Please Pay for Your News
goel.io
goel.io
What about a patronage model? The demand for news is universal and the ability for people to pay the price of news they consume (not at all universal) lends itself better to a patronage model where a smaller number overpay rather than a larger number bearing true external costs. By this I mean is that the article proposes that people pay for 3 or 4 different news sources at a few hundred dollars a year. It's true that many on HN meet this threshold, and probably should pay for their news. But based on how few people have an emergency reserve, how many people live hand to mouth, how many people don't take vacations, I'm pretty sure many consumers of news simply don't have this kind of disposable income. Urbanites, who are the most likely to demand many forms of news, are also the most severely burdened in terms of other fixed costs (rent, food, insurance, transportation). The author sidesteps the disposable income question by listing other products they perceive to be more successful (like, say, Netflix) without really engaging what that comparison means.
By contrast to the individual subscriber, a single billionaire could endow many news organizations in perpetuity without blinking -- and in fact a lot of journalism is subsidized in this manner. The article quotes The Atlantic (being floated by the Jobs estate); the Washington Post (being floated by Bezos); and the LA Times (being floated by a wealthy doctor in Los Angeles). Of course all of these have ad and subscription revenue as well, but it speaks to the idea that there's an outsized role for institutional funding.
The same is of course true for government. It would be trivial for the government to endow local journalism all over the country, but there is a strong aversion to this because of the perception in America that state funding, state ownership, and state propaganda are all synonyms.
Local papers? If Jeff Bezos took 50% of his growth in net worth this year, he could permanently endow every single local newspaper in the entire country in perpetuity. Does it really matter what I do?
Hell, let's look at smaller patrons. The author is a senior software engineer at Google: one very simple proposal that we know the author can afford is buying, say, 100 subscriptions of a worthy paper and donating them. Is it likely this article is going to drive 100 new subscriptions by readers? I doubt it. So if the author really means to achieve the goal they are advocating, this is a route their article doesn't consider. One possible response is "it shouldn't be incumbent on me to be a public good provider" or "how dare you assume I have that kind of money" -- both of which would be responses to the article's thesis, with the added benefit that the responders wouldn't be senior software engineers at Google. In fact, the author surely knows dozens of other SSEs at Google who also feel the same way politically about this issue. Why not solicit them?
Lest this seem facetious, when I look at what @pinboard has done with the Great Slate electoral campaign in 2018 and with his fundraising this time around, it's clear to me that approach is more effective than simply the righteous blog post. Skin in the game. I would enthusiastically upvote a Google SSE handing out hundreds of subscriptions because supporting journalism is important and $10-20k is trivial for them.
But also the decline of journalism is actually nothing to do with individuals not valuing it and everything to do with structural factors individuals can't impact.
To the extent we're talking about local journalism, a large part of the issue was national consolidation of publishing companies. This is a government issue and it requires muscular antitrust action to undo. It's also compounded by the national consolidation of advertising, and the national consolidation of other businesses. As long as big ad firms do most of the ad placement in newspapers owned by big newspaper firms, and most of those ads are for big companies, there will always be pressure towards viewing small local papers as unsustainable.
Second, a lot of the more recent wave of journalism cuts has been text journalism unsuccessfully chasing YouTube and Facebook money. It's well documented [1, using the authors preferred source] that Facebook misled video watch figures and that this led to the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is not an individual problem, it's a regulatory and structural problem. I could have told these places that chasing Facebook clickbait was going to bite them in the ass economically because it's a house of cards. They didn't listen. Why are Google and Facebook not looked at as the cause of this problem?
Also, the ad-first model has also hampered consumer direct-payment expectations. I can subscribe to a lot of paper magazines for $5/year. I don't want paper magazines, I never read them. So why does it cost 25-50x that to subscribe to the same content online? Answer: because that's the true price of what it ought to cost, but I've now been conditioned to free-ride. But I didn't ask publication to pivot to be ad-first, a variety of structural incentives did that.
Some other hanging user side questions: Why is it not easy to pay for the odd article read rather than a full price subscription? I read news from all around the country. I have no objection to a newspaper in Des Moines getting some of my money, but I won't be jumping through hoops to pay them $0.20. Why is search still so bad in online journalism? Why is there still an above-the-fold paper-first design paradigm? Why can't I customize sections without using adblock to block the sections I don't like? Why is so much of the page designed to get me to leave the page to share stuff on social media? Why are URLs so impermanent? Why is everything a low end liveblog format now? Why do major newspapers pay standing op-ed columnists to engage in empty punditry about things they know nothing instead of spending more soliciting the best possible external op-eds on a given subject? Who on earth thinks Bret Stephens has ever added value to any conversation ever? It might well be the case that making a product that's more convenient and less infuriating will solicit more individual compliance, but it's not individual feedback that drove these bad decisions to begin with.
I know this is a pretty far-reaching comment, but I think if we're going to have the conversation, let's have it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/faceb...
I do agree though that a lot of the problems are structural and systemic - that also does not negate the public's negative outlook towards journalism, or the sense of entitlement (read the comments here).
I do agree though that not enough tech people who can afford to don't pay for their news. Why? IDK. How to make them? Well maybe this post will persuade a few to do that.
I don't claim to be a media expert or business expert, so all I can do is call out something troubling with a CTA. If you'd like to chat more, email me. "_ @ goel.io"
You named a few business models (patronage, billionaire-good-heart, government grants, ads, subscriptions etc) - all those are valid and if effect. Not a single is perfect. I wish journalism suits were fast to realize the potential of the Internet and to adapt. They screwed up. Doesn't mean we should let the institution die (considering there's no replacement for it).
I think most publications have a mixed revenue stream anyway - private grants, reader donations, monthly memberships, events etc.
> Local papers? If Jeff Bezos took 50% of his growth in net worth this year, he could permanently endow every single local newspaper in the entire country in perpetuity. Does it really matter what I do?
Personally, I think this should happen through taxation. But that's another can of worms that would de-rail this conversation.
Side note: Have you read Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas? If not, I implore you to. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/14/winners-take-a...
> we know the author can afford is buying, say, 100 subscriptions of a worthy paper and donating them.
I personally have dozens of subscriptions and do donate xx% of my income every year to causes including journalism (through newsmatch and direct). If you'd like the list, email me. If you have ideas for effective matching/giving, ping me. I'd be all ears.
> In fact, the author surely knows dozens of other SSEs at Google who also feel the same way politically about this issue. Why not solicit them?
Yeah the sad thing about my experience with tech coworkers is that there is too much entitlement (read the comments in this thread). "I will only pay if it's on my terms". "I will only pay if I can pay 5 cents." Those are meaningless excuses that miss the big picture - that news is a business that everyone needs. So no, not many feel the way I do. My hope is that posts like these make a few people pay for their news.
> antitrust
Yeah good luck.
> chasing YouTube and Facebook money > ads
If people don't pay, then they will have to look for money elsewhere.
> But I didn't ask publication to pivot to be ad-first, a variety of structural incentives did that.
They didn't pivot. They were always ad-first. Print revenue was 10%, and the other 90% was ads. The suits in news thought that that would work online. They were wrong.
> all the UX problems
Sure. Those are good things to take with the places you like to read. I'd reported issues to crosscut that they have fixed.
> It might well be the case that making a product that's more convenient and less infuriating will solicit more individual compliance
"Journalism" or "news" is not a product. "nytimes.com" is. Apple News app is.
I do wish more places were tech-forward - but to get there, they have to have consistent revenue and trust of the public.
Your complaints are valid (and not novel). None of them mean that news as an institution doesn't deserve your money considering the risks they take and the value they provide. Yeah the paper isn't glossy, or it's too glossy, or it smells like Axe, or the website doesn't let you put widgets -- those are fixable. What isn't is the one-way path we are headed in that leads to no accountability for the powerful.
I don't want us as a society to look back in 10 years and think "well we could have saved news and democracy but they just didn't put enough Javascript on their website".
> Bret Stephens
fuck him.
> I know this is a pretty far-reaching comment, but I think if we're going to have the conversation, let's have it.
Happy to. Email me.
Edit: Also NYTimes cancelation process is AOL levels of hostile. The Economists, less so.
I don't like op-eds either, but there are other options.
I think paying for news and not reading all of it are orthogonal. If you don't like curation, RSS is still solid.
I share your dislike of this trend. In the physical paper days, the opinion pieces were kept within a specific section of the paper (usually end of section A, and column one on the front page), and it made a difference. Now you see people taking an opinion piece as speaking with the voice of the paper all the time.
It would make a real difference if the background of the page was different for opinion, or something, but I have no idea how to get there from here.
_The Economist_ has pretty good international coverage, but it's a weekly magazine, so a different focus, and they are not shy about their promotion of free trade and classical liberalism in the opinion sections, so you have to be ready for that.
...and their journalists are top-notch. They don't publish unconfirmed reports, and I find that they challenge my preconceived notions regularly.
It's not only medium that is different.
People don't trust institutions anymore. They don't want to buy "New York Times" or any other brand, and pay for the office, shareholders, CEOs. They want small independent teams / individuals that they can connect with, trust and hold personally accountable. Someone that feels like they are working for their Patreons.
When you cut the bloat, it takes just a thousand patreons to support a creator on some salary-like level. Even less, with ad revenues etc.
If we all subscribe to 3 or 4 papers right now, the best thing they can do for their business is bombard us with ads to make up for the remaining percentage. Well, we have adblockers now so it doesn't work.
I don't know what the solution is. Journalism that holds people accountable is crucial for society. But customers paying for the news doesn't work. It never did.
This is very much a bootstrapping problem. They need money and stability, and public support, to make the investments that would make the public support them.
I think the stakes are high enough for us to bicker about chicken and egg.
My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues:
1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased as you pick which facts and how to present them
2. Many news sources have different editors and journalist with a wide swathe of opinions that it's hard to trust one news source completely based off of reading just a few articles.
3. Picking one news source makes it likely to have confirmation bias, which is something I want to avoid.
Usually I stick with Wikipedia and its references for each subject and try to synthesize all sides of an issue. Or I pick specific writers who I've seen with a good track record that really try to be objective even with they are giving opinion pieces (Gwern is often my goto for a lot of topics)
So really I don't have a good answer for this, I would love other people's thoughts and other sources of good news or systems for finding good news
Or maybe you are saying, you don't want to pay for the news unless it matches your expectations -- but you DO want the rest of us to pay for it so it continues to exist?
I don't know where you are getting this notion that I want others to pay for something so then I can deem if it's worthy for me to pay for...
- minnesota public radio (my local) - economist news briefing - the journal (from WSJ) - WSJ tech news briefing - up first (NPR) - the daily (nytimes).
I would LOVE to add a more conservative one into the mix here. I'm just saying, there's a difference between people updating wikipedia vs people who have a full time job that involves covering the news, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. That is worth paying for. FWIW I also pay for wikipedia. But I also pay for nytimes, washington post, and the star tribune.
Sure there are different degrees of bias, some sources are definitely biased to the point of being far to much work to see through the bias, but others reliably have decent articles amongst their less decent ones. And who’s to say that the articles I feel are decent aren’t just the ones that most alight with my biased views.
Unbiased news is not physically possible. Holding out for it is to hold out for something that is literally impossible to happen.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/
There is an objective truth. The closest you come to that, the less biased you are. Not sure what the problem with understanding this is. Values may differ, and you may be including that in your definition of "bias" (for example, WSJ may come at news from a business perspective), but I would personally NOT include values into a definition of "bias" because that then makes "bias" conveniently impossible to define objectively!
When it comes to the issues that "news" covers for the most part, this is highly debatable (and debated) claim.
There are facts that you can state, but even then, there is the choice about which ones to mention and which ones to leave out. Or even which ones to state first.
Non-biased news never existed and will never exist as objective truth never existed.
However that doesn't mean that all new is necessarily "partisan."
A notable difference is that it's simpler these days to read and compare different media, as well as looking at excerpts.
To the last point: Historically you got the complete paper and a good™ paper shares different oppinion pieces (even if main oppinion of a paper had one view, publishing opeds with opposing views is/was normal) however nowadays one doesn't look at the full package, but only clicks on single articles (probably spread in like minded FB/"social media" groups.
- I want society to support professional journalism.
- There is an infinity of worthy things to read on the internet. I want to browse content from many sources.
- However, it is no longer the 1990s. People don't choose a single newspaper to be delivered to their houses and open it over the breakfast table.
- Accordingly, I don't want to have to choose a single newspaper to support, like people did in the <=1990s.
- Personally, beyond checking the headlines, I mostly read the news nowadays with a feeling that I'm time-wasting: that I should be spending my time doing something more worthwhile.
- So it really seems that payment has to be per article. Presumably some sort of subscription-based micropayment service: pay $20 a month; can read content from (and thus support) many professional journalists. Something like Blendle. Although when I tried that a year or so ago it didn't offer the type of browsing I was looking for.
1. I pay for nytimes, Washington post, and star tribune. This costs me around $20/month I think. I’ve wasted more on unused Linode servers.
2. I skim the headlines of all of these. Tbh I rarely find something I want to click on on nytimes and Washington post, but I do on star tribune. 3. Then I listen to podcasts. I listen to Minnesota public radio, the economist daily briefing, the intelligence, wsj tech briefing, the journal, up first, and the daily. Even here I look at the description first and see what I want to listen to. The economist and wsj ones are the best, which means I’ll probably be changing who I give money to soon.
I listen to the podcasts that sound interesting while I’m on the treadmill.
I guess I feel like there are enough options that I’ve been able to find something I like, and I give money based on that. Nytimes is a bastion of liberals, and I’m a liberal, but I don’t find it the best for me. There’s definitely some initial investment required to figure out what works for you.
It's almost like the raw deal you get with most commercial software. Consider the case where you have some open source thing that tends to be both free (as in price) and you get the source code to it. Now, someone is offering a premium alternative. What do you get for you money? In most cases, you actually have to give up on being able to look at the source.
No thanks.
1. Let the news die.
2. Pay for the news, suck up the fact that it has advertising.
3. Don't pay for the news and hope the rest of us pay for it so it doesn't die.
Your "option 4: news without advertising" does not exist. It may in the future, but only if ENOUGH OF US PAY FOR A SUBSCRIPTION SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON ADVERTISING.
The news orgs that will survive are the ones that secure arm's length public funding such as NPR, CBC, BBC, et al.
If Fox or CNN goes bankrupt nothing of value will be lost.
The local newsroom that do the important work of disseminating disaster information, local election information are what's at stake.
40-some millions US residents still don't have reliable or fast Internet. Millions don't have any Internet at all. How do you expect to keep up with their own community and the world?
To answer your question: no, that's not my argument.
1. Let the news die.
2. Pay for the news, suck up the fact that it isn't exactly what you want it to be.
3. Don't pay for the news and hope the rest of us pay for it so it doesn't die.
If you see another choice please let me know.
It seems like you believe that news is sacred, so your conclusions will differ from mine as we draw from different axiomatic beliefs. If that's the case, we won't be able to convince each other.
Everything beyond that has pretty much grown into either a quite expansive special I don't see a justification to pay for, things that everybody else already has and therefore is free or sources that does not offer a way to make a single time donation I'd love to do to reward a good or interesting article.
I'll not subscribe.
No analysis, just giving politicians a platform for their uninformed propaganda. The main objective is to program the population to keep working without complaining. Bread and circuses.
If you want facts or background, get the Financial Times.
Unfortunately, newspapers wants me to susbcribe and here we are.
Maybe this is a problem ready for a YC solution?
Netflix is pocket change and my family gets more value from it than anything other subscription besides trash and recycling.
I’d pay 2x as much for reliable, newsworthy, and succinctly written coverage that clearly separates fact from opinion.
As it is now, I don’t fully trust any news organization.
Question then: do you never read the news? Because if you do, you are consuming the product. So clearly, you are not against the ads. You just don't want to pay for it (even though the median income on HN is high enough that it would be a rounding error for most).
I have paid for news in the past and found that it wasn't worth it. Part of the issue is that to get the news I would want I would have to have a subscription at like 10 different companies. Not to mention the fact that many of them still have ads EVEN if you pay.
I already have enough subscription fatigue with streaming services, apps that have gone subscription model, etc. that it just isn't going to happen.
There is no business model I've found worth supporting yet for news. I'm still waiting to find a news product good enough to pay for. It doesn't exist for me.
So my current process is to just mostly avoid articles and news sites in general and let the news that gets to me through various means (free email digests/newsletters that aggregate and summarize, other people, social media, etc) be enough. The only exception being the occasional link on an aggregator-type site like HN where someone has linked to it.
1) A news agency might be further incentived to publish biased, "echo-chamber" type of news if they are more effective at convincing readers to pay.
2) Detailed news with in-depth research and thorough analysis is expensive to produce, so news agencies that produce such material, if they were to rely on subscriptions, need to charge appropriately expensive fees. This means only a select group of people can afford this news. To generate more revenue, such a quality news sources are incentived to cater content to this limited audience set. Over time this can make quality news inaccessible and even irrelevant to most of the public.
It’s opinionated, biased, and heavily edited. When the news gets back to factual unbiased reporting I’ll consider spending money.
So what's changed? Advertisers are less interested in the medium itself. Meanwhile, readers have built a very low estimate of the value of journalism.
But what is that estimate based on? Suppose that as citizens we all accepted that local political reporting was absolutely vital to our society, and that without it we would face an unmitigated wave of corruption and worse. How much would we each pay to avoid that?
I understand that people don't accept that news journalism is that vital, and that this affects their estimate of the value. But are they correct?
We look for the <meta> field on any article we aggregate for their payment request id https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request.
In the near future, the article owners will then be paid a portion of the reader subscription corresponding to their share of the total readership.
Pay what you want, ad-free, paid reporters and staff, and focused on solutions versus sensationalism.
Here in Aus our tax dollars pay for a very good news service (www.abc.net.au/news) Costs us ~11¢ per day each.
The commercial news services here are mostly crap and I wouldn't pay them cent.
I pay to support some ad-free journalistic endeavors, but I also pay to support a local newspaper that is the ONLY thing keeping tabs on our city council, county officials and so on. Pro Publica is great and even the Intercept has its moments, but neither of them are coming to my town or county and doing that local work.
I didn't mean to suggest that we should insist on ad-free before donating at all, but it's a concern. I'm more inclined to donate when there's no ads, and when there are ads, I'm extra hesitant.
I also don't like paywalls. So, really, I'm thinking about how to highlight and support the free-to-all work that is also uncompromised by ads. That's what most deserves and needs support.
Why not use an adblocker?
Advertising, like "location services" has become a two-way surveillance system.
I would love to be able to have a system of payment where we could pay a small amount of money for high-quality journalism? (and do it actually anonymously)
> Why do you assume they'll drop that revenue stream when they "get enough subscribers"?
Fair, I don't know if they will. I'm just saying that I don't see a better choice on the table right now. NOT subscribing to the news is not a better choice to me.
Are you saying: we should enthusiastically consume advertising in contexts where it helps pay journalists?
1. News is very important, especially today. None of us would have known what happened to George Floyd if a bystander hadn't been there to videotape it. That's what reporters do all day every day all over the world for a million other topics.
2. News is dying. Papers are barely breaking even, and with covid-19, plenty of papers have folded altogether.
3. News is a good example of tragedy of the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). We all want it but no one wants to pay for it.
4. The HN crowd has a pretty high median income. I bet they can shell out the $11/month for a nytimes (or whatever) subscription. The Economist has a $1/week offer on right now. Washington Post has a $39/year offer I believe.
5. Despite all of this, the majority of comments here are bitching about the news and not wanting to pay for it. Why?
2. News isn't dying so much as monopolies have taken over a not-very-well-regulated industry. That kills off competition to create better product.
3. We all pay for news. They sell our eyeballs to sponsors/advertisers. They even run "news" that is actually ads to get us to buy things or vote some way. We pay for it just like we pay Google for all their "free" services.
4. Maybe we do. Maybe we don't. Either way we pay. See #3. Also either way, we complain. Just like you did.
5. I think the complaints are largely because the news coverage sucks. See #1. That's also a pretty good reason to not want to pay more for it than we already are.
Here's TWO to start you off! https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1266908874105372672 https://twitter.com/JasonLemon/status/1266529475757510656
> 2. News isn't dying so much as monopolies have taken over a not-very-well-regulated industry. That kills off competition to create better product.
Sorry, you will have to explain this more. Didn't Jeff Bezos buy the Post because they were bleeding money?
3. We all pay for news. They sell our eyeballs to sponsors/advertisers. They even run "news" that is actually ads to get us to buy things or vote some way. We pay for it just like we pay Google for all their "free" services.
Again, what do you mean by this? It seems like we have a difference of opinion where I think newspapers are struggling to survive and you do not.
4. Maybe we do. Maybe we don't. Either way we pay. See #3. Also either way, we complain. Just like you did.
See above.
5. I think the complaints are largely because the news coverage sucks. See #1. That's also a pretty good reason to not want to pay more for it than we already are.
Can you define "news coverage sucks"? What would you like to see?
I might pay for Netflix or HBO. If one is insufficiently entertaining, I won't. It makes sense for Netflix/HBO to compete on producing the most entertaining and addicting product, and I know that's exactly what I'm paying for.
If news agencies are funded by having more subscribers, they'll also be incentivized to produce the most entertaining and addictive content.
The value of news is not in telling me what I want to hear, nor you what you want to hear, it's in telling us what we need to hear but don't want to. You & I might both be high-minded enough to pay for news that bores us or offends us - but I hardly expect the typical person to do so.
I don't have a better suggestion - but a per-article paywall, or even a subscription, leads to the same clickbait sensationalist rot that advertiser-supported news suffered.
Perhaps no one is currently willing to pay for it because (a) they don't have to and (b) a lot of it is utter garbage. It doesn't stand that should these "options" disappear other ones wouldn't take their place, perhaps even ones worth paying for.
Further, many news agencies conduct investigations. Perhaps the most well-known of these are the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. By paying for news you also pay to fund their investigations, which may or may not result in newsworthy information.