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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

People used to pay ~1$ for a newspaper. Now everyone expects it for free.

The issue is that the Internet has so many sources of information, whereas there used to be just the few newspapers at the local store, or the one delivered to your house.

With ad-blockers there is even less money being generated for online papers.

So what's the solution? What is the method by which reporters get paid for their work? I have some ideas, but I think they've all been tried.

That being said, I'm with the commenter, I'd prefer non-paywalled content (but I also want to see good reporting be rewarded).

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So what's the solution? What is the method by which reporters get paid for their work? I have some ideas, but I think they've all been tried.

Eventually there's going to have to be some kind of cable TV-like syndicate that aggregates a bunch of paywalled periodicals and charges you a monthly rate for access to all of them.

Don't shoot the messenger.

They would pay $1 for a newspaper. On HN, every day you have links for about 10 different publications, each requiring a subscription. That's more like paying hundreds of dollars to read the same number of articles for which you used to pay $1.

It would be no different if all those articles would be in separate publications.

Right, but the point is that saying "people used to pay $1" is misleading here. Besides, I would still complain if a meeting club required you to purchase a subscription to dozens of publications. Of course, it wouldn't have to, because people used to read news articles aloud and pass newspapers around, whereas now that's considered Theft.

People used to be able to share their paper with others. Now you might get a threatening legal notice if you do the equivalent on the Internet.

Fixing reporter compensation probably requires entirely new business models. Entrenched players will probably never even consider them.

When reporters do some actual work, like with the FT, I am happy to pay for a subscription. The FT is pretty reliable in term of the quality of information and that has some value.

Most newspaper were merely rehashing and commenting news agencies releases. I think the internet just revealed that they were adding very little value.

You seem to have read enough FT to reach that conclusion. In my case, since FT didn't let me read enough articles free, I didn't realise its value (assuming it is valuable), so I don't pay for it. Catch-22.

The Economist and NYT, by contrast, have loose enough paywalls that I've read enough articles to conclude that they are both high-quality sources.

And do you pay for either of those?

I used to subscribe to The Economist, yes. I discontinued because of missing issues, atrocious support, like not taking my calls, etc.

In general, I don't mind paying for high-quality content. In fact, this morning I did a Google search for "donate to BBC" but nothing came up.

People used to pay ~1$ for some paper to be delivered to their front door. The content is not what they were paying for.

I'm pretty sure people wouldn't pay $1 for a stack of blank newspaper sheets delivered to their front door.

I seem to recall the classifieds and ads paid for the reporting. But anyway, we used to subscribe to the local paper until recently. They used to scam us by telling us our subscription expired before it really did (we used to mark it on Google calendar) and playing games with the pricing until we eventually had enough.

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