The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.
Advertising-based is awful in itself, but I don't view this is a positive improvement.
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.
They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
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.
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.
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=...
But who know.
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.
> 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.
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.