Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."
I don't know if that's the case now or how many other publishers would live by those rules.
Their slapdown about our presence on the moon is brutal!
[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Someone highup wants a money grab but they also want to know roughly how much money there is to grab and how much will be lost to see if the strategy is worth pursuing first. I cherish these innovative businesses and all their high-risk taking that leads them there.
They're still one of the better organization, and I'm sad to see them go behind a pay wall as it leaves fewer outrage driven outlets available. At the same time, I understand it is difficult to fund journalism in the current atmosphere.
For some reason I figured Reuters and AP would be the last to go behind a paywall for the retail consumer. I remember those always being the safe neutral sources I could use in debate or extemporaneous speeches back on the debate/speech team in high school. Sucks it'll be harder to get access to now.
So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without registration or purchase? It's essentially "page cloaking" when the rendered page doesn't match google sees.
To me, if you want a paywall, that should come with the consequence that your site isn't included in search results for the general public.
Edit: It's also getting irritating here on HN. I might have a subscription or login to one or two sites, but HN regularly shares stuff from Medium, WSJ, NYT, Wired, and so on. I have to imagine that most people following these posted stories hit the reg/pay-wall.
Checking out allsides.com, and their bias ratings, is a good way to see just how bad the other options are.
Hopefully the addition of a paywall does not skew things.
Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc.
Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.
why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page.
Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow.
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. [0]
[0] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.
Reuters: $420
Bloomberg: $419
Financial Times: $372
The Economist: $189
The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.
It stands to reason that a subscription model reduces the dependency on ads and strengthens the negotiation position of publishers.
I'm pretty sure Google has made an art form out of being a rent seeking middle man.
Advertising-based is awful in itself, but I don't view this is a positive improvement.
My mom pays for the NYT, but I think that's mostly for access to their cooking site.
I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines.
Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting.
NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple
The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.
I don’t know much about the journalism business, but I expect Reuters is catering towards a smaller, premium audience that reads a lot of straight news but doesn’t care so much about criticism, commentary, and so on. In particular: reporters and academics, for whom this will be a business expense.
Exactly! I tried coil.com for a while and it would be amazing if you could pay a monthly subscription and then it distributes to articles that you end up reading.
They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
> the newly revamped Reuters.com www.reuters.com is hoping to attract professional audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage and data on industry verticals
It is true that Reuters tends to hew towards US-centric conventional politics and sometimes has problems with politically-biased reporters and editors. This is endemic to any news organization run by Americans, and similar issues will arise in any non-partisan news agency. Reuters is only “non-neutral” in the sense that any news organization will have some ideological baggage and some viewpoint.
It is useful to keep this in mind when reading any particular story, since any journalist is capable of bias and any story should be read critically. It is not useful to pretend that this human imperfection is somehow a problem with Reuters. It seems like an unfair (and dangerous) way to discredit legitimate journalism.
If nothing else maybe these sites could have plans that are tiered somehow, instead of going from "5 free a month (but you have to register and give us your info)" straight to "35.00 a month for unlimited." Give us "$3.00 a month for 10 articles, or $8.00 a month for 20 articles" tiered plan options or something.
There was of course a physical paper that had to be printed and delivered so a base cost at the very least kept printing and delivery down to reasonable numbers. The ads could pay the reporters wages, etc.
I'm not sure what the new rationale is for double-paying for the content.
It would seem to my naive brain that the more eyeballs on your ads, the more money you make from the advertisers. Needless to say a paywall (even a free subscription wall) blocks those eyeballs.
Yeah, if.
What about not so lucky people, though?
This is not a good development.
If it’s a civic issue, the government could offer them subsidies. Economics are an existential issue for news organisations. It’s unreasonable to foreclose them viable business models on the basis of equal access.
My father reads a lot of third party news but actually fact checks on Reuters. A lot of friends and colleagues skip third party news and read directly from Reuters, because it is free. With this change, I doubt a great many of them will continue with Reuters as a source, and would rather stop at a third-party localized news outlet.
Reuters provides facts, and very little opinion. People believe that facts ought to be free, and only worthy opinions are worth paying for.
And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.
So that rule seems to go out of the window for this reason?
I agree with the other poster who suggested Reuters is targeting pros with this pricing.
While moving to monetize the news side certainly doesn’t preclude this, I wonder if it will produce more friction than value?
They serve completely different purposes. The "biases" of them is hardly relevant unless you are routinely taking their opinion sections as fact.
The news articles are free for a few days. After that, access to older articles require premium subscription. This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news.
They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.In my mind, a subscription model for these websites is essentially a donation model.
https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion
Just like every other high quality news source.
People used to pay for newspaper subs before. In real terms, this price is relatively cheap. Gathering facts requires time, money and able reporters.
I know people got spoiled for a while with free news. It’s time to go back to reality and pay for good news reporters.
there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame.
i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...
I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!
It's all gain for the sellers. But from the customer's perspective, one still has to give their credit card number, and may still end up paying for content they won't use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.
It's perfectly possible to provide facts in a highly opinionated way. The world we live in is a messy smear of mostly-contradictory evidence [1], so media can influence perceptions enormously by being selective in its reporting of that evidence.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAy7jujW4AAHhuu?format=png&name=...
People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars.
OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts.
A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider.
Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.
Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.
Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.
(Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.)
The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the "who gets paid and how much" question --- high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate.
_______________________________
Notes:
1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dash... Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identi... A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.
My guess is that it has not taken off yet because everyone wants to be the top dog in that kind of business.
But who know.
It is really frustrating as a user, and undoubtedly Google knows this. So an impending lawsuit is the only reason I can see for them not blocking nyt/other sites that do this.
That's a fair point. And I definitely favor a real micropayments option in the long-run. But I could settle for a tiered plan in some cases as an interim step, especially if the only other option is the "unlimited plan" which just doesn't (in most cases) make sense for my usage patterns.
The grail you seek is not the holy sort.
Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle:
A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...
Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title:
Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...
I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?
Amongst the most successful subscriber paywalls is that of the New York Times, boasting about 5 million paid subscribers.
Given about 130 million US households, this means that 96.67% of the country's households lack access to this source.
And before any comments on the merits or failings of the source in question, again this is among the most successful and widely used subscription paywalls extant, and it excludes over 95% of potential readers.
The exclusion cost is absolutely immense.
All major news outlets run propaganda - not just in prime time, but all of the time. That is their job. The NY Times does have the privilege of being one of the primary establishment press outfits, resulting in their main aim being setting the tone for propaganda outfits around the nation and throughout much of the western world.
If you want to know which way the wind is blowing inside the FBI or CIA, the NY Times is where you go.
To compare them to Fox is pointless, as Fox does little to no print journalism. NY Times excels in [often overly-]lengthy, well-written articles, whereas I don't think Fox has ever done much more than briefs and blurbs.
Sources with a relatively objective viewpoints are going behind paywalls.
1. Propaganda. In the word’s original sense, as The Bible.
2. Cheaply-produced, high-cost status indicia / devices for separating fools from their money, a/k/a Papal Indulgences.
In the ensuing 568 years, nobody’s come up with an alternative business model, modulo rounding errors.
> The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world.
Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...
Top five or so stories of the day with a few lines of detail so you can understand what happened and why it's important, focusing on the actual events, not the narratives around them.
the news industry is roughly $100B in the US (depending on how you define it). as a thought experiment, maybe we could give each of our 330M residents $300/year (~10% of the military budget) to spend on any news source, and only news sources, and preclude other forms of revenue for the industry. that'd make journalism directly accountable to the entirety of the population rather than just to moneyed interests.
vested interests will celebrate and put more money towards warping the minds of people (edit, just to be clear, I’m not excluding myself here)
They are distinct and completely governed by different editors.
I see this as making a strong case for more put into entities like PBS, CPB, BBC etc and for Libraries paying for access for their citizens.
Aljazeera English has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles words by words), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news and viewpoint about Africa, Asia and Middle East.