
How we should pay for newspapers - AndrewDucker
https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3616974.html
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tptacek
_The problem being that I don 't want to read individual newspapers. There are
pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify
subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or
two per month_

Consider changing your habits. I felt this way before, too. Then I subscribed
to the Washington Post and New York Times and weaned myself off news
aggregators and CNN.COM, in favor of just scanning the front pages of both. I
am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was
before.

Something that was easy for me to miss before was that the _selection_ of
stories on aggregator sites is itself a form of editorial control. The
algorithmic aggregators do a pretty terrible job; the popular vote
aggregators... yikes. If you want to read a couple of articles from a lot of
different sources, you're going to need to pay _somebody_ to "design the menu"
for you.

The major newspapers have spent the last century working on that problem, and
I'm not sure anyone's really giving them a run for their money. Consider an
NYT, WaPo, or WSJ subscription.

~~~
paulcole
> I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was
> before.

Haven't you just traded one set of biases for another?

~~~
organsnyder
Every news source—even crowdsourced ones—has a bias. However, there are news
organizations that strive to present the facts, as best as they understand
them. Of course, they miss the mark—and their worldview inevitably bleeds
in—but the top-shelf organizations do their best.

I subscribe to the NYT (the print edition—trying to figure out how to make
news more accessible to my kids to stumble upon, and I like how it helps me
focus on reading). As a Michigander, I definitely detect a progressive New
England lense at times, but the quality of their journalism is generally
superb.

~~~
devinhelton
_but the quality of their journalism is generally superb._

What's an example to you of an article on a hot-point issue where you think
the quality of their journalism was superb? And how do you know the quality of
their journalism in that article was superb?

I have noticed that on topics that I have independent knowledge of,
particularly topics relating to race, sex, or politics, I often find their
reporting to be slanted and misleading. They care more about selecting
anecdotes and statistics to fit the narrative, rather than starting from the
perspective of picking representative anecdotes and a full composite of
statistics that give you the actual truth of the matter.

------
QasimK
I absolutely agree with one caveat. I think it’s important to be able to read
an historical article even though you are no longer paying the subscription.

I think there’s subtleties to the subscription model though. Will it really
cover all newspapers, even the super expensive and rare ones? The aggregator
will get to choose what you could read on its platform. Also, certain articles
are likely to be of higher quality, so there should be a good way to “fairly”
distribute the subscription that is beneficial for you and humanity.

I love Spotify. I think it does the subscription model really well, and I like
how it does not restrict you. At least compared to Netflix which is super
annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions. I refuse
to use Netflix (and Amazon video) because of the pain it has caused. It’s
still not perfect because I want to play the songs using my own choice of
music player.

There are two different services that I know of that might be of interest. The
closest service that I have found is Blendle which charges a small amount per
article rather than a subscription. The second is the basic attention token
which, I think, could be used for this though it is much broader. I haven’t
tried either.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic,
> VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions._

Netflix has to honour its contracts with media providers, who have been
accustomed to regional contracts and blackout clauses for decades.

~~~
QasimK
Yes, absolutely. However, regardless of the reasons, it when I run into an
issue I feel annoyed and it makes me want to not bother.

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kenhwang
As somebody who has some insight into the inner thoughts of the revenue
departments of newspapers, the suits running newspapers would rather die than
accept Spotify for newspaper.

We were offering something like $0.20 per article. We ran a small scale test.
The users loved it, it allowed the newspapers to monetize users that would
otherwise not pay, it let you read the article without a bunch of ads loading
slowing down the page. We thought this is great, we're making the digital
newspaper experience better and making them more money, this is a wonderful
success. They noticed that our product was loved too much by the user that
they were cancelling their subscriptions in favor of it.

They would rather have that guaranteed $1/month from a subset of their users
than rely the unpredictability of hoping the user reads 5 articles a month.
And it wasn't just one newspaper, half the top newspapers 15 by circulation
said the same thing. Throw in an aggregator service like Spotify on top so the
newspapers can't even control the look and feel on top? The idea's dead in the
water.

~~~
jordanpower
Mmmmm. Kind of. That insight is pretty accurate, in my experience (I work for
PressReader, disclaimer) and what we're building is basically the Spotify for
News. But for real.

It took some doing, and we definitely had resistance at first, but we have
more than 7,000 newspapers and magazines now. And more every week.

Where we've really found success is taking the time to build strong
relationships with the publishers. I totally get that they don't want a
Spotify-like service to eat at their regular subscribers.

So - part of our benefit to them, is the way we let big brands buy access for
their customers. That way, newspapers can reach hotel guests, airline
passengers, people like that, that they couldn't before.

Whatever product you build, you have to consider BOTH the reader and the
publishers.

~~~
kenhwang
It depends on the scale, really. When you only account for a small % of
traffic, your impact to subscription revenue is also small, to the point where
they can just bucket any cost or revenue loss under the marketing budget.

We still integrated with many of them (for years now at this point), with
quarterly meetings with their senior management. They limit our integration to
some small % of their traffic, undesirable articles, low flight risk users, or
low loyalty users.

We're letting them control their revenue risks, and they're all just slow,
risk-adverse, engineering resource limited, and enjoying the high Trump
brought back to the press.

------
lgregg
The only thing I know about in this arena other than prior mentioned in the
thread is Civil, a blockchain for journalism payments. I think it's super
interesting. [https://joincivil.com/](https://joincivil.com/)

They're one of the blockchain projects coming out of Consensys.

------
evmar
Google tried this model some years back (I forget the name). The problem ends
up (as always) being around the money.

You need to sign up ~all the newspapers for it to be valuable for users
(otherwise they're paying $20/mo for access to just a random subset of the
news), but the more newspapers you sign up, the more you need to split the
user's subscription fee between an increasingly large pool of newspapers.

In the post he writes that the papers should get their "fair share", but how
do you compute that? If you do it based on pageviews you create an incentive
for participants in the program to juice their pageviews, either through low-
quality clickbait or technical means like splitting a single article into a
multipart series. And so on.

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stcredzero
There should be an ecosystem like YouTube, but for long form text, where
individual authors can have subscription relationships with subscribers.

~~~
jordanpower
That's super interesting. I think others are right, that's a lot like Medium.

But, what about when a reader doesn't really know which author they like. What
if they just read the entertainment section of one newspaper, fun stories from
some other magazine, and whatever's dominating the news cycle from that
national paper somewhere else?

~~~
stcredzero
What happens on YouTube? People can look at the "home" page and see
recommended articles. Also, sites like HN and reddit can link back to
articles.

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andy_wrote
I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and
sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than
flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the
role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction.

There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and
financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be
fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers
(or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them).

The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to
be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly.
From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going
on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream
from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg
is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a
fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.)

At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation
in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing
delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per
month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My
inclination is to feel similarly about print media.

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misterbowfinger
Suuuuuuuuuure, although this will undoubtedly result in newspapers being paid
_less_ , not more. Given the currently bleak situations for newspapers, I'd
doubt this would work.

There's also the issue of unions that have been popping up since DNAInfo got
shut down. I don't think they'd support a "Spotify" for news.

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sunstone
Well there's Texture, a kind of cable package for magazines, bought by Apple
last week. [0] If it works for magazines it could work for newspapers but the
tricky part is that it has to be shared ownership and there are a _lot_ more
newspapers than magazines.

[0][http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture-
acquisiti...](http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture-
acquisition-1202724105/)

~~~
DogOnTheWeb
Exactly this. For Spotify to succeed they only needed to get a handful of
label conglomerates on board. It could be done, but getting all of the
heavyweight newspapers just in the United States to sign up would be a
herculean effort. There is consolidation in the industry (particularly among
hyperlocals), but it's not as consolidated as major label music.

~~~
jordanpower
It is!

But Hercules lives! Sort of. PressReader (disclaimer, I work there) is doing
exactly this. Think Texture, except way more content. We have more than 7,000
titles right now. About half are newspapers.

You're absolutely right about the US news brands, though. They've got some
good things going on their own already. But, we're working at it. This month,
we added Variety, Robb Report, and a bunch of Meredith titles (mostly
newspapers).

I'm loving this thread, though, you guys. It shows there's a serious interest
for what we've got going on at PressReader. Awesome, awesome.

~~~
DogOnTheWeb
Awesome! Best of luck to your team.

------
overcast
We need Netflix for newspapers. $10 a month, gives you access to read hundreds
of news articles.

~~~
hollander
There is Blendle, although I can't find a list of newspapers and magazines
that they publish.

------
hakanito
I think this is a great use case for blockchain and in-browser wallets. I
imagine a not too distant future where Newspapers can add a bit of open source
code that controls access to their content. If I want to read an article, I
pay like 50c to unlock it.

------
jacques_chester
I've called this model "microsubscription", on the idea that it combines
features of micropayment and subscription. It's arguably bundling and it
arguably isn't, so I'm going to go ahead with the cool name.

Flattr are doing it, Google Contributor was doing it drifted away. Readability
used to do it. In fact, so many people have thought of this model that I have
kinda lost track.

Google Subscriber splits the middle. It's not _really_ a walled garden, but
Google's reach and interpenetration of the open internet is so total that it
feels and behaves very much like one.

I was granted a patent last year on a technical aspect: how to (1) log the
visits, (2) let visitors through a paywall, (3) without revealing their
identity to the publisher. This is easy (but potentially expensive) if you
have a walled garden (Netflix, Spotify, Texture). It's more difficult if you
don't.

If you want to contact me about it, use jacques@robojar.com.

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mfoy_
I'd sign up for "Spotify for newspapers".

~~~
jordanpower
Try PressReader, my friend. Shoot me a DM on Twitter (@jordanpowpow) and I'll
get you started with some free access.

If you like it, awesome. If not, that's cool.

It's unlimited newspapers AND magazines. 7,000 of them. You can create
'playlists' and set auto downloads.

And every time you read something, the publisher gets paid a royalty.

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peterwwillis
This is the business model of cable TV providers.

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hokus
How we should pay for the telegraph and the pony express?

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snambi
This is exactly what medium is doing.

~~~
jordanpower
Err...not really.

