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Comment by jaredwiener | Hacker News Reader

Exactly!

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

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Or that one article you wrote for motherboard about undersea cables in (2010) occasionnaly makes it to the top of hacker news…

Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.

Which sites/newspapers are you talking about? Many have metered paywalls, where you get a few articles for free before the paywall hits.

Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.

I’ve never heard of Blendle or post.news. I want a source of news that’s a known quantity and has been around for a while. I know where I stand with The Guardian[0] or The Financial Times or The Telegraph or Le Monde or the New York Times. None of these have tried micropayments to my knowledge.

[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.

"Dutch startup Blendle's early success in Europe has already attracted 550,000 users, the majority millennials, to read and pay for individual articles from publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post." https://www.businessinsider.com/blendle-to-launch-in-the-us-...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...

I looked up blendle and it seems to be a subscription service not a micro payment service. For the UK it only has The Guardian and The Independent. The first a reliable paper with opinion columns that lean left. The second a bit more tabloid. I can already read the guardian for free. I can’t tell if I can access US or EU newspapers or what they are. Post.news doesn’t seem to exist. Neither seems to be doing what I described which is the equivalent of being able to buy a digital equivalent of a one-off purchase from a news stand. I don’t think a service like this can work without some big names.

If you look at my link above, you'd see that it was a micropayment service with lots of major US publications.

They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.

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