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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

Bless you people. I am amazed at how many pay-walled articles are posted on HN. Are most people here really well off enough that they can afford the dozens of subscriptions that are often linked to here?

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Different countries have different purchase power so subscriptions may be different expensive depending where you live. That said, paying for news is essential for our democracy. Paying for news allows news sites to pay journalist to research and write news stories.

If we do not pay for news, news has to be financed through online advertising which is basically selling personal data for profit. Without paying revenue local news sites cannot afford to hire journalist. If there is not local journalist, there will not be controls, checks and writings on what elected officials do. Local news papers feed national news feed with articles and national news.

So its essential for our democracy that we are willing to pay for news services which pays journalists.

Part of that concept is the implied outcome that once media is paid for by readers it will no longer engage in undesirable practices for revenue, like advertorials and shock content; but this is somewhat of a myth. Those shady practices were common before the Internet, and they'll be common even if media returns to a subscription service model.

What you need is a well-funded, and non-profit public news media. It's not without its faults, but it certainly shines where private news media consistently fails to.

Hmm, any examples of journalist-owned media engaging in such practices? I can think of at least 6 of them who don't (and don't have ads either).

I'd give examples of independent journalists, particularly vloggers, who produce shock content of questionable merit, or who regularly publish promoted content; but I think you can identify them yourself.

Right, I didn't think about individuals... though b/vloggers that aren't already journalists generally don't have the pretension of following journalistic norms ?

> If we do not pay for news, news has to be financed through online advertising

Agreed.

> which is basically selling personal data for profit

Not necessarily. Mostly untargeted display ads don't. They could profit from personal data as much as TV or newspaper ads. They also yield a lot worse; my point is that it's possible to run ads that don't actually use personal data.

My bigger concern with ad-funded journalism is it encourages stories and headlines that get clicks, not stories that are important. Journalism isn't supposed to be entertainment.

Simpler explanation: People don't read the article. Why do you think people complain about titles so much even though they really don't matter

The worst issue with this is that titles are generally picked by different people than those writing the article, and are sometimes only tangentially related to its content.

On the other hand: Most articles are pretty fluffy and don't bring much to the table, and so are just an invitation to discuss the topic at hand in the comments at what is usually a far greater depth than the original story.

Yeah, I often don't feel the need to click the link after reading the comments, but sometimes I do and I am frequently disappointed to find only a few paragraphs of content or a superficial introduction to the subject.

There are some services that allow you to subscribe to a single service for ~$10 per month and you get access to a wide range of national papers like the WSJ.

What is this service you are talking about?

Sounds like Apple News. I am not a subscriber but this is what I understand the offering to be with regard to the WSJ. I think it is not comprehensive, but it includes a good deal of WSJ content. I think it can also be purchased even more cheaply as part of Apple's recently announced bundles.

apple news

My ISP has/used to have one, and it was even given for free for some months. I would have preferred that they didn't, as this can easily turn into a conflict of interest.

Huh, I don't have an iPhone but the offer sounds very good.

I pay much more than $10 for only WSJ subscription. Sounds like I'm getting the shaft.

Generally I don't get locked out of articles. The combination of uBlock, privacy badger, and auto deleting cookies seems to take care of 99% of cases. The rest are handled by outline.com and archive. But I'll be honest in those cases I'll read the comments first to see if it's worth reading.

It's like the often-proposed micropayments, except without the "micro".

if you are using firefox then there is a great extension here which gets rid of many paywalls. works like a charm https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Another very useful add-on is Unpaywall which searches for free reprints of paywalled scholarly papers.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unpaywall

I keep trimread[1] bookmarked. I works on most paywalled sites...

[1] https://beta.trimread.com/

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