would strongly advise you to take The Guardian with a grain of salt. I’m a (non-US) veteran and from my own personal experience (and personal biases, mind you), The Guardian is way off about its reporting. Will often (as most media) present a certain bias that just makes it impossible for me to trust them on any other subject I’m not involved in. In British journalism, BBC is better imo. However, a bias still exists. NYT’s investigative journalism is also not bad. Addressing the Guardian, I’d say their biggest issue is failing to address previous events that led to the current action. A (fake) example would be: Taliban deployed IEDs outside of a school zone, US retaliated and killed four combatants and two civilians in a drone strike. The Guardian’s headline would be: “US drone strike kills six, two of which civilian”. Is it wrong? No. Is it provoking? Yes, at least in my eyes. The rest of the article would probably discuss the US drone program or the specific event, rather than the chain of events as a whole. The IED incident might not be reported at all prior to the strike. Both the headline and the article itself have a disastrous impact on public opinion.

Actually, Deutsche Welle is the only German public broadcaster that is not funded by the radio fee since it's our international broadcaster. It's just illegal for the government to tell it what to broadcast.

Thanks a lot for correcting me, for some reason I had misremembered that they are also funded by broadcasting fees, but you are right, they are not; they are funded by tax money[1].

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/who-finances-dw/a-36767785

How is a fee the government mandates everyone pay not a tax?

I am guessing it’s similar to Japan’s NHK and their fees.

Sure. I just don’t see how that’s not a tax.

A fee does government collects is tax, if it just mandates to be collected by a non-governmental org is not tax.

Government does not get involved in collecting this fee except for having a law that an organization(ARD ZDF Deutschlandradio Beitragservice = joint contribution service for ARD ZDF and DR) can collect fees from every household that uses any kind of broadcaster/receiver devices.

It does not pass through the German government so it is not a tax.

More info: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/27856/why-is-th...

Thanks for clarifying. I can see how that administrative difference matters. It doesn’t affect the “money out of my pocket” equation but does affect how the money is controlled.

Is it possible that he’s talking about scientific journals? That’s how I understood it.

I thought he was talking about the people posting on Medium

There's absolutely no reason to pay for scientific journals.

None of the money paid for journals supports research, it all goes to the publishers, who do not share with the scientists.

Yes, in fact, it is usually the case that scientists must also pay in order to be published in them

My preferred source of news is one that is created voluntarily or through the support of (mostly grassroots) donors. It will usually be ideological in some way but of course every news source is inherently biased and, this way, at least you are removing a certain strong source of bias, especially if the outlet is non-profit.

So, while I still have to take everything with a grain of salt, if I read stuff from say Democracy Now or The Intercept (or ideally much smaller outlets with direct connections to the news at hand), I can feel more confident that I am not being intentionally manipulated for ulterior purposes. The fact that such outlets are often directly challenging the narrative being presented by more mainstream media and other power/profit-driven institutions is a testament to this. And since they offer their news mostly free of charge, relying on donations at the cost of potential earnings, they demonstrate a greater commitment to values of transparency over brainwashing (hopefully).

Of course, this category includes the likes of unhinged conspiracy theorists such as say Alex Jones. So one should still do some due diligence of fact-checking wherever possible to ensure they are presenting a narrative consistent with reality.

Regarding WSJ, Noam Chomsky at one time at least read it, he said he did because their subscribers were people who actually demanded accurate news.

The best way to get people to pay you is to preach to your choir, not to say important things. So the deal is more like "Will you pay me $30 a month to let me feed you information that will entrench your current worldview?". This results in articles like "This is the beginning of the end for Trump" being written every month throughout his entire presidency and there is still no end in sight before the election.

Paying helps, but is no guarantee that you're not the product.

I don’t think anyone can actually afford journalism that’s of decent quality now that classified died and most of print ads. The end result you have to rely on the free stuff where the quality is highly variable.

Having people pay for your news is even better for advertisers, because it shows them how much the readers care about what you write.

How are poor people supposed to get good news? Or are they not supposed to participate in that democracy?

In the era before the internet, they had these printed things called “newspapers”, for which you had to pay money to read, and yet people of all classes of society read them, and got good (indeed, significantly higher quality) news than we get today, and participated in democracy.

So there’s some evidence that “having to pay for news” hardly makes news the domain of the elite few.

> they had these printed things called “newspapers”

..which were heavily subsidized, if not outright paid for, by ads.

And? Newspapers still cost actual money, running $30+ a month at the newsstand. Paywalled newssites are routinely criticized for charging a fraction of that, and somehow there’s still handwringing that they’re suddenly “depriving the poor of news”

...and therefore, subscriptions do not replace ads. "Ads are evil, buy subscriptions" is the sentiment I was responding to, but it has a subtext that exclusion is OK. It's not OK when you're talking about it as an essential pillar of democracy. The entire voting populace needs access to that information. Ads can give them that, patronage can give them that, government support can give them that, subscriptions can't.

> "Ads are evil, buy subscriptions" is the sentiment I was responding to

Neither the word “ad” nor “advertisement” nor any synonym appears in the post you responded to?

What the post you responded to says is “If you get your news for free, you might well be the product“, which isn’t the same thing.

If you read free news, monetizing you is all the income the organization is ever going to get. If, on the other hand, the organization is supported by a robust mix of sales and advertising, it is always going to have both the financial incentive and the financial wherewithal to resist advertisers’ demands to erode the editorial firewall.

It’s only with the undermining of subscription revenue that we’ve seen the corrosiveness of being too dependent on advertising destroy editorial credibility.

> Ads can give them that, patronage can give them that, government support can give them that, subscriptions can't.

This is plainly contradicted by the fact that newspapers, which were a paid product sold at retail and by subscription and not routinely given away for free, were the primary mechanism by which the populace of the western world received news for over a century.

> This is plainly contradicted

No, it's not. Only 14 minutes elapsed between me pointing out that ads made it possible and you pretending that never happened. Is that a new gaslighting record?

> It’s only with the undermining of subscription revenue

That's the world we live in, and will live in for the foreseeable future, so my original questions still stand untouched by your diversions.

> Only 14 minutes elapsed between me pointing out that ads made it possible and you pretending that never happened.

I’m not “pretending it didn’t happen” Literally what I wrote is “If, on the other hand, the organization is supported by a robust mix of sales and advertising”. It’s you who has constructed a ridiculous false dichotomy in which people who are calling for a return of subscriptions must somehow oppose the presence of advertising to supplement sales, an argument neither I nor the person you originally responded to made.

The history here is quite clear: Sales allowed organizations to sell advertising space while also maintaining enough editorial independence to please subscribers and deliver high quality journalism. “Free news”, solely supported by advertising, is a toxic mess where editorial firewalls are routinely nonexistent.

> ..which were heavily subsidized, if not outright paid for, by ads.

Ads, yes. Tracking? No. Not remotely similar to what is happening on the Internet right now. The problem isn't advertising; it is tracking. Targeted advertising is just a result of tracking.

And if you start paying for an online newspaper, you will still be tracked. Actually, by subscribing you just made tracking you much easier.

A correct observation, unfortunately.

Offline newspapers exist too. They are made of trees, need to be delivered by a minimum wage paperboy (who remembers the game Paperboy?), they lag a few hours to a day behind, and the fact you read that newspaper and pay for it electronically gives away something about you... But what it doesn't track is which articles you read.

This is also a disadvantage of digital TV versus analog.

Well... yes and no. Not everyone could afford the newspaper on a regular basis, let alone a subscription (Which, where I lived, cost more than it did at the gas station). Regular newspapers were a luxury. You might have been lucky enough to read it at work, though. But you might be stuck with a local newspaper, which varies greatly in quality. One local newspaper was once a week, had no national or state-level news, was fraught with editorial mistakes, but was worth it if you wanted school news or yard sales. Many mid-level papers glossed over national and world news, were heavier on ads, and so on. You really needed to buy a major-city newspaper to stay informed. For me, what you could often find was the Indianapolis paper. Less commonly, the New York Times or even less commonly, the Chicago Tribune.

Much more commonly, however, was local news on television. Televisions are one-time purchases after all and weren't that difficult to get with a tax refund check. The local news, if you had it, was definitely paid for by ads. And honestly, you only really got this news if you were able to watch it at the times it was on. Sure, they had 3 times a day with news, all of which coordinated with bankers hours.

I absolutely agree with that sentiment. And if that only affected individuals, I would agree and accept that point.

The problem is that it affects the entire society. If a society needs to get information to form an opinion on something (say, breaking US Politics), and goes to Liberal or Centrist publications (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), the articles are behind a paywall. If they go check a Right publication (Fox News, Infowars), it's free and readily available.

When one of our biggest issues is a lack of public knowledge, it's counterproductive to make that knowledge inaccessible, when the misinformation is not.

Maybe journalism can take an open-source approach where the 1% that finds it cost-effective for their business (decision-making in the case you mention) pays for its sustained development and makes it available for free to the 99%.

Open source is the absolute worst business model you could've suggested. Any business that benefits from journalism would keep it as secret as possible so only they can reap the rewards.

I don’t think business model is the right term. But open source consistently produces excellent software. I think better than any commercial software.

I don’t think the solution is all software being open, but if by business model we mean a way to consistently produce good stuff then it would be a great option for news.

I think the ultimate solution is to figure out a model for news that doesn’t rely on echo chamber subscriptions, privacy eating ads, or govt sponsored bias.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but I think an OSS-like volunteer with reputation model is the most likely. I’m way more likely to donate to a Linux Foundation/FSF/Apache Foundation style org that figures out how to get good truth and relevancy than NYT.

You're right that open source in itself is not a business model, but as a community it tends to have a similar set of ways of monetising.

But I disagree OSS produces better quality than commercial, because the two don't always equate.

What you're likely referring to as high quality (Firefox, Android, Chromium, Linux, Gnome, etc..) all have massive commercial backing. They are commercial products without a doubt.

There's a ton of stuff that isn't commercial software like GCC or GNU tools but these aren't necessarily high quality unless you're capable of using them. That is, OSS is good quality for those who are likely developers or otherwise technically inclined.

If we take it back to the context of open publishing models, we have to make sure we can build a business model that works for everyone, and not a subset niche of readers.

I really don't believe there's a solution. As much as it pains me to say, I think diversity of revenue sources across the industry make for the best option - being ads, subscriptions and government entities all in the same market, which is basically what we have now. Much of the minute details of the status quo need to change, but I believe this is it for traditional* news publishing.

*I think independent influencers and creators who are funded directly by fans are likely the biggest shake up, but that's still just a subscription and at much smaller scale.

My understanding of what "open source journalism" might mean is something like Wikipedia, which provides pretty reliable information.

The incentive structures are very different and this is the root of the problem. Being successful in 'journalism' is sadly more about connections and being middle class (not saying there isn't exceptions) than anything else which is the very antithesis of Wikipedia contributors.

If we're going to discuss real journalists (not this pseudo-activism we've got today) who travel out into the public or dangerous places to find out the facts, then yeah, I think that's something we need, but the simple fact is you can't make money doing this with a Wiki style model. In my opinion this means the future is independent creators who are funded directly and traditional media completely burning up.

It's not clear to me that it's necessary to make money from publishing news. Many people contribute to Wikipedia without being paid.

The FT is exceptional in terms of its quality, especially when compared to CNN/ MSNBC/ Fox and even compared to a lot of the NYTs reporting which seems to be entirely focused on politics.

If you aren't paying for information either in terms of money, or inaccessibility (as in, there might not be a paywall, but you need to know where to look), it's probably not worth consuming.