Solution to the Journalism Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Solution to the Journalism Crisis

3 pointsGnarfGnarf6 comments

I believe that quality writing deserves to be rewarded. I am happy to pay the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, etc. an affordable amount for a specific article (50¢, $1.00 ?). However, flat monthly subscriptions are not practical.

For example, NYT is $50/yr, WSJ is $100/yr, Bloomberg $420/yr, LA Times $98/yr, The Guardian £119/yr, WaPo ~$80/yr. These are all fine publications, and I have no doubt each is well worth the price. However, I do not have time to take full advantage of all the channels if I were to subscribe (which I can't afford), and I don't want to limit myself to one paper. I want to pick and choose random articles from any publication.

What if I could pay on a per-article basis? I wouldn't have a problem paying 50¢ or $1.00 for an article I was interested in. It's not practical for each publisher to set up micro-payments. But, if there were an intermediate agent that accepted and managed payments for individual random articles, the money could be aggregated and remitted in a lump sum to the publishers. Sort of like an old-fashioned news stand.

The middleman could accept PayPal payments, or I could open an account with my credit card, and pay once a month for all the individual articles I have read.

Sounds like a business opportunity. Is anyone doing this?

I honestly giggled a bit when I read this. I think your heart is in the right place but adding another level of "Middle Men" to take a share of the money probably isn't going to solve things.

What might work is a "middle-man" between publishers offering a multi-pulbisher subscription system similar to what cable television providers currently do, though that model seems to be dying too (think cord cutters) and really doesn't solve the crisis either but might be a buisness opportunity.

Personally I think what has happened to journalists and is currently happening to television personalities is the elimination of a class of people(for good or bad the 4th estate is not as valuable in a connected world), the other night I watched SNL attempt to create their show with clips from the staff at home, and compared to what I already watch on Youtube it was OK at best.

Is it possible journalists have just had it too good for too long? Similar but to a leser extent to how the music record industry had it Pre-Napster?

afaik blendle.com is trying this, with mixed success.

Sounds interesting. They appear to link to NYT, WSJ, The New Yorker. However, the interface is in Dutch, no English option. Are they offering full access, or just insipid subset?

I tried to create account, but the prompts soon became incomprehensible.

oh weird. Seems like https://launch.blendle.com/ is their starting page for the US market?

As far as I remember you can read everything from partner publications, but need to go there through their site or app.

Excellent. Thanks for the link. They are in Beta so I can't evaluate yet. If they're doing what I think they're doing, that's exactly what I'm looking for. However, if the original newspapers only allow Blendle access to a subset of their material, this won't cut it. I need to be able to go directly from a HN link to any NYT article, or at least access the same article through my Blendle subscription.

Time magazine failed in this respect with Roku. I got all excited until I saw what dreck Time was restricting us to.

Whoa! The Medium.com article is from May 2016. What has Blendle been doing since?

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