
Ask HN: How much would you pay for useful news? - nix11331
After this Presidential Campaign, thinking about the media lately.  I don&#x27;t like them.  Too much noise, nothing useful for me.  I then thought about how much I paid for this experience.  $0.<p>Sure, maybe a $1 or two from my cable bill but for the most part, I paid nothing and the quality was what worth exactly what I paid.<p>Thought about all the work needed to create useful news.  We&#x27;re talking about staff of thousands of people.  And if you want good people, you need to pay them good salaries.  None of these free labor stuff but real money to hire real people where this is their full time profession.<p>How much would you guys pay for useful news per day?  What is the worth of useful information to you?  To me, if I paid $10 a day and the news helped gain $20 a day of value, it would definitely be worth it.  That&#x27;s about $300&#x2F;mo for news.  But that&#x27;s just me.<p>Is there a viable business here?  Are there others who think this way other then people who trade stocks?
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yetanotheracc
For a typical person, there are no useful news on most days. A personalised,
aperiodic list of relevant news would be interesting.

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ddebernardy
Zero unless you write some analysis that is worth reading.

Honestly... There isn't much worth reading out there beyond platitudes and...
the occasional insightful blog post. For the latter, sign me up for whatever.
For everything else, I honestly couldn't care less if anything or anyone is
earning money. Journalism has killed itself long ago with abysmal analysis or
opinion masquerading as news. The whole profession deserves to go extinct.

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lucozade
I do pay for news. It works out to a couple of USD per day I would guess.

It's not very efficient, I'm paying for a lot of stuff that I'm not interested
in to get a small amount of news that I am interested in. It's probably value
for money though as I do appreciate what I read and it's less than the price
of a coffee.

I would possibly be interested in a curation service as long as I was in
control of the curation and it had access to both free and paid articles. The
problem I would envisage is that, for it to be worth oto $10 a day to me, I'd
need it to cover most of my news requirements i.e. a digest of the sort of
news that newspapers have, expert opinion of current political affairs in G4
from multiple political viewpoints, and topical journal articles in the
academic subjects I'm interested in. Plus the musings of selected columnists.

To make it work, for me, it'd presumably need to do deals with a lot of
publishers who wouldn't necessarily be particularly happy with the idea. Maybe
if the bottom falls out of advertising for free news (highly likely) then it'd
be more attractive.

I doubt I'd be interested in a yet another generator of "original" general
news. Sure if it had a lot of high quality journalists who were out to inform
rather than push an agenda and had interests that happened to largely coincide
with mine. Not going to hold my breath though.

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rando444
You're defining "useful information" like everyone shares the same idea on
what is "useful".

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lumberjack
I guess you don't remember the times when your grandparents used to buy the
daily paper. The quality of the news wasn't any better than it is today.

Paying does not help fix the news because, 1. the market actually forces the
news publishers to become biased, 2. a sponsor can easily match any income
from paying customers and provide stability of income on top.

I think the public broadcasting model is the best one can do as far as an
unbiased news source, because at the very least, the bias will not be
permanently leaning towards one direction. It tends to change with
administration.

But really, how much is "general news", news worth to an individual? I would
say very, very little. I don't remember of any particular instance where I
read something that actually prompted me to take any kind of action.

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Mz
_To me, if I paid $10 a day and the news helped gain $20 a day of value, it
would definitely be worth it._

It is incredibly difficult to quantify something in this way. Most people are
not going to be very aware of the actual dollar value of the information they
are exposed to routinely.

 _Is there a viable business here?_

I don't think tossing out a question like this is going to lead to a viable
business. There may be a viable business in good information. But I don't
think this methodology really leads to it.

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atmosx
6 USD/month for full subscription to iPad/web version of the NYTimes.

I'd rather pay 5 and get an additional 10% discount to pay once a year. But
hey, we're getting there :-)

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CM30
To be honest?

Not much. Maybe not anything at all really.

That's because as much as I'd like a decent news service with well written,
interesting pieces about current events (and no tracking, annoying ads, overt
political biases, etc), I know that the internet has enough free content that
I could find some of those of things on other sites and social media services
(and can mix and match them for a decent overview). And it'll stay that way
unless the amount of content online drops by something like 90%.

~~~
rando444
While you'll always have a hard time getting away from political bias, you
should check out [http://www.newyorker.com/](http://www.newyorker.com/) and
[https://theintercept.com/](https://theintercept.com/)

Which I find both to have minimal ads and well written interesting articles
about current events.

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tmaly
I do not pay for useful news, but for companies, something to handle all the
updates to rules and notices regarding regulations is something many pay for.

Take the financial industry, there is a different set of regulations for each
exchange and jurisdiction. To keep up with all the changes is daunting. There
are a few providers in this space that charge like $30k a year to handle just
the RSS feeds from these regulators.

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King-Aaron
News? Nothing.

In depth analysis, free of government editing/native advertising/propaganda,
and a clear focus on preserving fact over fiction? Yeah, I'd pay for that.
However since I haven't seen this demonstrated before, the answer is still
nothing.

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vikp
I wouldn't pay for daily news, which is usually reasonably binary.

I would pay 10-20 a month for a site that had high quality in depth analysis
and articles, though. Something like a paid version of longform.org. The
articles wouldn't have to be tied to current events at all.

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paulcole
Never. Overall quality is way too low and even the high quality news isn't
worth paying for. I'll just read the free shit instead.

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shivakaush
It used to be called "newspaper". People used to pay for it if you can imagine
:P

