this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Mildly Infuriating

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[–] [email protected] 148 points 1 year ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago

Yes officer, I’d like to charge this phone with battery.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I doubt they can read this. Rip ops phone

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven "news". Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.

Personally, I'm excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I'm hopeful we'll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.

High quality journalism can't exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can't afford it, visiting a local library for example.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I know "state-funded media" is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it's always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The other nice thing for "state funded media" is they often have translations for international audiences

For example CBC / Radio-Canada also have an international page, Radio-Canada International offered in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic etc.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.

This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.

The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.

With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.

And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.

So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We had fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Everyone hates ads but no one wants to pay for it lol

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Well there are 3 alternatives.

Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.

All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D

Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

If I have to pay for it:

  • it cannot be sensationalized. It cannot even veer mildly from the found facts.
  • it cannot be filled with agenda bias
  • it cannot hold any false, non peer reviewed information
  • they have to pay their sources. And They have to pay their sources well. Especially the ones who are expected to uphold to peer reviews (science journalists, I’m looking at you)

If there is a free one with ads:

  • ads cannot fabricate their facts either.

Wanna regulate? Well. Then. Let’s regulate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they're government subsidized they're still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.

One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It's a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what's happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix until a few months ago...

Only so much blood in this here stone.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I'm kinda soured on Streaming these days.

Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today's ads, because they're literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn't have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I'm reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.

Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn't our fault for being pushed so far that we're fed up with it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Unskipable ads when I'm browsing my files on my phone, how fucking obnoxious can you possibly make them?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.

Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Facts are behind a paywall and bullshit flows for free.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

There is a reason for it, isn't there? Bullshit is motivated to manipulate, and spread propaganda. While, truth based journalism needs professionals to do due diligence. While we can argue for better journalism, wishing for everything to be free ain't gonna work.

Unless we are okay with.. Ads. We won't tolerate that either, would we?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

NYT has a lot of bullshit tbf

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Looks like a login wall. While I get the “joke” or irony, Journalism has never been free. Servers, journalists, investigations, and apps still cost money. So did printing and delivery. There are countless sources of information online so you do not have to join The Times but for some the journalistic value is worth the price.

Wikipedia offers knowledge to the world for free and are maintained through donation (including myself) and philanthropy. It has its issues but provides free information.

I think we can a enjoy a variety of options. Paid journalism, ad based news, and “free” community supported. There likely are other models we can adopt.

Other free sources I use. Roca News app Gabe Fleisher’s Wake up to Politics Knowledge at Wharton

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was the dream.... Now it's....

Holy shit, someone get this man a charging cable.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's not talked about enough how "traditional news" is culpable for the rise of "fake news" by locking vital information and reporting behind exactly these kinds of pay walls, thus causing people to seek alternative free means instead. This is how fake news sites thrive; pushed into the forefront by traditional media who refuse to adapt their business models to the modern landscape.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How do you feel about government subsidies being used to bolster a free press? From past examples like oil, they don't become a shell company of the governments whims and I feel journalism is just as important to an educated populace in comparison to oil for our commerce.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

This actually isnt a terrible strategy. Right now the news sites require profit for survival. Leading them to do well frankly... Whatever it takes to make that happen. Which leads us to the road we are on now. If their survival was subsidized and they were simply paid to provide the service of good journalism. This would be beneficial as journalism at its core is a PUBLIC service. That is currently being sold as a commercial commodity.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (10 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

A former newspaper.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not a paywall, just a login wall. The account is free. Still funny however.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully when you log in you haven't reached your limit of free articles for the month if you want to read it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

And that no one else on your public IP has reached it, since it seems to be IP-based.

There are so many times I try to read an NYT article and it says I've reached my limit when I haven't even visited the site in the past month.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just curious


how would you like this to work? If you want high quality journalism, you need to pay journalists.

You can pay them through ads, but 1) this is annoying, and 2) people just install ad blockers.

You can have state-sponsored media, which can work reasonably well...or can end up a propaganda machine.

Or...you can pay.

Journalism is not a crazy lucrative career for most. Financially, most of the folks writing for NYT would be better off in PR


and I don't think that's a good thing for society.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or you can have voluntary sponsorship like NPR has done for decades and has high quality journalism because of it. Yes, they get a tiny bit of government money. Nowhere near enough to operate on. And they get corporate sponsors. Who they report against when they have a story about.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You should look for an archive (dot) today that can get you around those paywalls.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Pro tip: Adblock + JavaScript disabled (Ublock Origin can do both) will block most paywalls

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Universal access, as in everyone need to pay 8 dollars a month for the privilege.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

You should charge your battery, sir!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I choose to believe the author did this intentionally.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

We need a Netflix for online journalism/news. I'm happy to pay for my news... But I'm tired of subscriptions for everything. And basically all the major news organizations want their own damn subscriptions.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Netflix for online journalism/news

So, like, regular removals of older material and ever increasing prices and restrictions? Oh, yeah, sign me up.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Check your local library. They usually have subscriptions for newspapers/magazines that you can access digitally with your library card.

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