What would make you pay to read this article?
Is it the price? The effort of typing in all your details? Would you be willing to one-click purchase it for $1 ? $0.1 ?
Is it the price? The effort of typing in all your details? Would you be willing to one-click purchase it for $1 ? $0.1 ?
If they were effectively priced, the decision cost of trying to figure out if an item was worth purchasing or not would exceed the value of virtually all content.
It's why bundled subscriptions became popular, at a time when these were tied to a service (delivery by the publisher) and a set of enabling technologies (low-cost printing, paper, and ink). Even if a given article within the magazine, or a given issue in the year, left you wanting, the gross price was about right. And the result was achieved: people could share and commonly discuss ideas.
With Web-based publishing, the tollgate which postal delivery afforded is gone, and an alternative business model is wanted. And the result is that we're not discussing the content of the article (pretty light, BTW, from Google cache), but of the publishing model itself.
Twist: Though that topic is HN-worthy in its own right.
But people will donate to an author or organization that consistently publish (freely) arguments for opinions they happen to agree with.
NRA or ACLU would be examples of such organizations.
I'd have to expect the article to be reasonably capable of surprising me with well researched, well formulated arguments that change how I think about the issue. I don't think a paper that provides such a promise exists.
Being in the position of not having read the article my only information on it is it's an opinion piece about education and it's in the WSJ.
So I don't expect it to be well researched, well formulated, or surprising. "Oh, well, it's an opinion" -well, look: opinions are cheap enough that excellent opinions on the subject, from very intelligent people, are just given away:
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm
And I don't consider all opinions equal in the first place, there are various degrees of being informed, various degrees of bias.
I could write an opinion piece about how gutted I was to go to university and realise that by and large I'd already surpassed the curriculum in my own studies. How I went to university to be asked questions and go and find the answers, not to sit in a lecture hall listening to some toff read their powerpoint stack at us while we tried not to fall asleep. How even if you wanted to try something hard and new, (and could find something,) the fact is that university is competitive vs your other classmates, and if you try something hard and none of your classmates do - given that the courses will offer equal points (points only being given on time in the lectures and not on 'hardness' - all course being scored out of 20 - thus better to take multiple easy courses and score well in them than a few hard courses and score mediocre, even if you've learned a lot more in the latter) then you'll get worse grades than them.
... But, really, would you pay to hear me say that? I hope not.
As long as most papers are written for most people, and most people don't put much study in to events that don't directly impact their lives, the value of such is going to be low to me. Reducible almost entirely to the headline that an event took place - commentary as something skimmed over if bothered with at all.