I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month.
Go.
Go.
That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business.
On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.
And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?
The $4 billion rich Netflix CEO says that artists should try harder if they don't want to starve (source, this same article we are discussing)
Netflix’s actual cash on the other hand has actually gone nearly 100% of revenue to content creators — they actually have taken out quite a lot of debt in order to create their content, because they think they can ultimately earn money on it over time.
But truly you should thank Netflix for ~$50 billion in content creation so far.
Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since the consumer has a much better proposition, people who previously weren't paying will sign up and the total pot will be even bigger. Since all the costs are fixed costs, it doesn't matter if everyone reads six times as many articles. But they won't. They will read slightly more, but benefit much more by having a bigger choice.
This is what we saw with Spotify. You pay about the price of buying one album a month. But you get to listen to much, much, more. Even if you only listen to a few songs a day, the utility of being able to choose from anything is huge. Of course, some people used to spend a lot more each month on physical music. But lots of other people used to spend nothing, since if you only had $15 a month, you could't get much for it.
One problem is that the NYT, the the FT, the New Yorker, etc, each assume that they are uniquely trusted and loved by their audience. But that's only true because of selection bias. No one who values their output to the tune of $3 a month is part of their readership.
In the music industry, the huge monopolists could force adoption of the new model. But they're also the reason musicians don't make much money, since they are now supporting two sets of middlemen - the tech companies and the 'record labels'.
The thing with journalism is that you can't rely that much on back catalogs and artistic enthusiasm. An indie band might share all their music on Spotify for $1.37 a month revenue for the love of music, but that $1.37 will not buy you much of quality reporting...
Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate.
The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.
There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".
For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.
So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.
There have been many many efforts to have sites that provide access to multiple news sources for a single price. Apple News, PressReader, Magzster, and more.
Newspapers and their corporate owners have ample data on your claim that low single prices massively increase the audience. I'm guessing your claim is not supported by the real world data and that's why they haven't adopted the model.
After all, only 16% of people have said they are willing to pay any amount of money to read the news. That's a total market of 40 million people. The NY Times has 6 million subscribers, so they've already captured 15% of the market. Your claim that they could capture 6x means this mythical service would capture 90% of the total available market.
Which just seems...implausible on the surface. Netflix doesn't even have remotely that penetration -- only 51% -- and they've been around forever, have massive brand recognition, have tons of money, have unique properties to draw viewers, etc, etc.
With no unit-cost, volume is a big deal for such content.
So if Times got 3x subs, they could cut their prices by 1/2 no problem. Car companies can't do that.
So creating a good marketplace with demand and volume can do this.
There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing).
What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.
Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.
if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.
The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
The worst questions to ask an engineer start with, "why can't we just..."May it rest in peace.
Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried.
But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly.
The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle.
And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.
Unless I'm missing something, they never did anything unique to "use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted"—it was just an RSS reader, and what you've described is exactly how I use my reader of choice (Feedbin). Many modern offerings even offer a feature to pull the full text for articles where it's not included by default.
I have always wanted human curation, filters, opinion.
You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market.
The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free.
So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content.
The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason:
content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case.
why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers.
In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money.
However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.