Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.
The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.
What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.
What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
This is basically what Apple News+ is, which includes quite a large set of newspapers and magazines and their back catalogues.
Also, various libraries will include some sort of mechanism to access a small set of news subscriptions as part of their digital offerings.
What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
10000% this. Or maybe you could weight them as a percentage, with a recommended distribution based on last month or similar for the privacy conscious.
The problem is, the big players who have managed to survive in the current environment would never buy into it. And the second you started excluding bad actors (AI slop or fucking stormfront or whatever) it would turn into a disaster zone. Don’t know how to solve for those problems short of having fuck-you money and making it my personal problem to solve.
I pay for Apple News. I really don’t know why everyone acts like it doesn’t exist (specifically Apple users). The UI is much better than the shit hole websites anyway.
Just like how Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ have gotten more and more siloed, having more and more exclusive content, I don’t want to give money to just one or two publications. Mostly the NYT is utter crap but they do have a decent editorial here and there and I won’t want to only support “liberal” news sources either. As you said I’d be okay with a flat rate and the sites I visit the most get the most of my money or if there were more independent agencies or foundations that would give grants to news orgs that have demonstrated a commitment to honest and fair journalism.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.
The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.
What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.
This is basically what Apple News+ is, which includes quite a large set of newspapers and magazines and their back catalogues.
Also, various libraries will include some sort of mechanism to access a small set of news subscriptions as part of their digital offerings.
I feel one should receive that for free if they’ve paid the price for any of their products.
10000% this. Or maybe you could weight them as a percentage, with a recommended distribution based on last month or similar for the privacy conscious.
The problem is, the big players who have managed to survive in the current environment would never buy into it. And the second you started excluding bad actors (AI slop or fucking stormfront or whatever) it would turn into a disaster zone. Don’t know how to solve for those problems short of having fuck-you money and making it my personal problem to solve.
I pay for Apple News. I really don’t know why everyone acts like it doesn’t exist (specifically Apple users). The UI is much better than the shit hole websites anyway.
Is it? It’s still full of ads even though you’re paying for it. And many of the articles are just ads disguised as news.
Ugh, you’re right. I forgot that I blocked their DoH server so the ads are gone for me.
Just like how Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ have gotten more and more siloed, having more and more exclusive content, I don’t want to give money to just one or two publications. Mostly the NYT is utter crap but they do have a decent editorial here and there and I won’t want to only support “liberal” news sources either. As you said I’d be okay with a flat rate and the sites I visit the most get the most of my money or if there were more independent agencies or foundations that would give grants to news orgs that have demonstrated a commitment to honest and fair journalism.
Sign me up. I’ll pay.