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Comment by johnnylambada | Hacker News Reader

the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.

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So sell regular old display ads. Native ads are the future (again).

Not anymore. There's very low demand / price for run-of-site dispñay ads.

Then let's increase the demand by diminishing the ROI of the current ad model. Something that can be done, for example, by using an ad blocker and never ever turning it off.

Are you saying that if WaPo started selling only native ads nobody would buy them? I'm skeptical of that prediction.

I agree that news outlets serve an important function. That's exactly why it is especially disheartening to see them turn into organs of surveillance capitalism.

Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect their readers at the same time [1].

I frankly don't care if the papers who can't figure out how to function without selling out their customers fail. Let their corpses be a cautionary tale.

[1] One outlet I subscribe to, Talkingpointsmemo.com, is in the process of offering ad-free options. I blocked them previously, and they've made no effort to break the site in the presence of blockers.

Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way?

Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?

Agree with you mostly, though on occasion it's nice to know if my taxes are increasing or decreasing soon, and where most people in my country stand on "Merry Christmas" vs "season's greetings" (whatever that means).

It has saved my life once, via weather report. It has let me know that there was a disaster in the area where I knew people I cared about greatly were, enabling me to prep some support. And once, it told me that a project my then-company was working on was indirectly doomed by the advent of this little thing called the iPhone. Off the top of my head.

I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered.

Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?

Maybe the newspapers entire value is tied to a fraction of the staff and they wonder why we are all collectively disinterested in funding their worthless printing presses, managers, secretaries, and buildings?

Maybe so, but this discussion usually conflates four sentiments:

1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription.

2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business.

3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising.

4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads.

Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to make this content."

I read a broad selection of content and don't necessarily know ahead of time which publications are going to produce the useful/interesting content this month.

I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication.

Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking.

In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too.

In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money.

My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model.

As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem.

Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.

You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity?

(not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)

The integrity lies in the people and connections between same none of that lies in the building or the dead weight.

sure but that integrity may become a scarcer commodity as it becomes more difficult to earn a living.

By that argument you could say that Silicon Valley and its clustering of technology firms are dead weight. All that matters is the people and their connections right?

The journalism that we aspire to today requires a lot of personnel and material resources. Independent vloggers and Facebook/blog randos simply do not have the resources to report like NYT

The problem is that newspapers are leaving money on the table. I'd sign up for a Netflix style subscription service that offers me access to a broad range of media. I have a Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify subscriptions as I'm sure many here do. That's good value for money. Netflix is making way more than I ever spent on dvds & cinema visits combined. Same for Spotify.

As it is, all I have is paywalled niche news sites each thinking they can charge similar fees for very limited access to just they tiny corner of the market. I'm not going to pay per article. I haven't bought a news paper in years. I get all my news through ad sponsored crappy websites. Because they are so offensively bad, I have adblocking, tracking prevention, and other extensions trying to limit my exposure. Works great for me

So, that's money not spent by me or millions of other users that news papers are neglecting to make.

There are a countless ways of funding news. The reason for the current obsession with invasive tracking and advertising to offer "free" access is because it's seen as most profitable. Make it not profitable and newspapers don't go away - the profit model changes.

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