If you have something important to say, don't say it in a paywalled publication

If you aren't paying for information either in terms of money, or inaccessibility (as in, there might not be a paywall, but you need to know where to look), it's probably not worth consuming.

The problem is that it affects the entire society. If a society needs to get information to form an opinion on something (say, breaking US Politics), and goes to Liberal or Centrist publications (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), the articles are behind a paywall. If they go check a Right publication (Fox News, Infowars), it's free and readily available.

When one of our biggest issues is a lack of public knowledge, it's counterproductive to make that knowledge inaccessible, when the misinformation is not.

But if I had to trust one, I guess it would be a The Guardian or DW(Deutsche Welle).

DW is particularly interesting as every household in Germany has to pay a radio free(~17 Euros per month) that also in part supports DW(Along with their documentary series which as far as I can see don't hesitate to criticise the government or BND(secret service)).

It is not a tax and as a result the German Government would have a hard time pushing its agenda to it.

It'll cost you $15 to read it though. Research like this is expensive, and since you're the party who will benefit, you have a duty to pay me.

If you refuse to pay me to read what I have to say, it means you hate the truth.

In my opinion, the main difference between the bad journalism that used to exist before, and the utterly horrible journalism that exists now, is that previously people treated the newspaper as a whole, and now they share articles on social networks separately.

Why does it make a difference? Because when you have a package of 20 articles, and you understand that 3 of them are complete bullshit (because they are about a topic you know something about), you become less likely to trust the remaining 17 articles even if you see nothing wrong about them (because they are about topics you know little about). When a bad article can ruin your impression of the entire newspaper, the newspaper has an incentive to avoid at least the most obvious nonsense.

The same mechanism mostly doesn't work online. People share one article at a time. You won't share it if you understand that it is nonsense. But the fact that some other article on the same online newspaper is obvious nonsense won't stop you from sharing this specific article. On paper, those articles are part of the same thing; online, each of them lives a separate life. (Actually, an online company such as Gawker can split their content among multiple websites, to further avoid bad impression from one article hurting the remaining ones.)

Perhaps paying for online newspapers could return this perception of a newspaper as a package. (Assuming there would be no deals like "pay $100 a month, and get access to these five newspapers".) Maybe.

So, while I still have to take everything with a grain of salt, if I read stuff from say Democracy Now or The Intercept (or ideally much smaller outlets with direct connections to the news at hand), I can feel more confident that I am not being intentionally manipulated for ulterior purposes. The fact that such outlets are often directly challenging the narrative being presented by more mainstream media and other power/profit-driven institutions is a testament to this. And since they offer their news mostly free of charge, relying on donations at the cost of potential earnings, they demonstrate a greater commitment to values of transparency over brainwashing (hopefully).

Of course, this category includes the likes of unhinged conspiracy theorists such as say Alex Jones. So one should still do some due diligence of fact-checking wherever possible to ensure they are presenting a narrative consistent with reality.

1. advertising is all about externalities

2. advertising's cost is relative. It matters more how much Coke spends on advertising relative to Pepsi and less the absolute amount that Coke spends. So if half of both Coke & Pepsi's advertising budget are taxed away neither Coke nor Pepsi lose much. But citizens gain due to both reduced ads and services provided with the state tax revenue gained.

Yes, advertising might be a net negative, but it's not a pure negative. It is important to help sellers connect with buyers. In a lot of ways it's like finance, which can also help lubricate the gears of commerce, but both it and advertising should be adjuncts to commerce. They shouldn't be these swollen behemoths that dwarf other industries. IMO taxes are the way to account for their externalities, and also reduce them to their economically optimal levels.

This approach does work with how-to books (how to program X language), but not with news.

There's also the advertising-only-if-you-don't-have-a-subscription model, as on Twitch (which may or may not have journalism, depending on what exists that I haven't seen and on whether you count talk shows on current-events).

Who is "tech"? "Tech" has an incoherent position because "tech" is an incoherent entity you've invented so you can disagree with them.

Here's my position--I think you'll find the position of a person who exists in reality to be a bit more coherent:

Advertising is always bad. At the very best it's forcing biased views into our attention. At the worst, it's manipulative lies packaged with all manner of malware. Advertising breaks the fundamental ideal of capitalism that the best products and services for the best price win, because better-advertised products can win even if they're inferior. If one company advertises, all their competitors have to advertise, which takes money away from producing quality goods and services, and these costs are passed back to the consumer. And fundamentally, paying for content with advertising means that the content creator is serving the advertisers rather than the consumers of the content.

I disagree with paywalls for academic publishing: these usually do nothing to support research financially, and hinder education and further research. Research is typically funded by institutions and governments anyway.

For journalism, I prefer donation-based services, but I'm not opposed to paywalls, provided that they don't also include ads.

For most other things, subscription or purchase models are perfectly acceptable. My personal preference is to have ownership of the content I have paid for (download an EPUB/MP3/MP4 or buy some physical media rather than stream it)--but this is a preference rather than an ethical position.

> After 20 years of experiments, there are only two models that have been consistently proven to work: restricting access to paying customers only (a.k.a. paywalling), and open access combined with heavy, invasive advertising (both the traditional kind, and more insidious kinds like clickbait headlines and sponsored content). That's it. Those are the only models anyone's found that don't lead to bankruptcy.

For journalism, none of Mother Jones[1], Pro Publica[2], or NPR follow either of the business models which you claim are the only ones that work. For academic publishing, there's a whole list of open access journals[3] which again have neither paywalls nor advertising.

PBS has existed for a lot more than 20 years.

At a more fundamental level, an entry-level Squarespace subscription costs $16 for the month, $12 if you pay annually[4]. There's lots of kinds of content that don't have to be for-profit at all, and the costs associated are well within the ability of most people to pay.

> OK, fine. So what then does tech propose these publications do, exactly? Are they supposed to just lay down and die?

In many cases, yes.

Your argument seems to be, if these companies aren't evil they'll go bankrupt. I'm saying, if they are evil, then they should go bankrupt.

Advertising models, in particular, support low-quality content, and even when they don't, the quality content is mixed in with low-quality content in a way where it's hard to distinguish the two (your Buzzfeed example is a good one for this).

Isn't the fundamental principle of capitalism that the value of something is what people pay for it? So if nobody is willing to pay for, donate to, or devert institutional or government resources to something, it probably doesn't have much value, now does it? Why should we accept harmful business models just to prop up businesses that don't provide value?

Obviously, content providers who make money off this will disagree. But I don't see why we as humans or as a society should be concerned if these people can't make money off their harmful business models. Good riddance.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/

[2] https://www.propublica.org/

[3] https://doaj.org/

[4] https://www.squarespace.com/pricing

"Don't publish important things behind paywalls" is a very easy moral principle for a rich person to adopt. That doesn't mean it's false -- but to make the point convincingly, one would have to take the perspective of people who have strong reasons to publish behind paywalls in the first place, and explain why they can and should resist these pressures.

Either advertise and make it free, or have a paywall subscription model.

I get it that news isn't free. What is strange about the struggle is that in the 21st century a big news organization can have a bigger subscriber base than ever before. So why don't they? What is broken?

(Perhaps I don't view news as having something important to say)

However, your point is interesting - sometimes you do have to charge in order to say things effectively. For example, you generally have to charge for a book to cover the cost of putting it together.

This isn't a coincidence: to a large extent, the last few years haven't been THAT remarkable, but news outlets will inevitably cover things as if they're very remarkable, because that's what fuels subscriptions. See also: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

You don't think it is possible that those things could have been avoided if people had better access to high quality information from for example newspapers and scientific studies? Currently a majority of people don't think it is worth it to pay for quality information so they only consume the poor quality crap you get for free. I guess this situation is fine if you want to sit in your ivory tower and lament over the ignorant masses ruining everything, but if you actually want to solve the issue you should clamor for more quality information being made free because in a democracy it is the ignorant masses whose opinions actually matter.

"But it doesn't matter, those people are too dumb to understand!" you say, well totally blocking them from accessing information is a good way to ensure that the situation will never improve.

Do you think academic publications are important? Then he is referring to academic publications.

Of course most news and most academic publications are not important so are not covered, please monetize them as much as you want. But the important stuff should be open. I think that is his argument.

Example: Someone writes a very good article on climate change which could sway many ignorant persons. If it was behind a paywall then you ensure that only those who already believes in climate change will bother to pay for it and read it making the entire article mostly worthless to the world.

Until very recently, being illiterate was common, so it's not as if there was a paradise 150 years ago where everyone was an engaged citizen.

Big breaking story about US politics? New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post all have important articles about it. You find them linked in Google News, reddit, Hacker News, and Facebook. And they're all behind paywalls.

But if you get your "news" from Fox News, Infowars, or even farther extreme sites like Stormfront.... it's free and instantly accessible. This causes some serious problems.