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.
http://lwn.net/ is the only news source I'm paying for.
obviously
Wikileaks.
Free to you but, Julian Assange is paying for it big time.
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!
I get most of my news from the state funded TV network's news section of their web site
No doubt there *are* a lot of excellent news aggregator services available online but it's getting harder and harder to find relevant news, especially news articles written by knowledgeable reporters, and news articles that report the news as it is - without added "bonus" such as biases.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
Technically he's not because of Wikileaks, but because of rape suspicion.
I for one will be happy to pay for in-depth, impartial analysis that takes complex matters and explains them to me simply.
There are enough people out there interested in different things, there's a market there, somewhere. Regardless of that I'm sure most people are sick and tired of tabloids, newspapers with a political agendas and media moguls pushing their views.
I'll pay if you empower me with no BS knowledge and thus a real chance of understanding. Ask me, the potential buyer what I care about, what I'd like to know about and what I do not care for.
Information should be free, instead of asking how you can charge for information maybe you should consider how to monetize transferring free information? wait a moment that's call an ISP. Tax the ISP? -do you see where this is going?
So far we've all been reading what we like for free on the internet, what will your pay service do better? can you demonstrate you're giving me, the reader better value over "free!"? -if you cannot answer that question you should not bother with a pay wall. If you tax at the ISP level and they transfer costs to the customers then customer will move.
So really, what information is not easily accessible to the masses, without passes and logins? high quality research, specialist and niche information. Essentially the sort that has a very low readership and cannot fund itself on ad revenues. Someone will pay for that.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I do not run an ad blocker, and I am fairly tolerant of adverts alongside my news. I will continue reading a site even if the entire sidebar is flashing animated gifs at me.
That is my payment.
I do block flash content, because ads with sound step over the line, and I will stop visiting a site that loads keyword ads in the text of an article, but almost anything else I consider to be a fair condition for free access to content.
The submitter may not think its worth it, but I've been happy with my online subscription. I like the periodic long form articles going in depth on topics that I often find interesting, the opinion articles where they actually invite several people with different view points to present their own argument (without just yelling at each other), and the general news coverage which usually doesn't get too caught up in the petty cable news fodder. (The "missing white girl of the week" stories.)
Plus I am absolutely addicted to their Numberplay feature.
But more important than any specific site, I think its important to pay for news. Research isn't free, and if we don't pay for it, who will? Remember -- who ever pays for it gets to decide what goes in. I don't want that to be the government, nor do I want it to be some rich "benefactor" with an agenda to push. Sure, we can get stuff like the Snowden leaks for free, but we need journalists like those at the Guardian to pore over the data and find the juicy bits. I don't trust random bloggers to do so, because the signal would get lost in the noise, and most of us don't have time to do it ourselves.
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??
Yeah right...
I would pay for a news source with no economic or political agenda... You know. an unbiased news site.
You know the Sydney Morning Herald uses cookies right? If you open in it private browsing or clear cookies the 30 articles/month limit resets itself.
null
In the UK we already pay for the BBC through taxes. So we might as well use it.
Even simpler to use Chrome and open up an incognito tab.
While it's not a news site, among other things it provides thoughtful analysis of current affairs and cultural trends. Some of it is available for free, but subscribing gives you access to all content, current and past. It's not light reading, but Vishnu knows we have more than enough of that the Web.
A bunch of reporters in my home country decided to create a no-ad publishing site, where they publish their own in-depth investigation articles. They need € 60 / yr / reader to stay afloat. I happily donate to these aficionados of free speech. By wiring the money in from my bank account. I refuse to use credit cards on the internet, and refuse to pay for any pay-walled site. The free offers are vast and diverse enough.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The Canadian version of BBC. Still independent of corporation control because it has signifigant tax payer funding and support. Politicians find it hard to muzzle CBC because tax payers can get very pissed off when CBC gets pushed around by politicians. Not enough money for lots of international news but still can be a good site for some interantional news.
Radio, streamed or OTA, like the BBC World Service and NPR, are all I need for breaking news. For depth, when wanted, I'll research it myself.
I'm not even remotely interested in the crappola that passes for main-stream media these days.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I would pay for a slashdot version with >80% of articles about technology :)
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.
America's Finest News Source
I currently do pay for The Economist.
I would pay for the New York Times as well if they provided cheaper pricing options. I wouldn't mind paying $10 a month to read 30 articles of my choice, but I don't like having to take a full subscription just to access the handful of content which interests me.
-deane
The paywall often disappears if you access the news sites via Google (News), so you just need to search for the article's title, and click to access the full article. Sorry... I know.. I'm a bad boy...
http://www.csmonitor.com/
politiken.dk.
-- Make America hate again!
You haven't paid a nickel until your willingness to tolerate the advertising seeps into your psyche in such a way that causes you to behave differently in how you participate in the economy to the advantage of those who generated the advertisement stream.
Ads function on at least four levels. The first is to create direct demand. Suddenly you know something exists and you decide you want it. The second is to make rational people less rational. You already had a perfectly rational plan suited to your economic interests and life goals, but then something changes, so you end up paying more for less (some part of your brain believes those beer girls are hiding inside those beer cans filled with inferior beer). The third level is to cause you to crave those munchies you already have in the pantry. This is a direct boost to consumption level, of a product you already buy. This works extremely well for salty snack foods. It's hard to watch people eat salty snack food on TV all day long and not get a craving. The fourth level is to get people to buy into status glow. When your friend buys three times as much truck as he really needs, it takes a lot of his buddies oohing and awing in suitable hushed and gushing terms, to back-fill the 10 k$ hole in his wallet relative to a different purchase where he would have hardly noticed the downgrade on a daily basis—not even getting into what he could have lived without.
I happen to believe that the engine that really drives the free market is rational decision making. Advertising for the most part reduces the contribution of rational decision making to the free market, to where we end up with a power law (or a law of power): the wealthiest and smartest 20% of the economy (these are not uncorrelated) makes 80% of the rational decisions. The other 80% of the market makes 20% of the rational decisions, in between mouthfuls of Cheetos.
Wired ran a retrospective recently featuring famous commercials of recording artists selling their souls. Take a look at the Pepsi commercial circa 1980 with His Dancing Whiteness. The entire cast look like well nourished Kenyan distance runners. There's exactly one physique I would even describe as burly (you catch a glimpse of half of his back as he provides a backdrop of some guy unloading a candy van). Burly man is not drinking a Pepsi. All the skinny people are drinking Pepsi.
Thirty years later all those Pepsi customers are so fat they need double-wide remote controls just to sink into the couch after school because the mere thought of going outside to dribble a basketball would cause their overworked hearts to explode.
Is that a free market outcome? Really, you think so? What all these rational economic agents wanted deep down was to become fat, unhealthy, and unsexy? It's a good thing God had the foresight to allow humans to copulate in a mutually horizontal orientation.
Bad things come from bad markets. Look around at the outcomes of so many people who willingly welcome these toxic payment streams into their lives stuffed to the gills with lizard-brain visual heroine.
I'm not the one paying
We get the digital Asahi Shimbun. It gets us all editions of the full paper, including a browsable, zoomable PDF copy of the morning paper edition, at a price slightly lower than the paper edition cost us earlier.
The reason is mostly convenience: I and my wife can both access the website and the iPad and Android apps at the same time, through the same subscription. With the paper we'd get only a single copy, so I'd end up bringing yesterdays evening paper on the train in the mornings while she'd read the morning edition.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Wow, I thought the online papers etc trying to charge had dispeared ?! There were worries that newpapers were going to lose too many readers in print and started charging online.. assumed this had died. Never will pay for news, it's freely available and actually most are behind the social networks at getting anything up to date.
'nuff said.
In the 10 or so years I have been surfing the web. There is no site I have ever run across that I would pay to read.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Despite my strong inclinations never to pay for news content, I must concede the one thing I do pay for, Foreign Policy magazine is well worth it. Otherwise, I remain a surly curmudgeon who follows the old man's advice: If it ain't free, ya don't need it. If it is free, take two, kid.
Also, the Economist.
In the if-they-want-me-to-pay-I-will-dept I would put the Guardian. At least I think it is worth supporting their journalists.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Sadly, I know about none online news. All I can see is online opinion.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not afraid to print numbers and graphs.
good old ABC http://www.abc.net.au/news/aus...
...I obey the laws of physics....
We get the Sunday Washington Post, which includes a free subscription to their website that can be shared with a second person. The coupons we get more than pay for the cost of the subscription, and I get the Sunday comics to read...on Saturday. My wife also checks the ads for sales on stuff we'll need soon. The newspaper itself goes right in the recycling bin, unfortunately. (Side note: this tells me there's a market for a service of just delivering coupons like the papers do, but it would make more money than the newspaper by ignoring the news!)
Other than the Washington Post, New York Times, and several other places publishing the information he provided.
Best Slashdot Co
Until Rupert Murdoch took it over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal
By DAVID CARR
Published: December 13, 2009
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.
Accurate, objective, well-selected reporting that I can depend on is easily worth $200.
Propaganda isn't worth the time wasted.
I still subscribe to Science magazine.
Well, information wants to be free however, when someone is selling it to me it ceases to be worth anything more than an advertisment.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
For NYT it is very easy.
You can clear your history after you hit their paywall block or you can just view in Privacy mode and then close the tab once you're hitting the paywall.
Then open a new tab and try again and it will work.
NYT does tracking using cookies and what should you do with cookies ? Eat them!
I subscribe to the Economist and the New Republic, make donations to NPR and ProPublica, but as far as electronic only sources, I haven't felt inclined to purchase any so far. And, quite frankly, I don't see this changing in the near future. Once micropayments are integrated into news sites, though, I will gladly pay an amount if I like the story. I have no qualms of clicking a button and sending $0.50-$2 for a very well done, in-depth story that I appreciate, but this feature just isn't there.
I want to support quality journalism, but no news site has floored me with its coverage and commitment to journalism to make me subscribe. I don't see this changing for major sites. For minor ventures like Glenn Greenwald's Omidyar site or Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias' Vox site, perhaps. But even then I'd far prefer a method where I can support exactly what I want to support.
This is the exact same problem record companies had to encounter when the pirates hit. Consumers do not want to buy a whole album for one good song. Even they begrudgingly adapted, and media organizations should as well. They can have their click-bait fluff which will get ad revenue, but rather than using that to subsidize quality journalism, why not let the consumer support that sort of journalism directly?
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
In my personal opinion there is a lot of junk out there that is not worth its price. I really don't want to know about the Justin Bieber sex tape, and the world isn't a better place for anyone knowing that.
The few places that seem to do great work, in my personal opinion, work that has value worth paying the price for, include the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, sometimes the New Yorker, and then peer-reviewed published journals. I look through many abstracts free and then select the papers relevant to my work or interests and can have my work pay for access to them.
I think that the model of "associated press", where one organization provides 95% of the nations news, is effectively a monopoly. There is a profound lack of journalistic integrity because the journalistic marketplace and the fundamental value of the discipline are both compromised. The value of journalism in the eyes of the public has plummeted in the last 30 years. If someone said the LA times or the Arizona republic is closing shop, all the news they carried would be carried elsewhere. The same stories would be there. An honest modern-day Clark Kent would never be a reporter, because journalism is not the freedom creating and empowering enterprise that it was at the birth of that comic book hero.
When I consider the Economist, for example, nobody has equivalent depth or quality. Psychology today is also not bad. All of the *daily or *times - 90% of their content is not original. To me that means that 90% of their content is not valuable.
Clearly the post-Taco Slashdot falls in the second category.
There does not seem to be a shred of unbiased, agenda-free news out there. Some would argue there has never been such. But these days, it seems to be far less than when I was younger. The consolidation of news business is more than bad enough. That government is attempting to define "news media" is worse because people are tiring of the clearly-tainted news sources and are seeking out alternatives to attempt to balance what they hear.
Even the sheeple are beginning to see that there is something wrong with the way things have been going. The news needs to be run at a low-level and as free of money interests as possible.
I'm surprised that Anonymous hasn't yet organized a 'DOS' attack on the Ecuador embassy, a few hundreds of people dressed the same with the classic mask and a blond wig, running in and then out... with one more. It's not like the 5 cops watching the embassy would have the time to cordon off everyone.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Not exactly "News" but the only website subscription I've ever felt it worth paying was Consumer Reports. It pays for itself many times over every time I buy an appliance. It may sound lame, but my Vacuum cleaner has lasted 10 years... our dishwasher is insanely quiet... Our LCD TV has a better picture than my brother-in-laws $5000 sony and it cost us $700. Then we get into the automotive section and the sites likely saved me tens of thousands. For $20/year it's well worth it.
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.
Any news worth paying for is important enough that the people should be warned about it for free.
...machines' news!
I ignore the nagwall limits by loading the links in a private browsing window. This is mostly for articles where someone posted a link, not for regular reading.
I used to pay for Stratfor online. I found they have generally the most insightful information on international affairs. For example, their coverage of the Russian natural gas pipeline embargo on the Ukraine a decade ago and the repercussions it had for energy policy downstream in Germany and Central Europe was extremely important for understanding the sea change it caused. Germany's Energiewende is a direct result of that event. No other news source in the world then or since really understood the immense ramifications.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
None of it's worth paying for. News sources are owned, typically, by much larger interests so their content gets affected by that relationship. That's not news. I'm not sure if there has ever been such a thing as fair and balanced. You pretty much need to read everything to get just kind of an idea of what's really happening, but I ain't paying for it.
www.lemonde.fr is an excellent news source.
I do not currently have a paid subscription, but I am increasingly tempted to get one.
What I do if I find a site that might be interesting is subscribe to their RSS feed, that is free. All you get is a summary, but after hitting it for a few days/weeks/months I get a feel for if the subject matter will keep me interested. It's certainly not fool proof, but help weed out some places. For instance, I am doing this right now with Rivals.com. I am thinking about subscribing to get more in-depth news about my Iowa Hawkeyes. But I want to see how they spread the news across the different sports, as I am mainly interested in football and basketball. I have done this to help select some sites (pay sites and free sites), as well as weed out sites that sounded good or maybe had one interesting article, but then turned out to be mostly crap.
I know I don't know what I don't know.
If you mean an upfront paywall, the answer is none. The entire concept of the WWW is the synergy everyone gets sharing and linking to free content. It makes every participant far more valuable than they would be alone. Any attempt to put up artificial walls around a particular bit of content violates the entire social contract the Web operates on. You are making everyone else's content less valuable, and are inconveniencing every visitor, simply for your own personal financial gain. Essentially, you are sabotaging the Web.
This is why people get pissed off at paywalls, even though they can't necessarily find the words to explain it.
Now I realize folks have to eat, and the social contract of the Web doesn't mesh very well with a lot of old information brokers' steam-press era business models. Tough. Find a way to adapt, or go out of business. Your choice.
Back in the day, they used to say that the price of newspapers only covered the cost of delivery. Ads paid for the actual salaries of the folks generating the content. Delivery on the web is essentially free to the content producers now. If your grandfathers could figure out how to pay for the rest with advertising, I bet you can too.
Please consider checking out my project, @ncvrg and uncoverage.com. I am working on a platform for crowdfunding journalists directly to work on meaningful news on the topics you care about - in depth journalism, responsible to the public.
We are different from Kickstarter in that you can fund topics/journalists on a recurring basis, so the journalists can keep uncovering new information without having to show their hand to those they are after.
I won't pay for "general news" because by definition other news outlets could pick it up if they wanted to. If no major news outlet picks it up then it's either not important or not of general interest.
I would consider paying for specialized-interest news like hyper-local news, very-niche-interest news ("Lintball Newsletter," etc. - and yes I just made that up), and good analysis/opinion.
Bottom line: If you are a general-interest online newspaper, unless you've got some local opinion/analysis that I find very attractive or you've got local content that other online sources simply aren't interested in carrying because it's not local to them, I'm not going to give you money. As for local content, it will have to be of specific interest to me. If you are my hometown-as-a-kid paper, the paper of a town or a loved one lives in now, or a town I'm considering moving to, we'll talk. Otherwise, if you want me to see your ads, don't charge me for content.
If you are my current hometown paper, I can get local content for free on the radio or TV, so you better have good opinion/analysis for me to want to give you money. However, I've got a deal for you: I'll pay $3/month if you give me $3 in coupons to buy a print paper. I'll also be more likely to buy a print paper if it comes with a 48-hour pass to access to a PDF of that day's paper and copy-and-paste-able text and images of every article in that day's paper. That will save me the trouble of scanning the paper when I want to send a copy to my Aunt in Boise (yes, I made that up too - I don't have an Aunt in Boise).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
>> when I want to send a copy to my Aunt in Boise (yes, I made that up too - I don't have an Aunt in Boise).
Then just why are you spamming some old lady in Boise?
Librarian here. Why pay for access when your public library is already paying for the good stuff? Knowledge will always be free at your local public library. Most US libraries have access to paywalled news and scientific articles through Academic Search Premier, Gale and other databases. Our county library system offers free access to Zinio's magazine service, which is pretty sweet. Local (community) colleges usually have reference services available for county residents, and are often willing to mail you a journal article. Using these services take some effort (writing an e-mail or using your library card) so they aren't ideal for instantaneous gratification. Check out http://www.publiclibraries.com... to find your local library.
As far as where to get your news, start with an RSS reader (Feedly, Netvibes, gReader) and get the rss feeds for:
The twitter feed of your local newspapers
Google News
Your favorite TV news station (CNN, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, etc)
memeorandum for politics
A few international broadcasters of countries that you are interested in (VOA, BBC, RFI, RFERL, etc)
I pay for The Economist not only for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are no cat videos, no "top ten differences between men and women," no pop science fad of the day. I stopped reading the NYT because it has too much fluff, and their web design makes it difficult to find the substantive articles. Plus their "most emailed" list is just full of horrible clickbait which disappoints me every time. Really the NYT's sensationalist science/health fad reporting was enough to drive me elsewhere by itself; it made me stop trusting them as a reliable source. I know that The Economist is biased, but they are obviously biased in a particular way, not randomly careless. If I want the other side of the coin, I will read the New Yorker and the NYRB.
Also, I like the weekly format because it gives the journalists more time to write something thoughtful. As Chesterton put it:
"The tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth delivering at all."
The facts exist whether they are reported on or not. What you're really interested in when you read news online is a certain amount of analysis by the writers. Beyond that, people gravitate towards sites that color the analysis with opinion that more closely matches your own ideology. Commenting features aside, most news media is a one-way street with no room for debate. The author writes something and endeavors to spin it in such a way to make the reader think that their opinion is really fact and therefore indisputable. Having a popular person at the helm makes these opinions even more believable. Lots of outlets don't even bother to disguise their bias because they know they have a supportive audience that came there to find similar ideology. The author may be totally full of sh*t but there is usually a long list of commenters willing to defend the ideology until you get tired of the pissing contest and go away.
I'd buy more newspapers then. $15 is too much.
It doesnt cost them much to add new customers. I dont know why they dont choose mroe resonable price points.
I find Andrew Sullivan's blog, http://dish.andrewsullivan.com..., to be a great aggregator. Low nag factor, low price.
What a loaded question they asked. They should have asked: Should news be paid for? Why? How?
Of coruse news-- accurate, factual, relevant news-- is valuable. But since when has valuable always meant that it must be paid for? Sunshine and air is valuable too.
What services do experts in news provide? They don't create news, they report it. They investigate and select. Sadly, they also slant the news. For me, an eye-opening experience was to read what reporters made of a story of which I was personally acquainted. They distorted the heck out of the story. They sexed it up, made it more dramatic, played up irrelevant and infantile parts presumably because those were easier to dramatize, and largely ignored the original issue. By taking comments out of context, the media turns a civil discussion between the mayor and a councilman who disagree over some petty small town matter into a dramatic confrontation in which each seemed to threaten the other with violence and bodily harm, and the police were called in. An innocent little dent on the mayor's car he caused himself when he bumped it with a shopping cart can be insinuated as possibly deliberately done by someone with a grudge, maybe, oh I don't know, a certain councilman? And the issue they were discussing? Who knows and who cares. At any rate, that information wasn't even reported! Such distortion lowers the value of the reporting to nothing, or even negative levels.
The way things are going, news experts no longer do much of anything. Slashdot is an example. The readers submit stories, and select them by voting. Editing is infamously absent. What value does Slashdot add? About the only thing Slashdot does any more is host. I wonder if in the near future, news will be generated entirely fthrough such swarm intelligence.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Just delete the cookies on shutdown of the browser (as you should anyway) and you'll never notice any naggers.
They seem more balanced and go into more depth than the for-profits. Conservatives complain that its state sponsored liberal propaganda and liberals complain that they are becoming too conservative and caving to the right. I take this as a sign that they are doing something right.
They do so much more than news and I don't feel like I'm paying for someone to cut-and-paste AP news feeds like the other guys.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
so he gets out of the embassy, then what? the whole point of being in the embassy is that he won't be arrested there. if anything I'm surprised that GCHQ hasn't gone in and renditioned him.
In case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot supplies links to other news articles, and the members contribute the discussion/content.
Maintaining the site does not come free.
Selecting stories for their relevance and challenge does not come free.
The deepest problem for a site like Slashdot is confirmation bias. Nothing comes easier than to fill a page with stories that invites a geek to rant. Nothing comes harder than to fill a page with stories that challenge him to think --- to question his core values and assumptions.
I subscribe to Slashdot and the local town paper's online version. For a while, I subscribed to the Maui online paper as well, as I have a friend there and would consider living there, but they overcharge for the little they provide and it wasn't worth it. I also contribute to wikipedia. Google is probably the most valuable site I use (how did we ever survive before them?!?), but they don't need any contributions from me ;-)
In most cases, I like what the summary called "nag wall": it's good for consumers as people can read shared links on sites they don't go to very often or may not have even heard of without the hassle of jumping the payment barrier every time they click on a link, and it's good for the site because people who have never heard of them find out about them.
But if you find yourself visiting a site regularly, it's time to think about supporting them. Ads would be ok if they weren't distracting, but since so many seem to think it's ok to get in the way of what you actually came to the site for, ad blocking is the only viable way to read the web these days.
Dear Slashdot,
I found Slashdot roughly 4 years ago by clicking through a hyperlink on another website. I have been an almost-daily reader ever since. A paywall would have turned me away then. A paywall will turn me away now.
I pay for the NYTimes, I enjoy the opinion and dining sections. The key to remember is that you're not paying for news, you can get that for free on the AP Wire. You're paying to read journalism by authors with points of view you enjoy. I like the NYTimes b/c I find Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and the rest of the OP-ED staff interesting. If I wanted to read a weekly column by Karl Rove, I'd read the Wall Street Journal, thankfully, I don't. Find the sites you find compelling.
Really, access to current news should be free. The history beyond say 7 days, maybe that becomes more paywalled the older it gets. Storage does cost some amount of money as does the ability to search it. The immediate up to date stuff that's happening now should be free with ads. The older stuff may not make sense to be free with ads because just how much do internet users actually use stuff that is older than N days? Maybe use the text ads for stuff that is a few weeks old and more video like ads for older stuff and perhaps survey data for even older stuff. The older the data the more the data has cost the provider in storage costs. Yes storage costs are relatively low, but maintaining said data and access to said data gets more expensive each day.
The statement below is FALSE
The statement above is TRUE
For $15 a month, you can read all the digital NYT you want, including some historical articles. How can the price of a Starbucks Grande once a month make a difference it being informed?
I am a follower of Robert Fisk, Charles Bowden, Michael Pollan and other excellent writers. I want these writers to keep doing what they do. Publications, by nature, only care about sales. It is necessary for their survival, so it is understandable. However, as rich corporate entities like Murdoch take over publications, they reshape the news to suit their agendas. That was why Fisk left The Times to join the Independent. The Independent is not great, but they at least do not censor Fisk. The journalism landscape is changed rapidly in the advent of the internet, so perhaps the best thing to do at the moment is find a writer/researcher and support him/her until a worthy publication arises. For what its worth, I like to support Harpers Magazine...and 2600 Magazine is quite good as well...
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
This is one of the few sites on the net worth paying/donating to.
http://www.therealnews.com/
And Assange sold you that tower too I suppose.
I have subscriptions to the WashingtonPost and New York Times.
I enjoy both of them, and am willing to pay for access. They can't operate on ad revenues alone.
Slashdot.org doesn't nag currently, but if it did, would you pay for it?
And, for those who care... Same question for Beta.Slashdot.org? (Now I'm just trolling, but the first was serious.)
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Please put beta.slashdot.org behind a paywall and keep those who don't pay on the classic site.
"Be careful of what you invoke - you might get it!"
On top of my page today:
"MOVINâ(TM) ON UP. You are on Slashdot Classic. We are starting to move into new digs in February by automatically redirecting greater numbers of you. The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months. As we migrate our audience, we want to hear from you to make sure that the redesigned page has all the features you expect. Find out more."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If you cannot or will not pay for news at a site like nytimes.com, etc, then you're likely not the kind of reader a news org wants, anyway ... people with money and good educations.
Because then they can sell those "eyeballs" to higher end advertisers.
Why pay for access when your public library is already paying for the good stuff?
Because the library is closed at night, on Friday and Saturday evenings, and on Sundays between late May and early September. Some branches close early on more days of the week and are closed on Saturdays between late May and early September. That doesn't necessarily leave much time between getting off work and when the library closes.
not all software is appropriate to an addon service supported model.
Video games are amenable to an add-on service model with a free engine and paid mission packs. Why don't more major video games use this model?
Do they let you determine what articles to include? Only to the extent that if they do a bad job, you won't renew your subscription.
The subscriber can make clear his intent to vote with his wallet in a letter to the editor.
If advertisers were paying, the same would be true: they won't get eyeballs if they don't have content that attracts them.
But then the newspapers are faced with a conflict of interest: advertisers will pay more CPM if they include stories favorable to the advertiser. The editor of an ad-free publication answers only to the subscribers.
The industry has been slowly moving to the way of F2P
True. But to my knowledge, free-to-play hasn't spread to the consoles, nor has same-screen multiplayer spread to the PC. A cooperative platformer or a fighting game is unlikely to be made F2P, or even to be ported to the PC at all. Not a lot of people want to buy a second gaming PC for the TV room, carry a gaming PC back and forth between the desk and the TV every time, or crowd two to four people around a desktop monitor.
Besides, I apologize for being unclear. By "free engine" I meant that the engine is free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. This means end users have the legal right and capability to 0. run the engine for any purpose, including use with self-created mission packs, 1. mod the engine, 2. provide copies of the engine to other people, and 3. provide copies of the mods to other people.
Well if you're going to do that, the companies might as well charge you the whole game, engine+mission, as a standalone.
Which is perfectly doable with free software. One can sell a copy of LibreOffice (the engine) with clip art (the mission pack).
Can't exactly sell additional mission packs if the original sucked.
If someone's game sucks, and the game's engine is free software, someone can create an entirely new game on top of it, possibly in a different genre entirely. Modders call this practice a "total conversion".
...should be paying me to read their liberal propaganda.
NYT does tracking using cookies and what should you do with cookies ? Eat them!
I thought one was supposed to use cookies to hire a grandma to bake you more cookies, then build a factory to make cookies, then ship in cookies from another planet, then bring in cookies from a hellish alternate universe, click, click, click...
I have taken to ignoring local papers except for advertisements. For news I go to less agenda driven sources. Why pay for the local paper to interpret, edit, and tell you what to think? Go for the news services that still feed the newspapers like Reuters http://www.reuters.com/
Better world news coverage than most is at BBC News
You can get better news if you read the text and ignore the talking heads at
Fox News
MSNBC
NPR News
And the international pages from other countries often have a more complete take on even U.S. issues than the major American networks.
Der Spiegel
Pravda
NRRPT/RCT
they aren't going to publish things just to make one advertiser happy
I was referring to the fallout from the giant bomb that hit GameSpot after unflattering reviews of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and Kane and Lynch: Dead Men .
For me, the economist is a bastion of capitalism (the title should be a clue here) and despite high standards of writing, very biased in many areas. Since I left the UK more than twenty years ago, I have come to see that the BBC is usually a mouthpiece for the older, wealthier generations, and that their Asian bureaus are keen to overblow every small thing to justify their huge expat salaries. The Beeb is great for nature documentaries but its news is extremely biased. I would settle for financially supporting smaller entrants such as Democracy Now and Link TV. Sure they have an agenda, but at least they are up front and honest about it.