News media does not operate at the scale of Netflix or Spotify, etc. Spotify has about 87 million paying users, Netflix around 150 million. The New York Times has around 4 million. That‘s a huge difference in scale alone. And the NYT is the exception, not the rule.
Journalism is expensive. Really expensive, if you want quality. More so, if you want some great investigative reporting.
So, yes subscriptions are mostly structured around the needs of the media company, not the needs of the consumer. No one is assuming, the "internet" is different. The economics of journalism just don‘t care.
> What I think you're seeing is that people are paying the amount they're willing to pay. When your choices are $40/mo or $0/mo for the WSJ and you average an article or two from them a week, a lot of people will opt for $0.
Again. That‘s their choice and that‘s totally fine in my book. But journalism is a business and no business survives on people not willing to pay.
I completely agree that behavioral targeting can die a premature death and I‘d love to go back to models based on local, contextual or brand-driven advertising.
> With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve. I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.
I think we‘re on the same page here. And again that‘s totally fine for you to make this decision. Media companies need to find a sustainable model. At the moment it looks like subscriptions and paywalls are the way to got. Maybe that‘ll change again, but I wouldn't count on it, tbh.
And the answer should be, as with everything else: the amount everybody is willing to pay.
I understand your criticism, but what we‘re seeing is the fall out of the disruption of the news industry. The old model (advertising) isn‘t working anymore, so companies are falling back on the subscription model. (Or memberships) And yes they are expensive. But what‘s the alternative?
Not something you wrote, but HNs relationship to journalism is weird. On the one hand there‘s an infinite stream of complains about clickbait and how advertising ruined the media. On the other no one is willing to pay for a more sustainable model.
Foreign countries undermining the manipulating democracy is "just another way form of political campaigning". That‘s a really really cynical way of framing the problem.
If newspapers were only interested in clicks, no one would write such a story. No journalist would spend 6 months of their time researching such a story. Would you please stop with this simplistic media meme? This is not how things work in journalism.
Well here we go. That‘s not even remotely true. And even if they did, what you somehow think the did, why didn't Tesla sue for libel?
You know that there‘s a huge legal risk for Reveal, which means that an army of lawyer is waterproofing every single sentence of such reports? Reveal has literally nothing to win by fabricating a report of this magnitude. They‘re one of the most prestigious investigativ non-profits in the US. So no.
There‘s a huge difference between getting something wrong in an article and "fake news". Could we please at least try to have nuanced discussions around this topic or news in general?
As someone working in the media business. Please could you at least google the outlet you‘re talking about? You‘re embarrassing yourself with your own ignorance. Reveal is a non-profit. They don‘t care about page views, because they don‘t need advertising to finance themselves. There‘s only one thing an investigative journalism team cares about and that‘s reputation. They are deeply incentivized against publishing half-assed work or missinformation. Please just stop repeating this meme over and over that journalists only care about page views.