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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

I'll gladly pay for journalist content, but not when a single article is going to be $15/mo and hard to cancel.

Is there some way to support journalism across publications?

I just came from chicagotribune.com where they tried to entice me with a Flash Sale of one year’s access for a total of $1. Sounds great, but I took advantage of it a year or so back and regretted it due to how annoying they were with advertisements, newsletters, etc…. It’s pretty amazing that the tactics can be so annoying that they can make me regret a $1 purchase.

That's the topic of an essay I'd written a couple of years ago and just discussed on HN last week:

"Why won't (some) people pay for the news?"

<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>

Upshot: Numerous legitimate reasons. I'd very much like to see universal syndication / superbundling on a distributed progressive tax and/or ISP tollkeeper basis, with some additional details for the fiddly bits.

As for subscribing to content submitted to general discussion sites, such as HN or others:

As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the HN front page.

Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.

Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.

Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.

Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.

Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>

(Source: own work based on scraping the HN front-page archive from initiation through June 2023.)

>ISP tollkeeper

ISPs are terrifying organisations I wouldnt wish this system on the world.

Everything else you said makes sense.

>ISPs are terrifying organisations

Could you explain why?

At least in the US, most:

1. Are monopolies.

2. Don't care if you live or die.

3. Have a long sordid history of despicable practices, including price gouging, rampant upselling, shoddy customer service, manipulating search and Web results, selling customer browsing history or patterns, and worse.

4. Are typically at or near the top of lists of companies / industry sectors with which the public trusts least and hates most.

They have enormous power over individuals, collect absolute gobs of data, and act capriciously, carelessly, and overwhelmingly against their subscribers' personal interests with it.

Mostly because they see themselves as invisible, have basically no security posture, and are often either operated by the owner, or by a bunch of foreign tech support goons who have unlimited access to your data.

I'm not suggesting this out of any sense that they are good-faith participants in society or even commercial space.

They are however the one point of authenticated and payment-based contact between all Internet users and the greater cloud.

So if there's going to be some form of payment, it's highly likely to come either from the ISP or some collection of government-imposed fees or taxes. The latter could come at multiple levels, e.g., a city, county, state, or federal levy.

>They are however the one point of authenticated and payment-based contact between all Internet users and the greater cloud.

Yeah but we need to diminish their contact with authentication and payments. They have little to no understanding of security.

Like you might be thinking "Oh just have comcast do this" and they could probably cobble something together with only a massive data breach once in every 5 years.

But think about all the guys in the sticks dealing with Joe Blogs Wisporium or Texas Petes flying internoobs. These solo operators often cant work out telephony or iptv. Having them middleman payments for an extra tax or service is a huge extra risk. I am not even super comfortable with them holding PII or Credity cards as it stands.

https://www.pressreader.com has 7000 publications for $30 a month.

I get it free by visiting my library once a week.

Oddly enough, we created this thing called the Internet and World Wide Web on the premise that data comes to people and not the other way 'round.

This attitude is why journalism is dying. There is value to an undissected payment to the publisher that gives them revenue surety and lets them fund a variety of reporting, even if you don't personally find it interesting or relevant. This is exactly how journalism x publishing worked with the "rivers of gold" from classifieds/advertising during the golden age (also: this is exactly how Bell Labs, Google 20% time, etc were/are funded. The incessant need to pay for only the small portion you directly consume/find interesting kills this sort of thing).

Interesting thoughts. I can’t refute or support your assertions about the cause of journalism’s demise off hand, but I actually am very curious whether a publication could find success in a model where one could pay a nominal fee to access a give article (in addition to the normal subscription setup).

I don’t pay for NYT. I don’t want to, because of the cancellation stories I see repeated.

If I could pay $1 here and there to access an article, though? I’d do that.

And NYT would get some money from me they aren’t getting now.

Seems, maybe, worth it. I don’t know.

I see the point you're making, but I'm not sure it's a fair assessment that my attitude is why journalism is dying. I'd almost go so far as to say we're making the same point.

See, back in the "good olde days", I could subscribe to 1 or 2 sources of news (in my case the local paper and the big city paper) and get something like 80-90% of my general news. I guess largely through the magic of syndication. When someone shared a story with me, it was physically clipped, no paywall. And I get the impression that advertising was fairly effective.

The attitude that is killing journalism is, IMHO, the publishers attitude that the world still operates the same way it did 40 years ago: buy a subscription to us and advertisements work.

One of the big reasons I don't subscribe to, say NYT, is that in a given month there are only a few articles there that I seem to be reading. There are maybe 5-7 sources like that, and, when I'm honest with myself, my life isn't enriched by $100/mo subscribing to them. And advertisements just don't seem to work in today's world.

For example: I do pay for The Guardian because they:

- Don't paywall their articles. - They pop up a reminder that I've looked at X articles. - I can pay what I want (I probably average paying them around $1 or 2 per article I read).

While this is generally true for legacy publications (impossible to cancel!), I mostly enjoy paying for niche-topic newsletters from a single source. A great example is a former newspaper journalist who was laid off and now produces his own newsletter focused on a single college football team. He probably makes more now than when a newspaper employee. I am a happy subscriber. I pay for a handful of these. I also subscribe to newsletters like "Morning Brew." while free and ad-supported, it is well done.

Wish you could just have the option to pay 50 cents to unlock a single article.

> Is there some way to support journalism across publications?

Apple News+, Inkl, PressReader, (maybe more). Others if you want more magazine-focused subscriptions.

I liked Apple News for a bit, but the more I used it, the more it felt like an algorithmic echo chamber like all other social media.

And of course for apple Europe still doesn’t exist because they don’t even sell their service here in Italy :/

Is blendle an option for you?

A decade or 2 ago, there were some talks in several countries about creating a global licensing aggreement where people would just pay one single tax payment per year and have access to everything without being called pirates.

But medias / arts publishers weren't happy with that idea.

Articles should come with license agreements, just like open source software nowadays. Free for personal entertainment, but if you try to make money from the information in the article or otherwise commercialize it, you can fuck right off.

> Free for personal entertainment

Didn't the GP say

> Is there some way to support journalism across publications?

I don't think there's a way to support without paying.

> Free for personal entertainment, but if you try to make money from the information in the article or otherwise commercialize it, you can fuck right off.

Note that such a license would not be considered open source. Open source and free software allows commercialization because they do not allow discrimination against various interest groups. The only thing that open source allows you to do is to restrict people from restricting the information, which has some relation to commercialization, but not fully.

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