this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I'm going to be honest here. If you live in a poor country, sure go ahead and bypass the paywall. But if you can afford it buy the subscription. Real journalism actually takes time and money. Because otherwise news sites depend on ad revenue which then results in click bait journalism. There is no third option. Journalism, much like anything else, is not free.
What if, and this may be shocking to some, but what if you live in a rich country and you're dirt poor?
Do you have bootstraps?
Could you… by chance- pick yourself up by then?
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. I was chewing my avocado toast.
That model works great if you tend to get your news primarily from one news source. If you don't, then that's a lot of subscriptions, and especially if you want to go look at a local news article that got linked somewhere for a town you don't even live in. Most of the time I don't even want to register an account, let alone set up a subscription.
There used to be aggregate subscriptions where you would get multiple participating websites under one payment, and then it would distribute the money based on your actual views. Kinda like Spotify for news.
It always seems to fall apart after a while, with websites just opting for their own individual systems (I guess they get more money that way?).
I've never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I've ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn't like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we're clear, I'm not saying that I don't to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it's worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it's worth it etc.
But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn't something that I'm really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I'll subscribe just because of one random article... that's just shitty business.
Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say "hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!". I mean, that makes sense. I'd then go, "yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I'd like to read, so it's worth subscribing to".
But no, instead they're like "heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month's worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn't going to put you off, right?"
I haven't read anything beyond the first sentence because motherfucking NYT
My hot take is that we need more journalists on the NPR / local affiliate model. People should pledge to their local journalists, no news hidden behind subscriptions. Pay what you can, subscribers get early access to the entertainment / pop culture content, and don’t get blasted with pledge requests.