Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Online News Is Worth Paying For?
schnell writes "The increasing prevalence of online news paywalls and 'nag walls' (e.g. you can only read so many articles per month) has forced me to divide those websites into two categories: those that offer content that is unique or good enough to pay for vs. those that don't. Examples of the former for me included The Economist and Foreign Policy, while other previous favorite sites The New York Times and even my hometown Seattle Times have lost my online readership entirely. I also have a secret third category — sites that don't currently pay/nag wall, but I would pay for if I had to — Ars Technica and Long Form come to mind. What news/aggregation sites are other Slashdotters out there willing to pay for, and why? What sites that don't charge today would you pay for if you had to? Or, knowing this crowd, are the majority just opposed to paying for any web news content on principle?"
I get most of my news from the state funded TV network's news section of their web site. The abount I pay for this in taxes comes down to approximately $ 0.5 per day.
Why should I pay for content that amounts to Propaganda, supporting increasingly corrupted civic institutions and companies, all against my own interest. And this is even more my eyeballs are the product being sold to advertisers.
Why should I pay one penny for a word of this?
May the Maths Be with you!
It is not really a news site, but I would pay for wikipedia if paywalled. I did voluntary pay a bit, twice. It is in general very useful for me. Otherwise perhaps occasionaly for an in depth article by a repute dpublisher (even then, max. $2), but not a subscription.
The Guardian to give them financial support to keep real journalism going.
trans corpus mortuum
I find it hilarious that news corps expect me to pay them to access their sites, when all they do is sit on their asses copying/pasting shit from AP, Reuters, or Bloomberg (for financial news) like everyone else does. No wonder many news outlets (both online and in print) are tanking.
If they expect me to pay, I expect them to bring me some original, exclusive news coverage/articles that's not easily found elsewhere for free.
JUST STOP THAT FUCKING THING.
NOW!
Or is nobody out there listening to what the users are saying??
I pay for the NYT, Ars, and The Economist, although the last 2 really aren't newspapers. Why does everyone here hate "paywalls"? Running a newsroom is extremely expensive. From the beat reporters and copy editors all the way up to the editorial board, plus all the foreign bureaus with their own reporters, a "real" newspaper needs to support a ton of people. I'm also a huge fan of investigative reporting, which you rarely ever see outside of major newspapers because the paper and the reporters must invest a huge amount of time and money.
Aggregation sites are nothing like a real newspaper. But at least Ars Technica has a large amount of original content (including their great feature articles), instead of resorting to Huffington Post-style click generation with "articles" that summarize someone else's hard work.
Dice want to commercialise Slashdot and are asking you what you are prepered to pay them for it, not for real journalism.
You say that like it is a bad thing. The truth is that we live in a capitalist society where nobody works for free and running a high traffic website like slashdot costs money in hosting, routing, etc.
You have to get the money in to pay for all this stuff somehow be it subscriptions and a paywall or just tons of adverts which you have try and work show to people even though they want to avoid them with ad-block or similar.
If DICE one decided that slashdot was not profitable for them to run then they would have to pay money to keep it running as a loss leader of some kind. They MIGHT do this, but then they might just turn the site off instead. If you would rather that they turned it off you can simulate that quite well now by just leaving and never coming back. If you would rather slashdot still existed in some form then wouldn't you rather it was able to support it's own existence financially?
I dont read
Sites like the Economist, Foreign Policy, and even the Wall Street Journal (At least pre News Corp). Are sites that give focused information into a particular area. You are getting information that it hard to get elsewhere.
The Times, or your local papers tend to be less indepth and that means you can find the same information almost anywhere.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You say that like it is a bad thing. The truth is that we live in a capitalist society where nobody works for free and running a high traffic website like slashdot costs money in hosting, routing, etc.
In case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot supplies links to other news articles, and the members contribute the discussion/content. "Nobody works for free" - that's exactly what happens with comments; community members write them for free.
If Slashdot wants a paywall then it's going to need to significantly up the quality of the articles (start writing/researching its own material, rather than just link and have an editor write a summary). Or seriously beef up its various subsites (they are apparently called "topics" now): business intelligence, cloud, datacenter, etc.