Blendle – iTunes for journalism launches in the Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Blendle – iTunes for journalism launches in the Netherlands

launch.blendle.nl

51 pointsalexandernl15 comments

Hopes this succeeds...my impression of the news business is that journalists have vastly underestimated the importance of delivery system. Newspapers had success in the pre-Internet days, not just because of good journalism, but of good delivery systems. There's a reason why afternoon newspapers died as television became popular (back in 1948, there were 1,453 afternoon papers versus 328 newspapers: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/02/rip-pm-newspapers.html)...it's not that people are just attracted to stellar journalism, but the newspaper is expected to provide a useful, reliable service (such as classifieds). Too many journalists thought that people paid to subscribe because they, deep inside, cared about the First Amendment and freedom of the press. Yes, some subscribers do. I pay for the New York Times and the New Yorker because I want to support them, but there's not enough people like me around.

And truth be told, the New Yorker's digital service is a pain in the ass. For awhile, their user-management system was horrible (find your print magazine, enter your name in exactly as it appears on the label) and the web-viewer is trash, and to read it on iPad meant downloading hundreds of megabytes per issue. I only use the digital service because it comes free with the print subscription and would never subscribe to digital alone. Reducing friction has been a huge factor to online subscription services in general and the news industry has been far behind on it...hopefully the Netherlands project makes up for that.

But even with a good subscription service, I wonder if it's too little too late? People are now way in the habit of not paying for news. And unlike Netflix movies or Spotify tracks, the average person doesn't get addicted to morning news clips. Reading news is more work than pleasure, and that's always why newspapers, back in the old days, were very careful about how they did comics, sports, and other non-news sections.

I think Blendle is doing a great job regarding reducing friction. I signed up and read my first article through the service yesterday within one minute after somebody in my Twitter feed shared it. The per-article fee is subtracted from my account as I read, but I can ask money back if I didn't like the article.

It's interesting to see what this approach does for reporting, as the whole economics of news reporting relies on bundling. You have a bureau, say, in Paris and in Iraq. When something interesting happens in Iraq, people buy the paper for that, and it subsidizes the Paris bureau. When something interesting happens in Europe, it subsidies the Iraq bureau. If you let readers unbundle the package, this would no longer work. Or would it?

Isn't part of the reason for this that journalists need to eat even when nothing is happening in their area?

I'm in the beta program for a while now. I love being able to read articles from different news papers without having to buy them all. Articles usually cost about 15 to 25 cents and you can ask your money back when the article is not what you expect it to be. This is pretty useful because the moment you click on an article you pay for it. I haven't found this to be a problem for now but I guess people will sometimes click without noticing. Money is being refunded without questions asked.

The service works great on an iPad and the crew behind Blendle is really responsive to questions. Great work.

I tried the service, and am pretty amazed. It has all dutch national newspapers. You can scroll through the papers pages, and click (and pay) to read the articles.

The only thing I am really missing is an indication of article length. Knowing the length of an article beforehand will influence my selection, since I prefer (longer) background articles.

Myjour (https://myjour.com) is providing kind of same services with a different angle. The article is the main subject, instead of newspaper or magazine. Individual articles can be bought from newspapers, magazines, authors as well as several international publishers.

this is an amazing service!!

Seems expensive, $0.10 to read an article?

Have you ever bought a news paper?

I'm going to be the devil's advocate for a second and ask the hard question: "Why would you ?".

In an age where the level of connectivity and communication is so high, most content can be found on the Internet and that before the newspaper is printed.

Newspapers aren't really about being the first to inform people about something that has happened, but more about being very informative, well-written, objective and complete. Many articles are somewhat timeless, anyways.

You have an incredibly idealistic view of newspapers. I don't think they've ever lived up to those principles, especially not now.

For the average article in a newspaper: yes. But that includes a lot of the stuff already out there for free. It'd be silly to pay even a cent for a copy-pasted press release or a 100-word article reporting on how firemen rescued a kitty from a tree the other day.

For stuff like in-depth analysis and backgrounds, imo the only area in which newspapers still add value nowadays, I think $0.10 is perfectly reasonable.

When you buy a newspaper, you expect to get a lot of information from the whole thing. However, you do not distribute the money to single articles you actually read. After reading, you will feel informed anyway.

The advantage of a full newspaper is that you can start reading and then stop again once you realize the content is not interesting to you or you don't need any more details. Just taking a glance is often enough.

However, spending money on a single article on this service when you only want to take a glance? I would ponder bit, but I would be less likely to hesitate spending the money on it due to their refund policy.

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