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Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

> It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.

It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.

I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.

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> I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while.

What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I think one of the argument is that you would see more of those decent articles if people were more enclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers.

>"you would see more of those decent articles if people were more inclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers."

I think this argument holds up. For example, publications like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly, versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.

Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are, but I found myself struggling to justify such a subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-tainment. The publications that can more easily get people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people make more money or find career success, which is why industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend to be more financially successful.

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