New Yorker Stories to Read Before the Paywall Goes Up | Hacker News Reader

New Yorker Stories to Read Before the Paywall Goes Up

slate.com

83 pointsrdcasey50 comments

This is good news for those who appreciate the New Yorker.

Not everyone thinks that a world full of advertising and clickbait "information" is a desirable thing. Think of The Atlantic -- at one time, it was on par with The New Yorker for quality content. Now, it contains one rare pearl of compelling and thought-provoking writing (e.g., Ta Nahesi Coates's "A Case For Reparations") for every thousand transitory blips clamoring to acquire page-views.

There is such a thing as information which cannot easily be supported by the info-economy of frictionless social media sharing. I find it disheartening that this is an unobvious idea to some who preach freedom of information.

Think of The Atlantic -- at one time, it was on par with The New Yorker for quality content. Now, it contains one rare pearl of compelling and thought-provoking writing (e.g., Ta Nahesi Coates's "A Case For Reparations") for every thousand transitory blips clamoring to acquire page-views.

The paper magazine contains more of the though-provoking articles, hence why I subscribe and skip reading the online version.

I think it's pretty sad that so many people balk at paying very modest amounts of money for high-quality material. It's as though everything that's available on the web should be free, just because it's on the web.

It's the same with people moaning about paying a couple of dollars for an app or even installing pirated versions rather than paying. There's something seriously wrong here.

The New Yorker costs $50/year - about the same as a single evening in a bar with a friend. Or a dozen coffees.

We've had this thing to deliver content for 20 years (the web) but in the same 20 years no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

I'll balk at 50 dollars a year the same way I'll balk at 3500 dollars worth of gourmet coffees paid on January 1st. Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

> no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

Single click amazon payments, google wallet? Or gumroad? Or stripe?

How about monthly things like patreon? Flattr? Or things like bitcointip on reddit?

How much simpler do you want things?

http://www.patreon.com/

https://flattr.com/

https://gumroad.com/

https://stripe.com/gb

That's just it. You listed 7 different services that provide various ways of streamlining payment. Should I sign up for all seven? Or can I rely on all content providers supporting the one I choose?

Just like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex* are accepted everywhere, this problem won't be solved until an underlying universal payment network is established and ubiquitous.

So... BitCoin?

* I know I know, but it's 80%.

> Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

ding ding ding

Amazon's mobile app does this excellently with the One-Click purchase.

And don't even get me started on Steam sales.

I dare not look at my spending history on either of those two.

For me that's GOG.com and the Humble Bundles. I keep telling myself that someday I'll have the time to go back and beat Baldur's Gate, or any of the hundreds of other games I've bought on sale. Fat chance...

One of these days I'll do something like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1jg15u/so_i_actu...

A while back NPR's Planet Money did a show on the penny[1]. It included a piece on a company that was trying to allow and make easy to charge/make fractional cent payments, so we could have content that cost a fraction of a cent. While there are obvious technical hurdles to be overcome at multiple levels in a technology like that, I like the idea of allowing small payments for content to support the production and delivery of that content.

1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/16/312732409/episode-...

The subscribe section gives you 12 weeks for $12.

Bitcoin makes it very easy: http://www.coinwall.co

No, it doesn't. The intersection of New Yorker readers and people who already possess Bitcoin would be infinitesimally small.

This would, in fact, mean "Open a Coinbase account, scan your drivers license and passport, link your bank account, do the two-small-deposits thing, initiate a transfer, wait the first-time-purchaser waiting period, and then read the article. Weeks later."

I might not object to paying 50 bucks a year, but I read articles shared by dozens of people on different websites so it would be more like ten times that, to different publications.

I very rarely actually go to any one publications website.

I'm sure there's a better way for authors to get paid. Would you pay (say) $1 for a credit for any five articles from the archives of a magazine, with free previews to help you decide? Or would you pay for a Netflix-like service for long-form materials?

I might choose either of those options, as I have no objection to paying a (small) amount for the stuff I read, but neither of them would be very fair. If we just measure cost per article then it just means they would have to push out two articles (similar to what you do with academic publishing) where it would have been better if it had been in one.

Make it so that some articles cost more and it just becomes too complicated.

If we are talking about £50 per year, I'd quite like email subscription to a service that popped out a couple of long form articles per week selected from a range of good quality publications. Just plain text. Its the writing I enjoy. I imagine licensing of the content a month or two after publication would not be outrageously expensive. Just expensive.

Yup, Reader's Digest for 21st Century.

My main problem is with the fact that these publications (not necessarily New Yorker) charge me as much (or even more) as the printed version for the digital version, even though the costs associated with the digital version are significantly lower: no printing, no mailing, no delivery, etc.

Case in point: NY Times. Home delivery to where I live (SF, CA) for a week: $8.45

Full digital access: $8.75 (or $5.00 for Tablet. Or $3.75 for smartphone. Really??)

Make the all-digital version reasonable considering the savings in printing and distribution, and I'll buy. But right now their attitude is: only the rich people have tablets and smartphones anyways, so let's sock it to them.

Thanks, but no thanks.

On the other hand the printed edition has no servers, no CDN, no developers, no sysadmins, no pay-per-click advertising pipeline, no app developers, no tech support, and no 30% to Apple for Newsstand.

I'd like to see what the cost differences are, but it's pretty hard to speculate.

This a 1000x. I feel the same about kindle books that are the same price or higher than paperbacks.

To get the most value from high-quality writing, I need to be able to share and discuss it with others. A paywall stops me from doing that.

That depends on the paywall; some give you a private URL you can use to share the page with non-subscribers.

New Yorker and NYT are two of the only old school media companies whose content I would still pay for. They have some of the best journalism around (NYT for straight news, New Yorker for editorial, long-form, & culture pieces). I think New Yorker's pay wall will probably be a success. I was already prepared to pay for a subscription when the time came.

Have you tried The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com)?

As venerable a cultural and literary institution as TNY, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher; less fetishization of the NY cultural scene (NYRB, despite its name, doesn't cover NY, and is ironically seldom about book reviews), less glitz. The paper edition is wonderfully old school, basically a tabloid newspaper format with zero thought to design or typography.

From what I can tell, all of their content ends up on the site. Their Kindle edition has both the digital version and the paper layout in the same file so you can switch between the two modes.

YES - The NYRB is fantastic. But, no, not everything is online for free. A number of articles are behind a paywall; some are free. I believe others are website-only, but they are not the usual chum to just attract viewers; they're actually good stuff that simply doesn't fit in the print issue.

"New Yorker and NYT are two of the only old school media companies whose content I would still pay for."

Agreed. We subscribe to both (NYT physically, and New Yorker via Kindle) and even if I expect not to read them in a particular week/month/year I still keep the subscription up because I want to support and "dollar vote" for these publications.

I would like to also add that the third (of three) that I support in this way is the "London Review of Books" which is simply fantastic. It's not just book reviews ... there is editorial content, foreign correspondence[1], etc. I cannot recommend it enough.

[1] Perhaps you have noted that one of the more discussed and read pieces about the google bus controversy, by Rebecca Solnit, was originally published in LRB...

I'd add the Economist and the NY Review of Books to that.

I thought the same about Far Eastern Economic Review, but after they installed a paywall I stopped reading. Everyone else did too, and it has since died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Eastern_Economic_Review

On the other side, I rarely read the New Yorker. I enjoy the occasional article that pops up here, but I wouldn't pay to read any of them. They'll lose me as a reader by going behind a paywall.

The pay wall isn't meant to attract people who "rarely read" the New Yorker. Those are the consumers they are OK with losing because they didn't make up an appreciable demographic for their business model anyway.

Readers are readers. They now have zero chance of converting me into a paying subscriber, since I can't read their articles. With a more flexible paywall, I can be encouraged to subscribe every time I'm linked to an article.

It's a metered paywall [1]. You'll still be able to read a few articles a month. IMHO, that's fairly flexible.

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/note-readers

But you yourself said (in GP) that you wouldn't pay to read them. So the chance of converting you into a paying subscriber is 0 to start with. What's the loss? :D

But they had a zero chance of converting you to a subscriber to begin with. You represented only an expense to them.

The slate article calls it a "metered paywall" which means that unsubscribed users will be able to read a limited number or articles per week. You'll probably be below your limit every time "the occaisional article" pops up.

Not to mention that if you're the free rider type, you can just read the articles in incognito and avoid the metering issue.

You don't even need to go incognito.

There are extensions available for every major browser that will let you set detailed cookie policies, such as wiping per-domain cookies once every x hours or x days.

This can be set up once, and then be completely transparent to the user afterwards.

> I wouldn't pay to read any of them

Then why should they care about you? If you're not willing to give them money you shouldn't expect them to give you content for free.

I recommend reading the following 2 stories:

Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? By George Packer | February 17, 2014 Issue

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words?cur...

Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans — and its money — to the realm of politics. By George Packer | May 27, 2013 Issue

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-worl...

This second story was discussed last year in context of Rebecca Solnit's article on a similar issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189580

It seems the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of paying for quality. The explosion of the internet and the effect it had on media destroyed so many of the traditional outlets that spent money on quality content.

For instance, my local paper has turned from being reliable in reporting on local issues and having seasoned reporters, to being not much more than an entertainment company with young, inexperienced reporters who don't spend more than 10 minutes writing articles.

Now we see outlets like NYT, New Yorker, and others, even bloggers (such as Andrew Sullivan), going to a paywall model and producing quality content that's worth paying for. Hopefully this is a trend more people realize that you get what you pay for.

I'll add my personal favorite from the last few years: "A Murder Foretold" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/04/a-murder-foreto...

Also: http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/all-the-new-yorker-story-round...

I just spent a few hours trawling through these and recommend http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/30/swingers-2?curr... (bonobo research), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good (a philosopher's defense of moralism) and http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play?... (interview with miyamoto of nintendo).

Also, anything form Seymour Hersh. Most of his stuff is timely in that there's nothing you don't know about already, but this is the guy who broke the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. He has access to national defense people that no other report on earth can get.

I would all throw in The Agent about how the CIA torpedoed the FBI investigation in Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 as required reading http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent?curre...

Well, I hope that authors that currently publish in The New Yorker such as Dr. Atul Gawande, Dr. Jerome Groopman, and Malcolm Gladwell switch to a different publication such as Slate so that everyone can read their well written, very important articles about healthcare and other fields.

FWIW, it's just going to be a metered paywall, similar to the NY Times (ie "You have read 1 of your 10 free articles this week."). I for one hope that people decide their well written, very important articles are worth paying a little bit of money to support.

You realize the paywall gives non-subscribers more access to these TNY articles than before, right? Before this current "free access" thing, 99% of New Yorker articles were not available online.

I disagree with the very premise; why go out of your way to encourage bad behaviour? I stand for freedom of information and will avoid New Yorker from this point forward.

How would you suggest the New Yorker obtain money to finance the creation of new high quality content?

you're confusing information (raw), and content which is built on analysis and presentation of that information.

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