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Comment by 88913527 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with access to a public library (photo ID will get you a free library card) can access eLibrary services that get updated daily. No need to pay for NYT, for WSJ, or any major national newspaper. By paying taxes, you're already paying for digital access to this media.

I applaud the FTC's decision but I wish people realized there's more practical means for accessing media that is more frequently locked behind paywalls these days. You fight it with a library card.

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Not only is this not true everywhere, it can also be much more cumbersome to access.

Not to mention that supporting quality journalism is probably one of the best things you can do today to make the world better.

I agree, and thats why I donate to ProPublica, which is free and doesn't use it's reporting as reputation laundering for an Opinion section that promotes billionaire profits ahead of humanity.

Also, using the library is supporting journalism. The library pays for a digital license

ProPublica does such good work. If anyone reading this hasn’t checked them out, I encourage them to, soon.

Honest question: where can I actually find quality journalism?

This depends on your library system. I am under a provincial library system which is woefully underfunded. We get “flavours of the month” services that are likely trial versions offered to libraries before lock-in. Some of the choices over the years were Freegal Music, Ancestry.com and some sort of language training thing.

Our Overdrive tier is probably the cheapest and I occasionally use my parents’ library card for expanded Overdrive access, who live in a place with a much better funded library system.

Fully agree. My local library system is badly funded (as in, they let a building full of books rot rather than simply move them, and the main library has been closed for several years due to roof and sewage leaks) and we have no easy option to pay for a good one.

We should have funded libraries in the infrastructure bill. A rounding error would have been enough to supercharge them.

Governments have realized that an uneducated populace is easier to control. Or maybe that is too cynical a view for HN?

>photo ID will get you a free library card

Results may vary.

No, Librarians are pretty liberal with this. Many in big cities, e.g. Chicago, Seattle, etc don't even need to see an ID, just a bill but if you show up and pester back and forth a few times they'll still give you one.

No government identity needed. A bill helps.

In large cities especially, libraries will have an "independent" charitable foundation attached to them. It is very prestigious in the local community to be on the board or to donate large sums to these foundations. Thus, large city libraries are typically excellent with plenty of funding and can afford to offer services to the poor and indigent which smaller libraries cannot.

In the US, a lot of libraries are funded by property taxes, and the various laws that allow these taxes to be collected (for library purposes) will state that the library cannot offer services to people outside the geographic boundary for a lower cost than is charged to the people inside the boundary and are paying the taxes. That's why they need "proof" of where you live before giving you a card. But then you also have laws requiring services to be provided to the homeless regardless of proof of residence (how do you prove your residence when you are homeless?). How does the library resolve that legal conflict? It pretty much always comes down to money and local attitudes (see first paragraph).

I always recommend folks get a library card, as they will generally provide free access to these as well as many other newspapers... However there's often 30-90 day embargo to access current issues/articles online.

I’ve tried that workflow with multiple public and university libraries. While the experience varies from Library to Library— my current underfunded city seems not to have current non-archive digital newspaper access at all— and some new commonly adopted platform I’m not aware of might have solved the problem, the workflow isn’t compatible with the way most people discover news stories. It works decently, even if a bit clunky, if you are moderately database savvy and your use case resembles a print user’s— i.e. browse today’s headlines from a small number of sources and use them to decide which articles to read. (Which is also probably the best way to avoid algorithmic bias if your source choice is solid.) However, most people access their news on a whim through social media, web searches, and aggregators designed to provide only the most relevant and appealing selection of stories without having to think about it.

While you say it’s more practical, that’s an extremely subjective metric. For many people, spending a few bucks a month for something that works with their current workflow and saves rather than costs time is far more practical. Also, I’ve never seen a Library setup that gives access to desirable paywalled extra features like podcasts or NYT Food. I’m sure that’s quite deliberate on the NYT’s part.

I’m happy to give a few bucks a month to news orgs; in fact I wish they were nonprofits that would somehow let me pay enough more to abandon their asinine surveillance capitalism tendencies and expand free access, but I have no idea what that would look like logistically. If there was a network of newspaper-like organizations that operated like PBS and NPR, ideally with its own news wire, that would be a great start, IMO.

People having free and easy access to news from non-government-run sources (PBS and NPR are not government-run, naysayers) is a public good. I wish we could figure out how to shape the industry to reflect that.

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