Please Pay for Your News
I have a lot of thoughts, but in sum I think the article doesn&#x27;t say much or engage in much soul-searching or really think about the problem in a serious&#x2F;interesting way. Here are a few of my thoughts:<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t take vacations, I&#x27;m pretty sure many consumers of news simply don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s an outsized role for institutional funding.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Hell, let&#x27;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&#x27;t consider. One possible response is &quot;it shouldn&#x27;t be incumbent on me to be a public good provider&quot; or &quot;how dare you assume I have that kind of money&quot; -- both of which would be responses to the article&#x27;s thesis, with the added benefit that the responders wouldn&#x27;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?<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t impact.<p>To the extent we&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>Second, a lot of the more recent wave of journalism cuts has been text journalism unsuccessfully chasing YouTube and Facebook money. It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a house of cards. They didn&#x27;t listen. Why are Google and Facebook not looked at as the cause of this problem?<p>Also, the ad-first model has also hampered consumer direct-payment expectations. I can subscribe to a lot of paper magazines for $5&#x2F;year. I don&#x27;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&#x27;s the true price of what it ought to cost, but I&#x27;ve now been conditioned to free-ride. But I didn&#x27;t ask publication to pivot to be ad-first, a variety of structural incentives did that.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t I customize sections without using adblock to block the sections I don&#x27;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&#x27;s more convenient and less infuriating will solicit more individual compliance, but it&#x27;s not individual feedback that drove these bad decisions to begin with.<p>I know this is a pretty far-reaching comment, but I think if we&#x27;re going to have the conversation, let&#x27;s have it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebook-driven-video-push-may-have-cost-483-journalists-their-jobs&#x2F;573403&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;faceb...</a>