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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

While I've enjoyed reading CityLab articles over the past few years, I've never quite known what their business model was.

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Well with journalism these days, you either don't know what it is or don't like it.

May the news be entirely subscriber funded in a post-UBI world where everyone can afford to subscribe.

> May the news be entirely subscriber funded in a post-UBI world where everyone can afford to subscribe

Probably not. UBI doesn’t end the appeal of “free” and doesn't change that the people trying to sell you stuff have a motive to spend money disguising efforts to get you to buy it as other things, like “free" news services.

The advertising targets can afford to pay for the news now, because they are paying for it. But they still pay for it indirectly, and UBI doesn't change the systems which feed into that.

I know it's hard to reduce the purchasing power of advertisers, but w e can produce their monopsony power by making subscription viable again.

People already complain about how media outlets won't write articles critical of their patrons, and now we want to make the problem worse by making everybody a patron?

This sounds like a great way to turn all media into tepid listicles.

I'm, it makes the problem better because the patronage cancels out. The problem was never patronage in the absolute.

And how much do you believe should be the UBI allocation per person for online news subscriptions?

Then considering this hypothetical money would come from the government (read: other peoples money) can recipients spend this allotment on whatever news sources or viewpoints they want?

UBI means recipients choose where to spend the money. It's income, not a subsidy.

And how is the amount of "income" determined per person - based on what necessary expenses? Should news subscriptions be one of them?

Getting acquihired it seems ... loved the articles, now I probably won't be able to read them anymore. Shame.

Aside from the financial news that's tied to terminal subs, Bloomberg doesn't make much of an effort to enforce their paywall. An incognito window will get around it every time.

Firefox's Reader Mode also worked for me reading 20+ pieces/day, around 6 months ago. They have a pretty low rate limit which gives you ReCaptcha, but only an issue if you use middle click to open many articles at once.

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