I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.
>I want to be able to read them
Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well.
But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline.
>I want to be able to read them
I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human.
But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
Also strange that some people would care more about a clean search result than the survival of media being consumed.
My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls.
Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today
For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do you see this all as simply entertainment?
No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do.
Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
It could be good for some use cases, but not for the primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git style record of all edits... which no newspaper would ever do either