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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

We've already been seeing this to some degree with harder and harder paywalls--which mostly don't work besides lucrative niche and global brands. But I suspect we're increasingly headed towards a case where quality content is only available to those willing and able to pay for it.

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Which is how it worked before the internet.

Yep. Maybe we move to a model where low quality/#FakeNews is free but quality costs and, presumably, you then move to a point where pooled subscriptions are a thing under that model. And it costs a substantial amount of money or you get it through a library. There's a lot less accessibility under that model, especially for those that don't really have disposable income. There's also the question of whether enough will really pay for the quality. But it's certainly a scenario.

e.g. you pay $100/month for an all-pubs subscription which is not all that out of line for people who pay for newspapers or DirectTV.

About the only US publication that seems to be making decent money from subscriptions is the New York Times, and I suspect they're at least partly trading on their name. The quality of their reporting... well, let's just say that I didn't expect to see the day when Snopes ended up debunking a conspiracy theory about the US president started by the NYT: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-profit-hydroxychloro...

That isn't a debunking of the NYT's story. It is a debunking of an interpretation of the story that many made due to either news illiteracy or malicious intent. That line got shared all over the place out of context. In context it was not the focus of the piece and was instead buried in the details as a disclaimer regarding the larger issue of who profits from this drug. Snopes isn't disputing anything actually reported by the NYT.

The focus of the piece was, to quote the headline, "Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug". The article leads into the claim by talking about how that advocacy "has raised questions about his motives". Literally the only reason to mention Trump's "small personal financial interest in Sanofi" in this context is to suggest that interest is, in fact, his motive. Everything leading up to that paragraph is background recapping of stuff people already know; the article is structured with this as the key point. Crucially, the New York Times piece also omitted to mention the one piece of information that made this conspiracy theory utterly ridiculous and that Snopes used to debunk it: just how tiny that financial interest really was.

Now, a few of the more cynical and distrusting people did realise that probably meant his interest was so small that the narrative the Times would pushing would fall apart if they mentioned actual numbers, and they were right - but all the people who trusted the most respected and prominent paper on the planet not to mislead them into a nonsensical conspiracy theory took that narrative as it was intended to be taken and spread it all over social media.

I've come across so many terrible and one sided Snopes articles. This is why all the talk of 'regulating' fake news scares me more than the fake news.

Does every slant need to make their own credibility machine now too to keep up?

(Not making a statement regarding this particular link, just personal experience in other areas I'm more invested in. NYTimes went off the partisan 24hrs news cliff long ago and are just burning old reputation at this point, it's becoming old hat.)

>Maybe we move to a model where low quality/#FakeNews is free but quality costs

Are you being facetious with the fake news reference? I don't know what the answer to this problem is, but I hope it isn't a system in which we just lie to poor people and they can only get the truth if they pay up.

Prestige newspapers might not have been widely available for free, but there were certainly credible news sources that were. Free over the air TV and radio broadcasts were once the primary news sources for many Americans, but unfortunately the quality of both has declined. It is a chicken and egg problem so I don't know which started to decline first, but easy access to high quality news is important for an educated electorate which is crucial to a well functioning democracy.

>Are you being facetious with the fake news reference?

Not really. Broadcast news is ad-supported too--hence the decline in quality. You either have subscriptions--ad-supported, or taxpayer supported--as has been historically the case in the UK. So, yes, if ads don't work, either only the wealthier get access to higher quality news, people use libraries (good luck with that), or the government funds (which has its own source of issues).

Someone needs to pay for it.

Ok, I understand your reasoning. The use of the specific term "fake news" rubbed me the wrong way. That term is linked with malicious propaganda so your initial comment called to mind dystopian ideas of having an underclass that the rest of society agrees to keep in their place through lies and deceit.

There are other options beyond just ad supported and tax payer supported. You can make news reporting a requirement of other government deals like what happened with over the air TV. You can do some sort of patronage model. That can range anywhere from a single source like people expected Bezos to handle WaPo, to the NPR model over numerous patrons, to the early internet model of still selling subscriptions but not putting the news behind a paywall. I'm sure there are plenty of other models out there too.

Is that not what happens anyway? In the UK, for example, the good quality print newspapers cost £2+ whereas the tabloid rags cost 20p.

That is already happening. Both New York Times and the Washington Post use paywalls, whereas Fox News is totally free.

In France, where I live, there have been calls to institute a "content tax" that would be redistributed to companies that produce content. In exchange, there would be no more laws to prevent piracy. That means that torenting/reading/listening to everything would be legal whatever the means but you'd have to give the state X$/month that are then redistributed to companies based on some factors.

That could also apply to news companies or to journalists individually.

This reminded me of the ROMS and the allOfmp3 saga of years ago. That site was a decade head of it's time an "explouting" a Russian law, but it showed exactly this. When contend per se has no differentiation value, companies have to compete on the delivery method, and we get amazing experiences as Netflix or Steam or Tidal (or allofmp3 arguably).

...And which also might be better in the long run for everyone. It aligns the incentives better I think.

Or information is treated as a public good and publicly supported through taxes and an independent entity.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...

Then it would be indirectly controlled by Government in power,In effect WORSE than current state.

Hence an independent entity.

The history is complex. Presently the press are ruled by advertisers.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

There's no such thing as a truly independent entity if someone else controls the purse strings.

Much of government, including elements somewhat more capable than the press, manages not to be absolutely partisan: police, military, courts, intelligence, inland revenue, the post office.

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