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> The challenge, of course, is convincing netizens to pay for your content, or freeing it in a way that isn't alienating to readers.

I like the LWN.net model, where "Brief items" that are essentially links to stories on other sites (but with their own comment section) are free to everyone, and their original journalism is free to paying subscribers for 1-2 weeks, and then free to everyone else after that.

If you're not a subscriber and want to see take on any topic, you can with a fairly short delay. If you want to see their historic output, either for research purposes, or just to get an idea of the consistency of their output, no problem.

It's only if you want to see their original work right now, or participate in their comments while the article is fresh, and you're happy that it's the kind of content you want to pay for, then you can. And there are multiple membership tiers (without much to distinguish them) so you can, to a limited degree, settle on a membership level that you feel is fair value.

https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs

I read LWN.net for free for ages, before deciding that, yes, this was a site whose journalism I was actually happy to pay for.

> I'd argue high quality journalistic work is supremely valuable but it needs to be targeted

Ok, sure, I can agree so far.

> and lots of legacy news properties (NYT, The Guardian, etc) have been doing that

And you've lost me. the high-status outlets that survived the online transition are doing "rushed college essay"-tier work at best. Where's the "high quality journalistic work"?

I recently realized I should compare the news to the non-fiction I'm reading all the time. It's not THE NEWS but whats the real difference between one 500-to-5000 word explainer for newbs and another? One is the news because it's supposed to be important. Otherwise it'd be an obscure subject matter explainer like the other shit I'm reading. And god damn is the news embarrassing themselves.

The difference is that the news, because it's attempting to explain things that are happening now, doesn't have the luxuries of time or hindsight that contribute to the quality of other nonfiction. Campaign coverage is probably the best example of this: any good nonfiction author will recognize that there's no way to write a book about it until it's done, but journalists kinda fundamentally have to offer play-by-play commentary.

The majority of what the rags do is not high quality, but a fraction of where they spend their time is. I'd put basically all of the NYTimes' Interactive work in that category -- here's an example I was just reading yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groun...

And here's a WaPo example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/take...

Similarly, The Guardian on the Panama Papers: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers

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Somebody has the report "the news" and that's both untrustworthy and commoditized at this point, but it's not like traditional newspapers aren't also doing any investigative journalism, or intentionally not adopting multimedia methods of presentation.

Private Eye (in the UK) is thriving as a paper publication without very much of an online presence. Audited circulation of nearly a quarter of a million (https://www.abc.org.uk/product/3379).

What's the consumer base like? I highly doubt that 20-40 year olds are reading it much if that's the case

There is a Michellin starred restaurant operating in Greenland that people travel all that way to. Sometimes certain things succeed despite choosing circumstances that work against them and not because of those choices. That same restaurant would be making a lot more money if it moved to New York city but the Chef probably doesn't want that.

Private Eye would have more money and more eyeballs if it had a sufficient online presence but the simple answer is Ian Hislop doesn't want that and I would imagine he would say "We're doing just fine, having not invested a lot in to online presence for Private Eye" and he'd be right.

What works for Private Eye might not work for the New York Times.

> Private Eye would have more money and more eyeballs if it had a sufficient online presence

Are the publications putting everything online making loads of money by doing so?

Because they sure don't act like it.

They pay like shit, and they keep writing articles about "the ugly, ongoing collapse of U.S. journalism"

Indeed anything online tends to be fairly easy to pirate or bypass paywalls for. Whereas for Private Eye there is not really an easy way to get it without paying. You could go read it in a library I guess but that's kind of a pain.

That's a funny one too me, because they do some very good journalism that spans many many years on many people up to no good. Frequently, they're the only ones doing anything more investigative than rewriting press releases and newswires and they must have an absolutely enormous library of material on public figures to be able to connect the dots that they do.

But when they report on something, it's gone from the public view in a few weeks as the only place you could find it would be your own archive, assuming it goes back that far (and you wish to dedicate the space in your house), or a major library of which there are only a handful in the country that would maintain an indefinite archive.

Something more impactful than a report on another suspiciously "bungled" contract by a councillor would be to be able to see the other articles they've done on that person over the decades. Even if there was, say, a year-long delay in putting them in the archive, there's a difference between "Eyes passim" (doubly irritating as there's also no thematic index and hundreds of back issues you'd need to look in) and seeing the older reports in front of you.

The Athletic is outstanding, and they fit very well into the New York Times model, who purchased them.

Former players and managers writing for them, in depth coverage of almost every sports team, stats guys doing deep dive analyses, insiders with lots of connections to break stories on trade and transfer deals, a nice daily email summarizing the previous days sporting news.

I gladly pay their subscription fee.

So I agree. Sports Illustrated dying does not entail the death of sports journalism. Just means other institutions are doing it better.

This argument would be more convincing if The Athletic weren’t also losing millions of dollars a year.

“Since The New York Times Co. acquired The Athletic for $550 million in January 2022, the site has had a total operating loss of more than $43 million, even as subscribers have more than doubled to 3.27 million over the same span.”

Source: https://frontofficesports.com/the-athletic-lays-off-20-journ...

I really don't know how you can lose that much money running a website like that for two years unless you're deliberately using it as a cost sink.

The NYT is not composed of impressive people.

I subscribe to The Economist in print and haven't even bothered to create an online account paired to my subscription.

I don’t understand the point of comments like this, are you trying to refute their point with a single anecdote? Why not add some context or explanation?

>It's not at all a collapse of journalism. It's a collapse of the print periodical with a content focus on topical current events

Don't know they were quite happy with their digital transition in nov 22: https://pressroom.si.com/press-releases/arena-group-reports-...