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??
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.
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.
That is incorrect. The payment you make to the site you browse is a chance to be influenced. The site thus gains an opportunity to influence you, which they sell forward to the advertizers. Whether these advertizers succeed or fail in their attempt to use their opportunity is their problem, not yours. Either way you've paid.
Think of it as selling options. The option might end up being worth something, or it might not. But even if it ends up worthless, the seller still delivered his end of the bargain.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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.