Fascinating. It's a shame that it's so hard to get people to pay for quality journalism. The world will be a dark place if the only news sources left are blogs by self-proclaimed journalists.
I read WSJ when I come across links from Hacker News, maybe 10x/month. I'm not gonna pay for that. I already pay for the NYT, the Economist and the New Yorker.
What's a shame is that there's no way for me to pay a set monthly fee for "news" and have that automatically proportioned among the sites I actually visit each month.
Perhaps you would end up with the same issue as Netflix where content providers raise their prices to the point that the aggregator would develop their own content in-house.
Or you could do Spotify for news, and dole out a percentage of the monthly subscription to publications based on the number of articles read.
That's before I even get into the dollars involved.
I subscribe to the Economist print edition (with free digital), and the digital-only NYT and Washington Post. I just don't see myself signing up to the WSJ and the LA Times just to get rid of the paywall the once a month I hit it.
Similarly, I'm not going to subscribe to the Seattle Times (I don't live there anymore, but I like occasionally reading 'local' news from my hometown).
Again, micropayments. If it was 5 cents per article and zero friction, I'd be all over it.
Similar could be said for Australian news sources (the publicly funded ABC and SBS networks being the two best sources of news there in my opinion).
For those who don't know they have a program called Media Watch which calls out biased reporting in the media - sometimes they even criticise their own organization when backed by evidence.
(The WSJ editorial page has always been terrible, but the news organization at least used to have a good reputation.)
Maybe because it isn't quality journalism. Ultimately, something is worth what people are willing to pay for.
> The world will be a dark place if the only news sources left are blogs by self-proclaimed journalists.
It's just as dark a place with "quality journalism".
My comment wasn't meant to apply to a specific website/newspaper per se, but the general state of online news media. Surely you believe someone or some publication somewhere is performing quality journalism.
So, in your opinion, what is quality journalism?
Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it is quality. Clickbait titles bring in ad dollars, but no one argues they result in a better article/story.