Hacker News Reader

Comment by Germont | Hacker News Reader

To me, there is a sense that the news, which is real information about the society that we currently live in, should be availabe to all participants of that society. The notion of being a good citizen requires that one stays informed. Books, movies, videogames etc. don't have that role and are more consumption goods.

View on HN

It’s a difficult problem with no great answers. If you want news to be free at the point of delivery you want public service news agencies. But that means they’re owned by the government… who are frequently the target of critical reporting.

That's not true. You can have Independent public broadcasting that is not owned by the government and is reporting critically on it.

It’s still a difficult tension. The government will always control the purse strings so independence is always going to come with conditions.

The Guardian in the UK is an example of an alternative: It is owned by a trust, which funds it.

Norway has substantial public media funding across the political spectrum, but as you point out it always comes with conditions, even is less so than the funding for the state owned broadcaster.

Combining the two models and putting public funds into several perpetual trusts intended to provide funding from their profits at arms length from any sitting government similar to the (private) trust funding The Guardian might be an interesting alternative.

(EDIT: Norway also has its own variation over The Guardian model - the second largest media group was founded by unions but is now majority owned by the combination of two public benefit trusts)

> should be available to all participants of that society.

Who pays?

The government (thus the people, in a so called sharing of public burden)!

For example in Hungary there is an official news agency ran by the government, with (cumbersome) free access for everybody. Of course this does provide somewhat biased presentation of some facts, but on many topics it provides unbiased access to news for any citizen.

This is actually pretty common in Europe, often funded by mandatory fees (for some reason not branded as taxes) certain appliance owners need to pay (UK TV license, German Rundfunkbeitrag). For this fee people get access to news and cultural programmes for free via different media (radio, TV, internet).

I agree with your general point but Hungary is probably the worst example you could have chosen from any EU country! The Orbán government is famously using it to spread propaganda and fake information in unprecedented levels.

The level of control governments exert on public broadcasting networks is widely different. Since Meloni, the RAI in Italy is facing similar issues, but Hungary is still the canonic example of government misinformation and propaganda.

That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having. The topic was whether people should have free access to news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of that news.

People have free access to public roads all around the world, and the quality wildly differs in that as well. Also the quality of for-profit news services does differ wildly, you might have an opinion about that of fox news, for example, but that is also off topic in this discussion.

> That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having. The topic was whether people should have free access to news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of that news.

On the contrary, the quality of the news is very important to the discussion. There is no point in making trash freely available to the public, after all.

The topic is a bit more nuanced, and far wider than "not fitting my favourite narrative on some topics, so it is generally and objectively trash".

think about this: I will get mostly objective and useful reports of the flood approaching my home near the river regardless the narrative/interpretation they might have on some other topics, or the biased reporting on the merits of the government in handling the situation at the dams.

For me I'm not here to debate on the political policies of some governments, just gave a few examples of ways to fund public access to news. This discussion is over from my part.

No it isn't an orthogonal discussion. The reason Orban wants people to have free access to his propaganda is because it directly serves his purpose. To finance it directly from sales of the media would defeat the purpose. Coupled with Orban's attack on free media it completes the picture.

I would argue the people of Hungary would be better off without hatred against asylum seekers and minorities, political opponents, lies and misinformation.

Yes, someone needs to pay.

I see the gp post about pirating news as a very good point, while having no veleity to pay the New York Times, and being ok with not reading it in general.

But I also pay for my national (public) news outlet, and their articles are available to anyone anywhere in the world. I don't know how it should work, but I wish we could get to a system where the burden to keep news outlet alive is split thinly enough to have open but viable publications around the world.

Basically the same way weather stations collaborate all other the world and we pay for our local stations while getting acccess to all the forecast everywhere.

There's a few possible models here:

Public donors ALA Patreon

People doing it in their free time because they care a lot about the subject (nowadays with things like Twitter its quite possible for an independent obsessive to write a good piece on, for instance, the Ukraine War by mostly referring to open sources and public announcements by governments and corporations)

Government sponsorship ala BBC

Everyone, if you don’t…

Every news source has biases. Under the paywall business model, the people who share the biases of their favored news outlets pay for them, and in exchange, they get to ensconce themselves inside a bubble free of dissenting viewpoints. This also reinforces the bias of the news outlet; if they don’t toe the line, they will lose subscribers.

Instead of paying news outlets to provide ourselves with filtered feeds of content that match our own biases, we could instead pay news outlets to produce competing streams of explicit propaganda to be freely disseminated. The overall bias and quality of the news would be largely unchanged, even if the biases were more obvious; in fact, it may even improve.

Not everything is news that appears in a newspaper. There are opinion pieces, etc.

I'm of a similar mind. I take the more expansive view that everything created is part of our common property and that something like an LLM should be able to yield the summary and references to those creations. As I've said elsewhere, LLM systems might be our first practical example of an infinite number of monkeys typing and recreating Shakespeare (or the New York Times).

I understand that copyrights and patents are vehicles for ensuring a creator gets paid for their work, but they are flawed in not rewarding multiple parallel creations and that they last too long.

a LLM is just a hugely lossy-compressed version of its training data, an abstraction of it.

Much in the same way as when you read a book, your brain doesn't become a pirated copy of the text as you only store a hugely compressed version of it afterwards, a feeling for the plot, generated images and so on.

That's what I thought from my various readings about LLM systems. I'm guessing that the kerfuffle from the New York Times and other shortsighted organizations is that copyright allows them to control how their content is used. With humans, it's simple as its read and misremembered. Using it for LLM training requires a different model. It probably should be a RAND fee system based on volume of training data because, as you say, the training data is converted into an abstract form.

> which is real information about the society that we currently live in, should be availabe to all participants of that society.

Who should pay the journalists or the investigative reporters?

The state, through taxes. It's a public good after all.

So you want someone like Trump to control the media?

No. I want an independent, but state-financed media, like the ARD or the BBC.

> which is real information

People post archive links even to fake NY Times.

what about wordle or the crossword or the cooking section

https://cooking.nytimes.com/

I agree, but nothing worth having is free. NYT and other news outlets have to ultimately pay reporters to go out into the world and do the work. The reporters are not priests, and the NYT is not a church that lives off donations and tax exemptions. They need money to operate, and you may disagree with how they try to collect that money (paywall) but that doesn't solve their funding problem.

How would you pay for news otherwise?

> How would you pay for news otherwise?

You could subsidise news via "public service" style stipends. Much like having a government owned "independent" news service (eg the BBC) this comes with a high risk of corruption. Don't bite the hand that feeds and all that.

You could implement a much lower friction non-recurring payment system. I'd be far more tempted to drop a little money on a fixed term (5 articles, 1 day, ???) setup than a subscription.

Realistically, I am not paying for more than 1 long running sub. And there are > that number of solid outlets.

> Realistically, I am not paying for more than 1 long running sub. And there are > that number of solid outlets.

This is somewhat what Apple News+ works like, but I doubt most news orgs want to be held captive by Apple.

> I'd be far more tempted to drop a little money on a fixed term (5 articles, 1 day, ???) setup than a subscription.

I believe that’s often referred to as a newspaper, which should be available in all good newsagents on any given day.

I'll just pop out to the nearest newsagent that stocks the NYT so I can engage with a news aggregator

(But yes, that is the model)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com