Many people don't pay full price, most don't want to pay at all for news | Hacker News Reader

Many people don't pay full price, most don't want to pay at all for news

niemanlab.org

23 pointssharpshadow74 comments

I would really like to pay for well edited news. I do not want to pay for advertising and trackers in my web browser. I want to pay someone that prioritizes readers over advertisers. Ideally, no ads at all, so there is no conflict of interest for the publication when choosing topics and investigating.

I had a daily local newspaper subscription and canceled it over all of the analytics embedded in the website.

I have long been a subscriber to The Economist. I value having a weekly update that is well edited and not repeating every 24 hours things that have not been well investigated.

I am considering subscribing to other high value feeds like The Financial Times and Bloomberg.

I would appreciate input on the best sources to subscribe to. Take my money, please!

Agreed, the only news I pay for is the economist. No other publication comes close to it in terms of quality, maturity and consistency of perspective, and reach. Pricey, but worth it.

The Economist is also amazingly objective in its reporting. It's the only publication (that I know of) where you feel like both sides get a fair hearing.

I subscribed to the Economist back in the day. I found an old joke to be true: get the weekly magazines, put them aside for six months, and then read them: they'll be more fun than Mad magazine.

I'm considering subscribing to the Financial Times, since Bloomberg is out of reach.

My line has been that it comes out every week and it takes me eight days to read it. I’m always falling behind.

Bloomberg is definitely worth it, although in a parallel universe they would make less of a deal of every single tiny bit of news as if it were all so important. Everything is breaking news, even when it isn't, so it gets exhausting after a while. You have to watch/read it with that filter on, IMHO.

But then again, they aren't the only ones guilty of this, so I can't really pin in it on them specifically

Well products like the ones you describe do exist. But apparently you don’t know them because you listed Bloomberg as high value when it’s a pay to play publication.

That's why I am asking. Do you have suggestions?

The problem with this business model is that the paper caters to the ideology of the subscribers.

Look at the New York Times as an example

I don't see how that is worse than catering to the ideology of advertisers. Can you elaborate?

I don't see how it is better. You seem to be ok with catering to an ideology.

I don’t see how ideology is escapable. How is the editorial staff being influenced by advertisers better than being influenced by subscribers?

"I don’t see how ideology is escapable."

And that is your problem.

You are OK with ideology in NEWS.

I accept that everyone is vulnerable to ideology and I skeptically read the news.

I am interested in reporting of facts and insight from those with an ideology different from my own.

You still have not answered the question. Advertisers have an ideology and a purpose when they influence news. How is that better?

No you expect ideology. You don't accept people doing their jobs professionally even if it counters to their ideology. That's a fail.

You said "Ideally, no ads at all, so there is no conflict of interest for the publication when choosing topics and investigating." But there is one, and it's subscriber based. You accept bias as long as it is subscriber based.

Your idea is flawed and your question is flawed.

If anything having both revenue streams is more likely to help then only one or the other. The publication doesn't have to rely only on advertising because they have subscribers. This is not an option your question asked. You question is either or which is flawed.

There are publications that have been critical of their advertisers, this is not a new concept. Multiple revenue streams help with this.

That is a more useful answer than your previous replies. Thank you.

You have not convinced me that ideology is something that journalism can escape. At the most fundamental level, some journalists consider freedom of the press differently than others. Some challenge the government more than others. Choosing to report on child labor is an example of an ideological stance.

Every time The Economist posts a story about the failure of the healthcare system and gun violence in the United States, it is because they have an ideology.

I fully expect every news source to have an ideology and to be honest about it.

I said this in another comment but I get a lot out of Bloomberg's financial and legal news. FT can be good and Foreign Affairs is usually pretty solid.

I was briefly subscribed to Apple News+, but then I discovered that even if you pay it's still stuffed with ads everywhere, making the experience just plain worse than a browser with 12ft.io and so on.

I have mixed feelings about the Financial Times. They are very expensive and often the title of the article leads you to believe you are about to obtain some deeper insight into a topic, but the article itself is often surface level at best and feels rushed. It’s better than a lot of other periodicals but not worth the price of entry.

Skimming the article - I see zero mention of quality of the news they're trying to sell me.

Back in the early 90's, I paid about $2k/year (inflation adjusted) for news and science/tech coverage. But Scientific American was already heading downhill, Byte Magazine died in 1998, I was slowly catching on to The Economist being far more consistent in its tone and 'tude than in actual expertise or mature perspective, NPR fully jumped the shark after 9/11, what remained of my local paper was fully gutted by the firm that bought it up in 2009, ...

>NPR fully jumped the shark after 9/11

How did it jump the shark after 9/11? I've never listened to or read NPR so I have no idea how its changed.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

Funny, I trust Bari Weiss' "The Free Press" a lot less than I trust NPR.

I trust Bari Weiss a lot more then NPR. NPR is not what it used to be.

NPR has its flaws, but it’s still reporting news. Bari Weiss is just opinion pieces now.

Im interested in hearing proper rebuttals and discussions of a piece that was written by an NPR senior business editor and reporter with a 25 year tenure at that institution.

Your comment is not that. It appears to either be dismissal by association or whataboutism, in both cases focusing on the outlet that published Uri Berliner‘s piece and not the content of the piece itself.

Ask yourself this, would Bari Weiss publish a piece that included voices that defended NPR?

We know from the piece and its fallout that NPR wouldn't publish a piece including voices that question itself.

If we are being ideologically consistent we would sort viewership by audience-size and then start the bias complaints at the top (hint: its Fox News).

Meanwhile, donate to your local NPR Station. Its some of the best local/investigative journalism I've seen: https://www.npr.org/donations/support

Been a while...but what I recall the most strongly is:

- "Pushing your buttons is our only goal" reporting. Both in individual stories, and as an overall "keep you tuned in and under our thumbs 24x7" business strategy.

- A "Facts Do Not Exist" approach to political reporting. Senator Slime(D) said that 2 + 2 = 3, Senator Sleaze(R) said that 2 + 2 = 5...and NPR's reporters would not dare to suggest that there was anything resembling an objective truth. Let alone give you a hint toward that "4" thing.

So many articles now are lazy quotes from Twitter with little of substance to add to them. The more expensive name brand newspapers tend to be better than this, but it's still hard to justify paying more than it used to cost to get a heavy paper edition delivered to your door.

The best dailies nowadays are the WSJ and the Financial Times in my view. Unlike the NYT, they do a reasonable job of keeping the newsroom separate from Opinion. The old joke about the Economist is that half the stories will be among the best reporting one reads; the other half is sound-good nonsense. The fun bit is trying to figure out which half is which each week.

And yes, it’s a crying shame how far Scientific American has fallen. It’s now on par with The New Scientist.

I had a subscription to the WSJ for awhile. I liked it because it is consistent. It definitely has a conservative slant, especially in the opinion section, but you can "lead the shot" so to speak. You can account for it. It is reliably and consistently conservative, and being conservative is relatively consistent.

The NYT or Atlantic or New Yorker, etc? God only knows what new thing has been declared off-limits/"problematic" in the online progressive world this week, and the tone of self-righteous goodness from the progressive media is insufferable.

I feel like Matt Stone from South Park: "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."

The WSJ opinion section has been a running gag for 50 years. It’s where they let the cranky old conservatives let off steam. But the newsroom is separate and more measured and middle of the road.

The Boston Globe is a lot better than the NY Times lately. It's a nice foil to the WSJ.

I beg to differ. The Globe is the worst of the lot, and I say this as a Boston resident. The NYT, for all its faults, is far superior. The Globe quite literally employed fresh-out-school undergraduates for COVID reporting (whose job, apparently,was to get scare quotes from fear-mongering local academics); outside of Tim Logan the newsroom is packed with NIMBYs; Renee Graham makes it clear she doesn’t much care for white men as does Shirley “pale and male”Leung; international coverage is sparse and superficial; and it’s frequently uncritical of the Democratic political machine, something absolutely fatal in an uni-party state like MA. Overall the Globe is an amalgamation of its midwit, upper middle-class, blue, 495 suburban beltway newsroom staff and editorial board. For its $38/mos subscription price, I want something that will inform, not inculcate.

Edit: my info on the Globe is a couple years out of date now. Perhaps it has gotten better recently, maybe I should sign up for a trial and give it a second chance.

What I miss in my part of the world is journalists asking tougher questions and follow ups in their articles. Not just being a spokesperson for the politician they're making a story on. You can basically get away with lies now without the journalists digging more. Just write what they said, press publish and onto the next topic.

Paying for modern news is questionable.

As an example, when The Athletic launched I decided to start a paid subscription because they promised they would never put ads in their news content and they would have solid coverage of sports/teams/regional events. After several years they started putting 3-5 ads between paragraphs, shut down a podcast I enjoyed listening to, laid off regional reporters who covered certain teams.

And then of course they were acquired by NYT which made things even worse.

They then removed the regional chief of the Bay Area in the last year.

Does paying full price guarantee anything these days?

It's not like you can guarantee any news network won't let subjectivity slip into their content, there will always be some bias and coverage based on either the writers or editors or top level business.

At that point I'd rather just use ad blockers as best as I can.

I will happily pay for high quality news. Every few months I check back in with The Financial Times to see if I can get it delivered to my house again (they used to deliver in Phoenix, but stopped, presumably they lost their printing partner here). My wife even tried to set up a PO box in another state and have the contents forwarded to us, but we could never get it working.

I also paid for Foreign Affairs for a long time, but eventually the quality of the paper (as in the physical material) dropped down a lot, and the number of ads went up.

Lapham's Quarterly (now defunct) wasn't really news, but happily paid for that.

Also plenty of substacks, patreon podcasts, etc.

My local paper just ran a story about a woman "trapped" in her Tesla because the battery died. They started the story with a "warning" to anybody who might be considering buying one. The solution, according to this article, was to locate the "secret" release button that opens the door. Of course to anybody who has ever ridden in the front seat of a Tesla this is an absurd framing of the physical door handle which opens the door in the exact same fashion as every door that has been manufactured for a vehicle for the last 100 years. If you own a Tesla you have probably had to tell somebody not to use this handle (since it seems like such an obvious way to open the door) because it doesn't crack the windows and could damage the window seal (or so the warning that pops up when you use it says).

I'm not going to pay for that.

Substack simply has better quality.

I've been involved in some things a handful of times that made it into the paper. Technical laws being passed, corruption, complains about a system failure... In every instance the only thing that was really correct was the simple facts (law X passed, thing Y failed, person Z arrested). Anything more nuanced tended to be 'technically' correct but was phrased in a way that often would make you think the opposite of what actually happened.

I don't want to pay for basic news. It's a commodity. If there was a source for deeper analysis that I liked I'd consider paying for it. I used to do that but those sources all went crazy around 2016 and haven't recovered.

The thing I am happy to pay for is investigative journalism. I've been very happy to donate to Pro Publica

>I don't want to pay for basic news. It's a commodity.

A commodity is something you pay for! No snark, it's one thing to suggest that we pay wholesale or in bulk-retail for news, another thing to suggest that a commodity can be free.

In the old days the price of the FCC granting you a license for a TV channel was that you were obliged to provide news as a public service. It was an obligation yes but also a responsibility, and that brought a note of sobriety.

When stations instead started trying to make news profitable is where public discourse went to die.

I like the Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker etc., but I like like 30-40% of all of em, so, what should I subscribe too?

I guess an aggregator like Apple News+ ?

I think there are some specialized places I'm willing to pay for deeper analysis. Some parts of Bloomberg are good for that; for example Matt Levine writes on financial and legal issues there and is excellent.

Basic news is a commodity when it is reporting on already-public records, e.g. Hansard or the Congressional Record. For reporting on organized events such as press conferences, it is mostly a commodity as the number of reporters present will be broadly proportional to the public interest in its topic.

However, there are huge number of events that aren't automatically included in some official register, and that's where having a reporter on the ground is vitally important to the quality of the journalism. I don't know if you consider that basic news or not; personally, I do. I would say that the major newspapers must move back to that model, in which journalists conduct their own interviews and reporters take their own photographs, to survive. They must produce value, and there's nothing more valuable in reporting than the 'scoop'.

I wish there was a pay-as-you-read plan (e.g. 10c an article) for news. I just don't spend enough time on one news source to justify a subscription cost

I've been thinking about this for a few years. It blows my mind that publications are not selling articles a la carte. Surely getting _some_ revenue from readers that don't want to subscribe is better than none at all? It feels like a great way to generate leads that might convert into subscriptions as well.

This is not some genius new idea so surely publications have thought about it and refused it, but for what reason?

The stopper (or at least one) is probably credit card transaction fees. There is usually a minimum fee of like 15¢ which makes it less feasible to do transactions under a dollar.

Accumulate and bill once per month. Or pre-pay.

Agreed - pre-pay. I'd pay $5-10 easy and let it run out slowly over time

The papers should offer their own card

The fee comes from the payment processor. There's no way to avoid it while providing credit card services without starting your own payment processing company (at which point you're then eating those costs directly).

FedNow should help in the longer term as non-credit card payment methods show up that use it, but it's still not going to get to the realm of 10¢ micropayments (the service has a flat $0.045 per transaction fee, and companies still have to then consider their own service cost overheads on top of that).

Good point though I’m personally willing to pay more for articles. For example a big feature article from a reputable publication is easily worth $10+ to me. Smaller reports would be less but still at least $1.

Obviously that’s very expensive compared to a subscription but that’s kind of the point.

Here's what I can think of for why not:

- Hard to predict/forecast recurring revenue (though it's additional revenue)

- Incentivizes click baiting for readers

- Requires setting up a "non-standard" billing system

I do not know a single high quality news outlet with values that are consistent and reasonably similar to mine. It just does not exist. I have no interest in paying for low quality reporting and/or giving money to political hacks who don't value the same things as me.

I'd pay for news, definitively not for click based drugs, I mean I'd pay for a classic journal where news got assembled to inform their customer, not following analytics-returned liking to master their reader emotions. I'd like to handle my emotions myself, and when I read news I look for news not emotions...

Secondary I'd like to own news I paid, meaning I'd like to pay for an RSS access to full articles and no ads inside, not to go to a website, login, getting ads if I do allow them and so on. With the feed I can archive myself the news I'm interested in on my iron.

Tertiary I'd like usable news archives, something I can use to research a topic, not just "see some historical stuff", usable with my tools.

Unfortunately almost no newspaper offer something like that. I pay Le Monde Diplomatique since it's succinct and informative enough and at least I can download all editions in pdf and (badly, due to their formatting) rga/pdfgrep etc on my iron, but they are not generic news. In the past I've paid some others but their evolution push me to ditch them.

I want to pay for solid news without a political or ideological slant. I'm not seeing that anymore.

Also publications used to be reasonably priced.

Is this what https://ground.news/ is trying to be? I keep getting advertised the service on Sean Munger’s YouTube channel

That looks like it specifically calls out the slant that different sources report with for a given topic. It's not quite the same as having a reliable source without the slant (if possible), but it might be the next-best thing, and/or the most realistic solution to the problem right now.

I used to watch a podcast called Unfilter (which has ended now), and what I liked about it was that they took a story and played clips from various stations to compare the coverage side-by-side, like that website does with text.

I'd consider paying for news if they considered offering any. The shovel-fulls of shit that is proffered these days is a far cry from news.

Why should I pay to be preached at and lied to when they do it anyway even if I don't pay them?

I might pay for less news, but certainly not more.

I'd go even further. Most people don't want to even be exposed to the news.

There's no way for customers to pay in a way that induces a contract with the journalist to not lie to not enter a contract with someone else to manipulate them. Payment should offer control over incentive structure

I would like a way to pay for first-rate journalism in such a way that they don't track what I read. (So, no login accounts, plus they need to get rid of trackers in general, theirs and others'.)

I would also like first-rate journalism to be widely available to everyone.

Government-funded is difficult when we have obvious problems with too many bad-faith politicians.

Maybe a donation model.

I don't mind paying for news, in fact I subscribe to a site or two.

What I do mind is sites that are peddling the Orwellian narrative.

Some people continue to pay full price. (Thank you.) And the rest of the world leaches the content. If there was a means to subscribed I would.

https://bbc.com/news but bbc.co.uk/news sounds much cooler imho and is still my bookmark.

bbc.co.uk is the uk only version.

The BBC has also gone downhill IMO.

To provide some context around this, one influence which could plausibly be behind a lot of peoples' criticisms of the BBC is the strong political resistance to the TV Licence Fee, which makes up about 3/4 of the BBC's income. The BBC's somewhat negative reporting of Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Conservatives) made the BBC quite a few enemies in Parliament, and there were subsequently no less than four different private members' bills from Conservative MPs and Peers to either greatly restrict the revenue that the BBC gets from the TV Licence Fee, or abolish it the fee entirely. Additional frustration comes from non-partisan criticisms of the heavy-handed behaviour of TV Licensing enforcement, which often intimidates people into paying unnecessary fees with misleading letters threatening criminal prosecution (my household has received such letters in the past).

How does all this affect the BBC? Well, everyone feels differently about the situation, but it's probably reasonable to say that the BBC has had a somewhat more pro-government bias since efforts to abolish the TV Licence Fee have begun in earnest, and the BBC tends to avoid some topics more than in the past. Its broadcasting has moved slightly to more profitable ventures, by developing programmes that it can sell abroad (nature documentaries with the slick new 'BBC Earth' moniker, Doctor Who etc.) rather than focusing on domestic educational content and reporting, which doesn't have a large international market and is therefore more reliant on TV Licensing income. It is likely to frustrate the Hacker News clientele with its vague coverage of 'Science and Technology' topics, which generally boils down to simplistic pop-science about black holes and the like.

It is true that some people feel the BBC is politically biased. but buts not just that.

The biggest problem is that people watch the BBC a LOT less than they did when there were a limited number of channels. Therefore people feel they get less benefit from the license fee.

Up to about the 1980s there were three TV channels, two BBC. The we got more and more new channels, and so the BBC channels became less and less important to people.

If the BBC were to disappear I would miss comedy and Radio 3. I have to TV so that does not matter to me - it does not stop Crapita sending me the threatening letters, of course. I think it is idiotic to outsource to them, and to fail to control their behaviour.

"it's probably reasonable to say that the BBC has had a somewhat more pro-government bias"

or less of an anti-Conservative bias? I think this is something people will argue about, and that is part of the problem.

News must be a public matter, both controlled and financed by the citizens, like it's done in Germany and in th UK.

I would love to be able to give 1-5$ in a single click if I really like an article after reading it. But I need a chance to judge that it's a long and well researched article, not just clickbait behind a paywall.

No way I'm subscribing to crazy weekly rates that are 3x a Netflix subscription for a single journal, though.

I am not paying for traditional news, they are not doing their job anymore.

I’m paying for journalism on Substack and X.

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