
Membership is the future of journalism - seapunk
https://medium.com/de-correspondent/putting-membership-into-practice-2e980c025fc9
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deusofnull
And independent patronage at that. A lot has changed with my monthly media
budget in the past ~2 years. The majority of it is now contributions to
creators on Patreon, coming it at about 60 a month. Journalism and independent
blogs can be funded on this model as well.

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ozmodiar
I can see it going this way as well. My fear is that it will cause too much
focus on personalities rather than quality work.

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jerf
If you want quality work, it's always going to be something you're going to
have to look for. Patreon can't fix Sturgeon's Law.

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Aeolun
Membership is the past of journalism aa well.

I think my parents have been sunscribed to the same newspaper since before I
was born, and before there was any sign of computers in daily life.

~~~
reaperducer
Membership used to be the way almost all worthwhile knowledge was spread.

People would subscribe to newspapers. They'd subscribe to magazines. They's
subscribe to books, and even entire libraries. Knowledge was important, and
people would pay for that.

Heck, even Microsoft believed that the future was subscribing to Encarta
updates mailed on CDROMs, and the internet wasn't going to be a big thing for
regular people.

It's only with the advent of electronic communication (radio, then television,
then internet) that the concept of getting one's daily knowledge for "free"
became widespread. Before that, if you wanted free knowledge you went to the
finite resources of the public library.

SV these days wants everyone to subscribe to software, but get their
journalism for free. An interesting double standard.

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CM30
Eh, I'm not sure about this. And even if it is, I'm not sure it'd be a good
thing.

Firstly, as much as some people hate to hear it, journalism is a lot like the
app store in that there are huge incentives to offer it for as low a price as
possible, and huge risks to anyone who decides to charge a reasonable price
afterwards. Indeed, for many average people, price basically is the only thing
they care about in these markets, and the only reason they read any news sites
or services is because they're free.

If a media outlet charges money, all that usually happens is a small
percentage of readers pay, and the rest go to one of the many competitors
offering it for nothing. And the more sources that do the former, the bigger
the gains are for the ones who don't.

I think people also overstate how large the percentage of
readers/viewers/listeners/whatever who pay for quality content is. It's enough
to pay for some small publications to keep running, but likely not something
that'll scale to the whole industry.

Additionally, if this does become the norm for more 'credible' publications,
it may also disadvantage those who can't afford all these subscriptions or
what not, driving them to the less credible sites running on ad dollars. What
do you think is more likely to go for memberships? Something like the New York
Times or Breitbart?

Probably the former. So it's the likes of the latter who would end up being
the main source of news and articles for people who can't afford/don't want to
pay for journalism. Is that a good thing? Probably not.

Still, maybe they'll prove me wrong there. I just personally doubt there'll
ever be a world where a large percentage/all journalism is supported by
memberships.

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phronese
as a Dutch national, I have to comment that it panned out really well here.
Would highly recommend this start up.

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dang
Url changed from
[https://threader.app/thread/1052194833777840128](https://threader.app/thread/1052194833777840128),
which points to this.

