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.
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!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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...
In the UK we already pay for the BBC through taxes. So we might as well use it.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...