Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls – Paywalled
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Subscriptions are fine, I pay for several. But they don't fit every use case. There should be a way to pay for a single article. Some micropayment service(s) so you don't need an account with every web site you might want to read.
It has been tried numerous time without success. Not sure when the right time and the right concept will come.
Is it because a news article is one time consumption, whereas music is not?
It's how I read a bunch of paywalled content -- New Yorker, NYTs, Slate, etc.
Is there room for multiple "Paid RSS reader where funds are distributed per article reads or time spent reading"..?
Are paid podcasts in the Apple ecosystem successful, or "Join" in Youtube? Maybe people will pay to listen/watch but not to read?
Edit: It was blendle. It seems to be still around even. But it's only focused on the Dutch market now, they used to have bigger plans. They only have some magazines now anyway, they used to have all the major newspapers onboard.
But anyway in the Netherlands we have an excellent state-owned news company (NOS). They're just funded by taxes. So I'm not bothered to pay for anything else. Also, all the other media are in the clammy hands of 2 huge Belgian media concerns (DPG and Mediahuis) and I have no intention of funding them.
Spotify is a great example though, because people would find it preposterous to pay $10/mth to listen to each band they wanted to.
uhh
Today publishers want an unprecedented level of restriction to solely the subscribers. News was never like this but they are trying to repaint our expectations on it for profit.
I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper lying around with ads cut out or scribbled over - which I guess is a simplistic analog of the ad-blockers and such that modern news outlets are up against. You can understand the push to maintain revenue that's needed to support quality journalism.
At the same time, as a consumer of news, print ads would not be centrally and intrusively tracking your every thought either, so the desire to block modern ads is entirely rational.
Modern advertising methods have broken the social contract that used to exist to help keep things in balance.
Have.
Practically every public library in the US (over 17,000 as of right now) currently, today, has online access to local and national newspapers.
My public library offers free online access to the following national newspapers:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlantic (HAH!)
The Chicago Tribune
The Los Angeles Times
The New York Times
USA Today
The Wall Street Journal
They also offer access to local newspapers, print and digital magazines, foreign-language newspapers, historical newspaper archives, scientific journals, and more.
I live in a highly-populated, urban and suburban, highly-affluent region. To test and see if smaller public libraries have access these resources I went to the website of the public library system of the rural Indiana county my grandparents lived in. They have one branch serving 28,000 people in a poorer region of the country where average household income is somewhere around $48,000. They have access to newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals through the Indiana Digital Library system.
Then I went to the library of the poorest county (19,000/$22k) in the entire country and did the same thing: WV Reads provides access to all of that, too.
All for $0.00-- today.
Not "had", "have".
Support, by using, your local library.
But unlike food, many people are willing to report on news freely without expectation of payment. For example, I get better local news coverage in my local city subreddit than I do in any professional publication.
Of course this type of citizen “journalism” is less rigorous, but nonetheless it is good enough which is why I believe charging for news has been a tough sell in the age of social media.
> There should be a way to pay for a single article. Some micropayment service(s) so you don't need an account with every web site you might want to read.
I think the idea of Reddit gold comes close to a feasible micropayment system. At the moment it only profits Reddit, but there might be room for some profit sharing.
Agreed. And the "professional" local news is more and more just regurgitating photos, videos, and descriptions they've lifted from Instagram, Tiktok, X, and Reddit anyway.
Then it would be up to me. Do I want to put $10/month into browsing the internet without paywalls? Sure, fine, then I get an ad or two but I would have access.
Add a little more, fewer ads, better experience.
Then at the end of each month, the wallet extension empties and is split evenly among the websites I visited.
This would probably not work for high cost high bandwidth streaming sites like netflix, but for all of these piddly new sites that would bolster their income dramatically and allow them to stop fiddling with the stupid paywalls and trying to force every person who visits their site to pay them money to read their mostly poorly written and generally completely worthless text while being bombarded with ads and auto playing news videos about today's latest tragic political intrigue.
https://lightning-sprinkle.github.io/master-thesis/thesis/ma...
Something that works in a similar way, by using blockchain to record site views per person and allowing cooperating websites to cash in on the views would be my preference.
I imagine that there would be other issues like people impersonating other people and spending their web views, or people setting up "fake" sites and then using dark methods to redirect page views to their site, siphoning off user cash from websites that actually add value, just for starters.
Independent "purely get to the truth" journalism, that people access, is a bedrock of a well functioning society. It's another form of an educated populace. I think what we're seeing right now is that a smaller and smaller upper middle class people are able to read a variety of sources to stay well informed, while most will now never pay or read informed articles. We all vote, so we should want everyone to have easy access to good sources. Instead, now most people purely consume low quality clickbait "for the ad revenue" drivel, and I see that is a contributor to society's poor understanding of the world around them in general.
So, I see government paying to make quality journalism accessible the same way I see education. We know that removing K-12 public school and state universities would be an unmitigated disaster in many of peoples' abilities to think, though they will still vote.
It fundamentally doesn’t work due to journalism, particularly investigative journalism, having high fixed and sporadic costs. Consider the trivial example of defending ones’ journalists against a lawsuit. You can’t easily borrow against clickstream revenue.
Caveat: it could work, but at effectively a a few months’ subscription price per article.
Similarly, I think I would rather read a blog written by an expert on their area of expertise (for free) than read a newspaper's (sloppy) filtering of that.
And, if I care deeply enough about a topic, I would rather read a book about it. What service do these newspapers think they serve?
To corrupt an adage, I honestly think the best reporting is generally free (e.g. coffeezilla, e.g., excellent in-depth podcasts, e.g. many excellent articles and essays linked via HackerNews, etc...) and the second best is more expensive than most newspapers can afford to be (e.g., a book).
Do you pay for any journalism? Or are you comparing the ad-supported cruft to YouTube?
YouTube has great information. But BloombergLaw, for example, remains a far more decisive source than CoffeeZilla. I say this as someone who participated in the FTX estate’s bankruptcy process as an asset purchaser.
Often, when I do read paywalled articles, I feel embarrassed by how poor they are. On most topics I'm actually informed on, e.g., my area of work, or say reporting on a fully videod courtroom case I've been following, they come across as incredibly ignorant. This is mainly the general newsites though, e.g., the Atlantic, etc...
I might check out BloombergLaw. So far, I think the only news providers I respect, are BellingCat (I thought their work with navalny was incredible), PrivateEye (consistently princibled - and funny - satyrists) and I also have a softspot for the BBC.
There's not enough time in the day for someone with a different full time job to properly inform themselves on every issue, so, in theory, news publications pay people to make that their full time job.
Unfortunately, that's not actually what most people want out of news, and is not something most people are actually willing to pay for, so the average quality of the product has quietly degraded over the years, catalyzed by digital media trends in general and sharply hastened in 2016.
Privacy is portayed by the authorities as someone to protect the people, but in reality the people have none and it’s really used to hide the illegal and corrupt actions of government officials.
Maybe that would work for larger websites too? They do often have gift links, which are another way to do it. Limited-time promotions seem like a reasonable way to get new subscribers, and an election is an excuse to do it. It would get traffic from people who do last-minute research on less-covered races.
I’m skeptical about how much effect it would have on the races where most people have already made up their minds. How would that work? Would it increase turnout?
The home page is shamefully Trump spam and tabloid garbage, but the magazine section isn’t terrible. I read The Atlantic and The New Yorker frequently on it.
Avoiding that is easier said than done: I used to pay for Apple News+, but ended up clicking on just enough clickbait to only get clickbait in my feed.
If they had a way to only allow certain news sources then I’d probably re-subscribe.
The next problem is that news outlets are paid per click, so they have incentive to use dark patterns to get clicks.
The last straw for me were things like “Biden hog tied in back of pickup truck …” with “… tailgate mural” hidden behind the click.
If you fall for it once, they aggressively uprank similar news outlets in your feed.
To get around the paywall...
Ad-supported journalism is a joke in a society that abuses advertising so thoroughly. Using an ad blocker is more than a convenience, it's a security measure. Arguably it's also better for the environment [1] [2].
One article [3] argues for "non-reformist reforms," which try to mitigate the commercial pressures on journalism. However the article's solution seems to be to switch to public media models and/or government funding. As the article puts it:
"Therefore, any initiative that erodes the commercial and anti-democratic design of existing media institutions—by transitioning them into nonprofit outlets, facilitating public media partnerships, unionizing newsrooms, and establishing media cooperatives—can help radicalize news workers and engage communities while laying the groundwork for more transformative change in the future."
I honestly don't know how well that'll work, but it's also basically what the article suggests to pay for journalism for a year:
"They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election."
Stengel's article also says, "A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall."
That wasn't true 40 years ago and I don't think it's true now. A lot of journalism strives to be unbiased, but that will always be a goal it reaches for, not one it will attain. To say otherwise only continues to erode society's trust of journalism.
The money to pay journalists has to come from somewhere.
[1] https://marmelab.com/blog/2022/01/17/media-websites-carbon-e...
[2] https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18
[3] https://lpeproject.org/blog/taking-media-out-of-the-market/
I never subscribed to a newspaper and I don't know what exactly drives an average Joe to subscribe to one but my assumption is that one or two paywalled articles won't drive someone to subscribe to the newspaper, it would rather frustrate them to get stuck and blocked from reading. Either you will subscribe because of the word of mouth and perceived reputation of the newspaper or you will subscribe because your favorite author is writing for the newspaper you want to subscribe. That's why I find it mind boggling that for example The Economist's news articles are anonymous and not signed by authors.
My suggested solutions are: 1. Make old news articles free and really new ones paywalled or 2. Introduce micropayments for each article (for example 10 cents to unlock an article for lifetime) or 3. Aggregate all paywalled articles across different newspapers to some news aggregator and then ask people to subscribe.
Tbh, I'm a huge fan of independent journalism and internet blogging which are free and either ad-supported or donation supported.
I don't want Google and the likes to become more powerful either, but some kind of consolidated access to all such information might be a better approach for the news consumer. Perhaps some kind of pay per "article" model might work better.
I would have been more willing to pay something like 25 cents per article if there was a universal access model.
I suprise myself saying this, but AOL model was probably a more consumer friendly approach...
If anything, a paywall suggests that somebody has put some effort into gathering that news. People peddling disinformation want to pay you to take it.
I believe the real issue is that the disinformation is so popular. It's crafted so that some people want to hear it. It's usually not difficult to refute, but there's so much of it that it that even if you're skeptical it's hard to swat away 100% of it.
Putting a paywall between you and the actual news source doesn't help, but even if it were free, it's just too much work. And those who don't want to believe it won't.