
Please Pay for Your News - foob4r
https://goel.io/pay-for-news
======
notafraudster
I have a lot of thoughts, but in sum I think the article doesn't say much or
engage in much soul-searching or really think about the problem in a
serious/interesting way. Here are a few of my thoughts:

What about a patronage model? The demand for news is universal and the ability
for people to pay the price of news they consume (not at all universal) lends
itself better to a patronage model where a smaller number overpay rather than
a larger number bearing true external costs. By this I mean is that the
article proposes that people pay for 3 or 4 different news sources at a few
hundred dollars a year. It's true that many on HN meet this threshold, and
probably should pay for their news. But based on how few people have an
emergency reserve, how many people live hand to mouth, how many people don't
take vacations, I'm pretty sure many consumers of news simply don't have this
kind of disposable income. Urbanites, who are the most likely to demand many
forms of news, are also the most severely burdened in terms of other fixed
costs (rent, food, insurance, transportation). The author sidesteps the
disposable income question by listing other products they perceive to be more
successful (like, say, Netflix) without really engaging what that comparison
means.

By contrast to the individual subscriber, a single billionaire could endow
many news organizations in perpetuity without blinking -- and in fact a lot of
journalism is subsidized in this manner. The article quotes The Atlantic
(being floated by the Jobs estate); the Washington Post (being floated by
Bezos); and the LA Times (being floated by a wealthy doctor in Los Angeles).
Of course all of these have ad and subscription revenue as well, but it speaks
to the idea that there's an outsized role for institutional funding.

The same is of course true for government. It would be trivial for the
government to endow local journalism all over the country, but there is a
strong aversion to this because of the perception in America that state
funding, state ownership, and state propaganda are all synonyms.

Local papers? If Jeff Bezos took 50% of his growth in net worth this year, he
could permanently endow every single local newspaper in the entire country in
perpetuity. Does it really matter what I do?

Hell, let's look at smaller patrons. The author is a senior software engineer
at Google: one very simple proposal that we know the author can afford is
buying, say, 100 subscriptions of a worthy paper and donating them. Is it
likely this article is going to drive 100 new subscriptions by readers? I
doubt it. So if the author really means to achieve the goal they are
advocating, this is a route their article doesn't consider. One possible
response is "it shouldn't be incumbent on me to be a public good provider" or
"how dare you assume I have that kind of money" \-- both of which would be
responses to the article's thesis, with the added benefit that the responders
wouldn't be senior software engineers at Google. In fact, the author surely
knows dozens of other SSEs at Google who also feel the same way politically
about this issue. Why not solicit them?

Lest this seem facetious, when I look at what @pinboard has done with the
Great Slate electoral campaign in 2018 and with his fundraising this time
around, it's clear to me that approach is more effective than simply the
righteous blog post. Skin in the game. I would enthusiastically upvote a
Google SSE handing out hundreds of subscriptions because supporting journalism
is important and $10-20k is trivial for them.

But also the decline of journalism is actually nothing to do with individuals
not valuing it and everything to do with structural factors individuals can't
impact.

To the extent we're talking about local journalism, a large part of the issue
was national consolidation of publishing companies. This is a government issue
and it requires muscular antitrust action to undo. It's also compounded by the
national consolidation of advertising, and the national consolidation of other
businesses. As long as big ad firms do most of the ad placement in newspapers
owned by big newspaper firms, and most of those ads are for big companies,
there will always be pressure towards viewing small local papers as
unsustainable.

Second, a lot of the more recent wave of journalism cuts has been text
journalism unsuccessfully chasing YouTube and Facebook money. It's well
documented [1, using the authors preferred source] that Facebook misled video
watch figures and that this led to the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands
of jobs. This is not an individual problem, it's a regulatory and structural
problem. I could have told these places that chasing Facebook clickbait was
going to bite them in the ass economically because it's a house of cards. They
didn't listen. Why are Google and Facebook not looked at as the cause of this
problem?

Also, the ad-first model has also hampered consumer direct-payment
expectations. I can subscribe to a lot of paper magazines for $5/year. I don't
want paper magazines, I never read them. So why does it cost 25-50x that to
subscribe to the same content online? Answer: because that's the true price of
what it ought to cost, but I've now been conditioned to free-ride. But I
didn't ask publication to pivot to be ad-first, a variety of structural
incentives did that.

Some other hanging user side questions: Why is it not easy to pay for the odd
article read rather than a full price subscription? I read news from all
around the country. I have no objection to a newspaper in Des Moines getting
some of my money, but I won't be jumping through hoops to pay them $0.20. Why
is search still so bad in online journalism? Why is there still an above-the-
fold paper-first design paradigm? Why can't I customize sections without using
adblock to block the sections I don't like? Why is so much of the page
designed to get me to leave the page to share stuff on social media? Why are
URLs so impermanent? Why is everything a low end liveblog format now? Why do
major newspapers pay standing op-ed columnists to engage in empty punditry
about things they know nothing instead of spending more soliciting the best
possible external op-eds on a given subject? Who on earth thinks Bret Stephens
has ever added value to any conversation ever? It might well be the case that
making a product that's more convenient and less infuriating will solicit more
individual compliance, but it's not individual feedback that drove these bad
decisions to begin with.

I know this is a pretty far-reaching comment, but I think if we're going to
have the conversation, let's have it.

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/faceb...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/facebook-
driven-video-push-may-have-cost-483-journalists-their-jobs/573403/)

~~~
foob4r
That's a good discussion, but improving the model and sustaining the
institution are orthogonal.

I do agree though that a lot of the problems are structural and systemic -
that also does not negate the public's negative outlook towards journalism, or
the sense of entitlement (read the comments here).

I do agree though that not enough tech people who can afford to don't pay for
their news. Why? IDK. How to make them? Well maybe this post will persuade a
few to do that.

------
mey
I tried, except, everywhere I looked, they promoted Op-ed pieces with equal
billing and authority as traditional investigative reporting. Washington Post,
NY times seemed liked the "best" based on track record for investigative
reporting on politics and international coverage (with a US focus) but I
cancelled both after a year. Open to suggestions...

Edit: Also NYTimes cancelation process is AOL levels of hostile. The
Economists, less so.

~~~
egonschiele
Why not just ignore the op-eds? Or are you saying you would prefer NO news to
news with op-eds?

~~~
sukilot
WaPo especially, and NYT too, is mostly opinion and human interest commentary
about how people feel, not hard news. It's exhausting to try to wade through
it to find real reporting and investigations. I get why they do it (readers
are dumb, mostly), but they don't even offer a "news" section.

~~~
egonschiele
I'm not disagreeing -- I subscribe to both and am probably going to switch my
subscriptions to The Economist and WSJ, which do a better job providing actual
news. I also subscribe to the Star Tribune which does a fairly good job.

I don't like op-eds either, but there are other options.

------
dpc_pw
The future of "news" is in podcasts & yt. I follow plenty of people who are
doing well for themselves with a Patreon account + some premium content +
public channel providing knowledge & news in their area of expertise, often
very in-depth.

It's not only medium that is different.

People don't trust institutions anymore. They don't want to buy "New York
Times" or any other brand, and pay for the office, shareholders, CEOs. They
want small independent teams / individuals that they can connect with, trust
and hold personally accountable. Someone that feels like they are working for
their Patreons.

When you cut the bloat, it takes just a thousand patreons to support a creator
on some salary-like level. Even less, with ad revenues etc.

------
firefoxd
I wish paying for news would actually make news organizations prosper. But
subscription only slightly help. Looking at past revenue of the LA times,
subscribers accounted for under 20% of revenue [1]. The remaining 80% was from
advertising.

If we all subscribe to 3 or 4 papers right now, the best thing they can do for
their business is bombard us with ads to make up for the remaining percentage.
Well, we have adblockers now so it doesn't work.

I don't know what the solution is. Journalism that holds people accountable is
crucial for society. But customers paying for the news doesn't work. It never
did.

[1]: [https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-
journalism](https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism)

~~~
0goel0
Author here: I don't think publications or journalists like ads themselves.
However, if not enough subscription revenue is flowing in, they are going to
have to use what's worked for them (but not for readers).

This is very much a bootstrapping problem. They need money and stability, and
public support, to make the investments that would make the public support
them.

I think the stakes are high enough for us to bicker about chicken and egg.

------
nicharesuk
I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by
regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque
news source)

My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be
considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be
my inability to trust but I see multiple issues:

1\. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased as you pick which facts
and how to present them

2\. Many news sources have different editors and journalist with a wide swathe
of opinions that it's hard to trust one news source completely based off of
reading just a few articles.

3\. Picking one news source makes it likely to have confirmation bias, which
is something I want to avoid.

Usually I stick with Wikipedia and its references for each subject and try to
synthesize all sides of an issue. Or I pick specific writers who I've seen
with a good track record that really try to be objective even with they are
giving opinion pieces (Gwern is often my goto for a lot of topics)

So really I don't have a good answer for this, I would love other people's
thoughts and other sources of good news or systems for finding good news

~~~
na85
Unbiased news does not exist. To get a good appreciation for the real "ground
truth", one must accept bias exists and seek several opinions on a given
issue, from different outlets or sources.

~~~
egonschiele
Absolutely this. "I'm looking for unbiased news" is a standard line by people
who do not read the news.

~~~
nicharesuk
I'm sorry if my point wasn't clear, I'm looking for as close to non-biased as
possible. As I layed out in my numbered list I'm completely aware that there
are no unbiased sources. To claim I don't read the news is just attacking and
not really helpful to my legitimate desire to find news sources that aren't
just pundits of organized interests.

~~~
egonschiele
Okay, then I'm really not sure what you are trying to say. It sounds to me
like, you have tried a bunch of news sources, and none of them are as unbiased
as you would like, so you would prefer the news not exist at all than exist in
this state.

Or maybe you are saying, you don't want to pay for the news unless it matches
your expectations -- but you DO want the rest of us to pay for it so it
continues to exist?

~~~
nicharesuk
I would say, like I said, that wikipedia has been my go to and what I support
because it has a HUGE reference list for each article. My question is simple
where are the news sources that list as many sides of an issue and list all
their sources that they pull from?

I don't know where you are getting this notion that I want others to pay for
something so then I can deem if it's worthy for me to pay for...

~~~
egonschiele
I mean, I'm with you 100%. I don't know why the news doesn't do a better job
of presenting both sides of the story. I get around this by getting news from
a lot of sources. It doesn't take very long either. My morning news intake:

\- minnesota public radio (my local) \- economist news briefing \- the journal
(from WSJ) \- WSJ tech news briefing \- up first (NPR) \- the daily (nytimes).

I would LOVE to add a more conservative one into the mix here. I'm just
saying, there's a difference between people updating wikipedia vs people who
have a full time job that involves covering the news, 8 hours a day, 5 days a
week. That is worth paying for. FWIW I also pay for wikipedia. But I also pay
for nytimes, washington post, and the star tribune.

------
Myrmornis
I don't know whether my position is morally sound, but it's at least pretty
clear in my head:

\- I want society to support professional journalism.

\- There is an infinity of worthy things to read on the internet. I want to
browse content from many sources.

\- However, it is no longer the 1990s. People don't choose a single newspaper
to be delivered to their houses and open it over the breakfast table.

\- Accordingly, I don't want to have to choose a single newspaper to support,
like people did in the <=1990s.

\- Personally, beyond checking the headlines, I mostly read the news nowadays
with a feeling that I'm time-wasting: that I should be spending my time doing
something more worthwhile.

\- So it really seems that payment has to be per article. Presumably some sort
of subscription-based micropayment service: pay $20 a month; can read content
from (and thus support) many professional journalists. Something like Blendle.
Although when I tried that a year or so ago it didn't offer the type of
browsing I was looking for.

~~~
egonschiele
Since you asked, here’s my take. I agree with all the issues you have listed.
Given the choices I have now, here’s what I do.

1\. I pay for nytimes, Washington post, and star tribune. This costs me around
$20/month I think. I’ve wasted more on unused Linode servers.

2\. I skim the headlines of all of these. Tbh I rarely find something I want
to click on on nytimes and Washington post, but I do on star tribune. 3\. Then
I listen to podcasts. I listen to Minnesota public radio, the economist daily
briefing, the intelligence, wsj tech briefing, the journal, up first, and the
daily. Even here I look at the description first and see what I want to listen
to. The economist and wsj ones are the best, which means I’ll probably be
changing who I give money to soon.

I listen to the podcasts that sound interesting while I’m on the treadmill.

I guess I feel like there are enough options that I’ve been able to find
something I like, and I give money based on that. Nytimes is a bastion of
liberals, and I’m a liberal, but I don’t find it the best for me. There’s
definitely some initial investment required to figure out what works for you.

------
cxr
The thing about paid news is that they're offering a "premium" product, but
that product has notable omissions. You know what I'd expect from news that
you have to pay for? A bibliography. Something like (an idealized version of)
Wikipedia, with a list of references included somewhere, each scoped to a
particular claim—even if a reference just amounts to original research
conducted by the news org. E.g. _Interview with Terrance Bodwell, 2020 May
17_.

It's almost like the raw deal you get with most commercial software. Consider
the case where you have some open source thing that tends to be both free (as
in price) and you get the source code to it. Now, someone is offering a
premium alternative. What do you get for you money? In most cases, you
actually have to _give up_ on being able to look at the source.

~~~
egonschiele
So your argument is, since it's not exactly what you want, you aren't going to
pay for it.

~~~
cercatrova
Well, yes. Even as the parent poster says that this isn't their argument, let
us assume it is. Why would I pay for something if it doesn't fit my needs? I
don't see other merchants think they're entitled to my sale.

~~~
egonschiele
So just to be clear, the choices on the table are,

1\. Let the news die.

2\. Pay for the news, suck up the fact that it isn't exactly what you want it
to be.

3\. Don't pay for the news and hope the rest of us pay for it so it doesn't
die.

If you see another choice please let me know.

~~~
cercatrova
I'd pick 1. I don't believe news is some sacred service that must exist. Of
course, if it were, the government could provide it, but it might cause issues
with independence of state and the people, depending on the type of
government. So, it's a service based on the free market, thus it must compete
on the free market, no?

It seems like you believe that news is sacred, so your conclusions will differ
from mine as we draw from different axiomatic beliefs. If that's the case, we
won't be able to convince each other.

------
Krasnol
I'm paying for news. It's mandatory to do it in Germany and I'm really
grateful for that. Especially in times like we live in today. It's a great
basis for my daily and necessary dose of news. All those extras like good
documentaries on media portals are bonus and only hindered by the private
media restricting unlimited availability of those materials.

Everything beyond that has pretty much grown into either a quite expansive
special I don't see a justification to pay for, things that everybody else
already has and therefore is free or sources that does not offer a way to make
a single time donation I'd love to do to reward a good or interesting article.

I'll not subscribe.

~~~
mag10l
You are paying for bad news. The quality of the forced state TV in Germany is
not great.

No analysis, just giving politicians a platform for their uninformed
propaganda. The main objective is to program the population to keep working
without complaining. Bread and circuses.

If you want facts or background, get the Financial Times.

~~~
Krasnol
Oh look at you ant those lines you gathered at the bottom of German society.
Just admit it: you hate them because they report on people like you and you
don't like to see your face in the mirror.

------
mongol
I would be prepared to pay per article. I am not eager to subscribe to any
particular newspaper. I want to consume media "a la carte", not "all
inclusive".

Unfortunately, newspapers wants me to susbcribe and here we are.

~~~
foob4r
Do you ask for per-movie pricing from Netflix?

~~~
jkmcf
We’ve been asking for ala cart cable pricing for a long time.

Netflix is pocket change and my family gets more value from it than anything
other subscription besides trash and recycling.

I’d pay 2x as much for reliable, newsworthy, and succinctly written coverage
that clearly separates fact from opinion.

As it is now, I don’t fully trust any news organization.

------
0goel0
A lot of people justifying not paying for news by saying that they don't like
ads.

Question then: do you never read the news? Because if you do, you are
consuming the product. So clearly, you are not against the ads. You just don't
want to pay for it (even though the median income on HN is high enough that it
would be a rounding error for most).

~~~
kup0
I think there is no good answer for many people. I don't want ads (and will
continue to block them) and I don't want to pay directly for news either.

I have paid for news in the past and found that it wasn't worth it. Part of
the issue is that to get the news I would want I would have to have a
subscription at like 10 different companies. Not to mention the fact that many
of them still have ads EVEN if you pay.

I already have enough subscription fatigue with streaming services, apps that
have gone subscription model, etc. that it just isn't going to happen.

There is no business model I've found worth supporting yet for news. I'm still
waiting to find a news product good enough to pay for. It doesn't exist for
me.

So my current process is to just mostly avoid articles and news sites in
general and let the news that gets to me through various means (free email
digests/newsletters that aggregate and summarize, other people, social media,
etc) be enough. The only exception being the occasional link on an aggregator-
type site like HN where someone has linked to it.

------
rocketflumes
On the issue of bias - I'm not confident that paid news is necessarily less
biased than news that relies on clicks and ads. Two potential issues:

1) A news agency might be further incentived to publish biased, "echo-chamber"
type of news if they are more effective at convincing readers to pay.

2) Detailed news with in-depth research and thorough analysis is expensive to
produce, so news agencies that produce such material, if they were to rely on
subscriptions, need to charge appropriately expensive fees. This means only a
select group of people can afford this news. To generate more revenue, such a
quality news sources are incentived to cater content to this limited audience
set. Over time this can make quality news inaccessible and even irrelevant to
most of the public.

------
dkdk8283
I’m not paying for news because I want to see the current model of news die
out.

It’s opinionated, biased, and heavily edited. When the news gets back to
factual unbiased reporting I’ll consider spending money.

~~~
stnmtn
When was news factual and unbiased?

------
daenz
If a business has to beg customers to pay, maybe they should step back and re-
evaluate the value that they are purporting to offer and the methods with
which they are offering it.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
It's an odd problem. What newspapers have done historically with respect to
reporting on local politics is almost unquestionably a social good. It's also
inarguable that they've done so as businesses, funded by advertising for the
most part. That has worked because people wanted to pay a little bit (each) to
read them and advertisers were willing to pay a lot (in aggregate) to reach
those readers.

So what's changed? Advertisers are less interested in the medium itself.
Meanwhile, readers have built a very low estimate of the value of journalism.

But what is that estimate based on? Suppose that as citizens we all accepted
that local political reporting was absolutely vital to our society, and that
without it we would face an unmitigated wave of corruption and worse. How much
would we each pay to avoid that?

I understand that people don't accept that news journalism is that vital, and
that this affects their estimate of the value. But are they correct?

------
ethn
I'm working on this with [https://intrgr.com](https://intrgr.com).

We look for the <meta> field on any article we aggregate for their payment
request id [https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-
request](https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request).

In the near future, the article owners will then be paid a portion of the
reader subscription corresponding to their share of the total readership.

------
chrisanthropic
I've been a fan of the correspondent since they launched:
[https://thecorrespondent.com/principles](https://thecorrespondent.com/principles)

Pay what you want, ad-free, paid reporters and staff, and focused on solutions
versus sensationalism.

~~~
sukilot
The articles available on their site seem to all be opinion columns, not news?

------
cercatrova
It is not my responsibility as a potential customer to subsidize a company's
business model, regardless of their product, even something as noble as news.
If a company cannot stay in business, they deserve to die. That is the nature
of evolutionary free markets.

------
perilunar
> We herald news as a public service, we forget that tax dollars don’t pay for
> this public service

Here in Aus our tax dollars pay for a very good news service
(www.abc.net.au/news) Costs us ~11¢ per day each.

The commercial news services here are mostly crap and I wouldn't pay them
cent.

------
quadrangle
As difficult as this trade-off for business is, I prefer to financially
support journalism that isn't compromising its values by using third-party
ads. The journalism that rejects advertising is the virtuous journalism that
most deserves our dollars.

~~~
egonschiele
In that case, how do you support journalism?

~~~
quadrangle
I support ad-free journalism, such as Democracy Now or journalism
organizations like the Freedom of the Press Foundation. I haven't actually
done all the homework I'd like to do in order to identify an ideal list of all
the journalism (particularly local!) that is at least as good as I can find.

I didn't mean to suggest that we should insist on ad-free before donating at
all, but it's a concern. I'm more _inclined_ to donate when there's no ads,
and when there are ads, I'm extra hesitant.

I also don't like paywalls. So, really, I'm thinking about how to highlight
and support the free-to-all work that is also uncompromised by ads. That's
what most deserves and needs support.

------
vulcan01
To all of you here complaining about the ads on many news websites:

Why not use an adblocker?

~~~
egonschiele
Seriously, reading the comments here is making me nauseous but I can't seem to
stop. HN is the essence of privilege. Reporters are getting assaulted out
there.

~~~
m463
But "advertising" today is a twisted caricature of sponsorship models of years
ago.

Advertising, like "location services" has become a two-way surveillance
system.

I would love to be able to have a system of payment where we could pay a small
amount of money for high-quality journalism? (and do it actually anonymously)

~~~
egonschiele
Unless someone kickstarts a system like that, which would be insanely high
startup cost with insanely high risk, the way to actually get to what you are
talking about is for a lot more people to pay for the news, so eventually they
can stop relying on advertising.

~~~
c22
Another way is to boycott news with advertising so that they're forced to find
a model that doesn't rely on it. Why is advertising the only choice here? Why
do you assume they'll drop that revenue stream when they "get enough
subscribers"?

~~~
egonschiele
Boycotting generally doesn't work. When Trump was elected there was a lot of
fuss to boycott companies that did business with Trump, but it had no effect.

> Why do you assume they'll drop that revenue stream when they "get enough
> subscribers"?

Fair, I don't know if they will. I'm just saying that I don't see a better
choice on the table right now. NOT subscribing to the news is not a better
choice to me.

------
b215826
I don't mind paying for news, but almost all news websites would keep track of
what I read if I do that, and it's easy to figure out a person's political
biases from their reading habits.

~~~
egonschiele
I'm curious, how do you get your news in a way that lets you bypass the
tracking? Why not continue to get your news that way and just subscribe to
ensure the news continues to exist?

~~~
b215826
I mostly get my news through RSS feeds (I have a small Python script that
makes use of readability-lxml to convert partial RSS feeds -- the kind that
most news websites provide -- into full feeds).

~~~
0goel0
You can continue that and pay for the publications. Those two work together.

------
joyceschan
For diversity of opinions, can also try the independent individuals on Youtube
with their own news channel. Yes, do try support them, too if you consume
their content.

------
Yen
I disagree. Don't pay for the news.

I might pay for Netflix or HBO. If one is insufficiently entertaining, I
won't. It makes sense for Netflix/HBO to compete on producing the most
entertaining and addicting product, and I know that's exactly what I'm paying
for.

If news agencies are funded by having more subscribers, they'll also be
incentivized to produce the most entertaining and addictive content.

The value of news is not in telling me what I want to hear, nor you what you
want to hear, it's in telling us what we need to hear but don't want to. You &
I might both be high-minded enough to pay for news that bores us or offends us
- but I hardly expect the typical person to do so.

I don't have a better suggestion - but a per-article paywall, or even a
subscription, leads to the same clickbait sensationalist rot that advertiser-
supported news suffered.

~~~
egonschiele
Great, so you are saying that NO news is preferable to the current situation.

~~~
c22
Elsewhere in this thread you've claimed that demand for news is _universal_.
With such high demand why do you fear a NO news situation? If all classical
news outlets die surely _something_ will rise up to fill this void? Sure, it
may not look anything like what we currently have, but that's kind of the
point.

~~~
egonschiele
This concept is not new, it's called Tragedy of the Commons
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)).
Basically, everyone wants something and no one wants to pay for it.

~~~
c22
I'm familiar with the trope, but "news" is not some finite resource we might
accidentally use up, so that wouldn't seem to apply here.

Perhaps no one is currently willing to pay for it because (a) they don't have
to and (b) a lot of it is utter garbage. It doesn't stand that should these
"options" disappear other ones wouldn't take their place, perhaps even ones
worth paying for.

~~~
egonschiele
Terrific, you're welcome to not pay for the news and not read it then. Getting
NO information must be the better option if what you are saying is true.
People have spent their lives doing this job, but surely you know better.

------
jeegsy
Is there any other industry that believes it is entitled to your custom?

------
buboard
the idea that paid news sources are some unique arbiters of truth is dangerous

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PaulDavisThe1st
let me know how to find the non-paid source who works full time checking out
my local city politicans and officials (because that's a full time job even in
a city of 80k people)

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SecurityMinded
News is public knowledge. What you pay is the opinions of the news reporters.
I personally have no interest in paying for politically skewed opinions of a
pol-sci grad of few years ago. That is why I will never ever subscribe or read
any newspaper in print or online. When I acidentally click on a link which
takes me to NY Times or LA times or Atlantic titled website, I immediately
close it without even perusing the first few lines of content, because I know
it will be a political writing, not objective news.

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vulcan01
Public knowledge must be compiled, and that requires some amount of work.
Whether this work needs to be paid for is up to you.

Further, many news agencies conduct investigations. Perhaps the most well-
known of these are the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. By paying for news you
also pay to fund their investigations, which may or may not result in
newsworthy information.

