Why won’t some people pay for news?

It’s very simple. The “news” makes very little impact on the average person’s daily life.

Unless you are a high level political operative or a day trader, the news makes absolutely no difference in how you go about your day.

Oh, so-and-so was caught in a scandal with such-and-such? Neat. Anyway, I’ve got to get to work and then pick up the kids and cook dinner and whatnot.

99% of the news is completely unimportant, but they breathlessly report it like it’s life and death.

For most people, it’s a momentary diversion, and if it went away it would make no difference at all.

Lookit all the "information overload" sentiment; and how little of the news is actually relevant to our daily lives.

We don't wanna pay for it because we know we don't need it and it isn't good for us. The grip of addiction or "go along" is strong enough for some to cough up cash, but it's not the vast market of unfillable desire that the publishers want to sell to their advertisers.

Newspapers cost more than their sale price to print: just because you've paid for it doesn't mean you're no longer the product the publisher is selling. It's just a way the publisher makes you seem more attractive to the real market. They know and use their "unpaid circulation" numbers too.

The destruction of "print costs" in the internet age has not changed the underlying dynamic that much.

At this point most of us don’t really need as much news as we consume, especially not the kind of “news” that gets created today.

For most of us, news isn’t that different from an HN or YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole, a compulsive outlet for us to waste time in, having little practical impact on our real lives. Certainly not enough to pay for, if we were forced. We would just move to TikTok instead

Outside of this site, I wouldn't consume news for free, and still wouldn't if you paid me. The news is all about the consensus account of what the canonical global social hierarchy supposedly is. No thanks.

For me it's easy, it's all untrustworthy noise being repeated. There's an overabundance and limiting myself to one or a few places I pay for doesn't improve things

I would totally pay for information delivery; however, most news sites are not just 'information', but instead are of the idea that 'information' requires context in order for it to be understood. Arguably, it's during the translation into 'news' for which we pay a premium, but it's where the most bias and meaningless garbage gets inserted--regardless of slant.

I realize that here on HN, the vast majority of us are in the minority as we are likely highly educated and/or experienced as well as have above average average critical thinking and synthesis skill. But, I don't need to pay someone else to take the information and provide context; I am quite able to do that myself and for myself.

I'm just not willing to pay news sites to deliver not only slanted context-added information but superfluous information garbage (i.e., who in Hollywood is fucking and/or suing one another) just to drive pageviews and inventory space for advertising I will never see.

Dropping The Fairness Doctrine coupled with poor critical thinking and synthesis skills alongside the rise of free exploitation of direct information delivery channels (i.e., social media) has destroyed our world and we shouldn't support it financially or with our eyeballs.

I'm conflicted on this.

For me personally, I'm reluctant to pay because the value < cost. On the other hand, I acknowledge how important a strong, independent press is so I want to pay something.

Then I remember how difficult most news orgs make it to unsubscribe and so about the only thing I'm willing to subscribe to is Apple News because I can start and stop with a click. No retention shenanigans, no emails.

Time for my favorite Andy Warhol quote:

I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet.

I was once a loyal subscriber to car & driver magazine for many years. then i wanted to take a few years off. At that point I started get highly deceptive and aggressive retention ads from that company: "your subscription has expired", "your bill is overdue", etc, etc. they try to make you believe that you accepted another year of subscription when you really have not. So, never again.

And why won't they let me pay for news the way I want? I'd much rather pay on a per article measure rather than a subscription. As a consumer, there's nothing I hate more than a subscription plan. If anything I'm trying to get rid of subscriptions in my life, not get more of them.

Then there's the quality of most news sites. There's a reason why people on hacker news immediately read the comments before reading a news article: it's because the average writing and synthesis of thought is much better on hacker news commentators than the average news site.

I happily pay for digital + Sunday delivery of my city's daily newspaper. The issue is that I'm not going to do likewise for the daily in 20 other cities. I would of course pay for a single issue of another city's daily, from time to time, just as 20 years ago I might have picked up a San Francisco Chronicle at the newstand if I happened to be in San Francisco. But they have no interest in offering that and I have no interest in maintaining a subscription to another city's daily.

I'm really fairly certain I would have purchased many, many, many editions of, say, the San Francisco Chronicle over the years, were that on offer. But it isn't. So after years of seeing the San Francisco Chronicle's popups telling me that the only way to read one of their articles is to subscribe, the San Francisco Chronicle has in fact received $0 from me.

Most of what passes for 'news' on the interwebz is rumour, celebrity gossip, clickbait, or PR puff pieces disguised as news items. There's negligible or zero vetting or fact-checking. Who would pay for that shit?

The quality of news is so poor that paying for it is aaaaaa waste of money.

Most sites rarely cite sources. They're still operating like we don't have access to the same information.

You can often get a better understanding of a news article by skimming the primary source and drilling in wherever necessary.

The intermediary of a journalist is rarely needed.

I wouldn't pay for news because it looks like every news outlet out there is just playing the SEO/Click bait game and it got old pretty quickly for me.

On my limited circle, nobody consumes news because they want to. You find that something happened (Usually in social media feeds) and then you want to know more about that specific thing. That sometimes leads you to a news website.

Some news websites do have interesting articles but that's not always the case

> (On that note, Groot Kormelink noted in a Twitter thread that he has a paper-in-progress showing that “when you do get people to subscribe, the next challenge starts: getting them to actually use their subscription.”)

There's another challenge after that: the inevitable massive price hike after 6-12 months.

I don't even have to scroll the comments to know that HN people are complaining about seeing ads after subscribing, or having to call to cancel their subscription. For me, that's not the issue.

The issue is having a bait-and-switch pricing structure that incentivizes to cut and run after the '$1 trial' period. 3 months later it goes up to $25/month or something ridiculous. And every paper seems to treat pricing differently and have a myriad set of subscription options beyond the base print/digital choices. The article mentions Netflix and Spotify, but doesn't mention the effect of relative price stablility on those platforms that possibly reduce churn, compared to newspapers.

The internet exists. Why should I pay people to bring me curated information from every corner of the globe, when there are many others doing so for free, and the tools to do so myself are within my grasp? Issues of trust and media complicity also exist, but these are just as much symptoms of the first situation as causes.

Its just too expensive for the value that I personally would receive. If I could get a yearly sub to nyt for $25, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don't want some price for the first year, and then it balloons up 4x.

My issue with online news sites is that there are too many of them, and the internet generally doesn't result in me sticking to any reasonable subset to make a subscription worthwile. Give me a micropayment mechanism built into my web browser that lets me sprinkle a nickle or dime here and there instead of being served ads, and I would gladly throw money at the problem. But if there are 1000 different sites with 1000 different sign in mechanisms, it ain't gonna be worth the hassle.

It is very simple why people don’t pay for News much anymore: bias, blatant bias, and damn lies.

Used to be utilitarian to buy a printed newspaper. Sidenote: I was a Detroit Free Press delivery boy with the largest subscription in my town; 325 daily (2 hours), 982 Sundays (4.5 hours) for a grand ol’ $325/month in 1970s US dollars)

Useful things like weather, comic, local events, and classified carried the printed stories for these prints.

Today, not so much.

I think for me, the problem is that each producer only has some "news" that is of interest to me. I might see one really good NYT article per month and something else in the New Yorker, Guardian etc. If I pay for a subscription then I am committed to reading more of it, even if not interesting, otherwise I might as well just dip into lots of sites like I do.

TBH even some trade magazines are just as tedious even though they cover my interests in theory.

I think someone mentioned a few years back about the need for good news aggregation. You pay, e.g. $20/month for access to lots of articles and the aggregator takes a small cut and then pays the publishes of the best articles. That should at least allow the big publishers to stop producing garbage since no-one will want to read it and also push them to work out what articles have good value.

The obvious political slant of some is also another issue but I don't have time to discuss that now...

I pay for The Economist. I used to enjoy getting one well edited update per week that was not full of ads. But now that I don't read the paper version, I have to use a website full of ads and trackers.

I will happily pay for a news product that serves the reader and has no advertising. This is a request for a startup!

I'd be happy to pay if the cost per article was reasonable and payment is easy. I'm not entering credit card details per article or signing up for large numbers of $10 / month subscriptions from independent vendors however. Maybe something like the spotify model for news could work.

Because publishers don’t know the difference between news and noise. Most long-form articles can be summarized in 1-5 bullet points when all the fluff is removed.

I used to have an app that curated topics into short summaries. It was curated by humans but they failed to monetize and shut down.

There's an issue for me which did not appear in the article and so far has not appeared in the comments.

It's that I look at news aggregators like Real Clear Politics and various newsletters, and I sample a small number of articles from a very large number of news sources. I'm unwilling to pay for a newspaper subscription if it serves me only a very small number of articles that I'm interested in each day.

I suspect that others who use Google News or Apple News or Yahoo experience the same thing.

All this suggests that a Spotify or Netflix-like subscription model might work. Spotify charges $9.99 a month to give you access to 82 million songs. I would totally pay for a similar subscription that gave me access to many newspapers.

I need to graze, not feed.

Paying for access to high-quality independent content is one thing, paying for access to advertiser-centric state/corporate propaganda is quite another.

The vast majority of news outlets fall into the latter category. They'll give you 'free' content because they're not really in business to make money, they're more like curated infomercial services aimed at feeding stage-managed narratives to their readers/watchers on behalf of other organizations and institutions.

Why would anyone pay to consume a propaganda stream that is provided for free?

Some people might pay for intelligence reports specific to their own business interests, but that's probably a pretty small market.

I soured on the news as I learned even just a little, even in high school. I would read articles about physics, or that had physics as an important element, and observe how terribly wrong the reporter got things. Even giving generous allowance for an untrained person discussing a difficult subject it seemed to me they got too much wrong too often, or took liberties (ending up with terribly inaccurate statements) with an expert's explanation in an attempt to make it digestable for non experts. Why should I trust what they have to say about other subjects?

I feel like the ultimate answer is that too many people offer similar quality content for free. For a while I subscribed to the NYT, but ultimately the differential in quality to what I can find on the web wasn’t worth the cost to me. For anything I find interesting enough to form an opinion on I have to do more research anyway, since there exists no single source that is so well made that I don’t have to worry about its bias.

What I do pay for is my city’s local paper, since unlike state or national news local news is much harder to get a suitable quantity of online.

To get to news I have to search through an immense pile of junk littering the news outlets and social media. I have to extract one bit worthy of news from gigabytes of junk.

I go looking for news and I get, old news, comments and opinions on situation X, political activism, other kind of activism, half fake facts, completely fake facts, tabloid news and things that do not interest me.

Why should I pay for junk? If somebody would be in the business of delivering news, not junk, I would pay. But it's hard to find that someone.

Special interests with large pockets already pay for the news having a specific bias or slant. Why should I pay for that kind of “news”

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

To add insult to injury, the prices for digital only subscriptions are well over $200 just for one news org subscription.

The only one that makes any sense is an Apple news subscription, but I don’t like how its AI presents content nor do I like its search results.

Because it's not entertaining, the supply of it already is overwhelming, and there's no real actionable information that you get. Wow, let me read in detail about the politics behind a deadlock in the U.S. senate. Even when something important does happen like the early days of covid or the war in Ukraine, the best information was always coming fresh from the people experiencing it.

Journalists are by and large full of shit and even most "high quality" reporting is filled to the absolute brim with nonsense. What is left after you take out everything that deals with facts? Opinion pieces. I can get those talking to my neighbours, for free.

There's an abundance of information even without paying for it.

How much of it is actually news?

The way I see it, (90%?)most of it is propaganda, rage baiting and interest pushing. That is not something I want to spend money on.

Personally i won't pay for news because i can get the same news, for free, from multiple sources, whereas in the past that was not true.

This article reads like it was written by an alien who is encountering human society for the first time.

I cannot imagine a situation where I would pay for gossip, which what most of those outlets offer.

Because people pay for content insight and useful information not status updates.

I recommend checking out "Stop reading the news" by Rolf Dobelli.

I misread the title as "Why want some people pay for news?" and was curious why anyone wanna voluntarily pay for news essay from MSM nowadays.

I wonder if a volume collective license agreement with ISPs would do it. I still find good, incisive reporting to be highly useful. The problem is the same as with subscribing to streaming services these days: there's too many. I might read from several sources but they all want payment information, authentication credentials, I have to be logged in, etc.

Would anyone notice if there was an extra $1.50 tacked on to your Internet bill? Some organization collects it from the ISPs and redistributes to the new sites based on viewership statistics from a trusted third party with a reserve for new/independent/grassroots/minority sources. Then I don't have to log in, renew my subscription to each site, and they still get funded for reporting.

I'm not super connected to the media publishing world or anything but it seems to me like a concentration-of-power thing is creating incentives for sensational/entertainment reporting than journalism. A system where billionaires wouldn't have a reason to buy up all of the sources for their circus would be nice.

its utility value is to low considering there are many free/free+ad options to bother paying

We had a variant of this discussion a while back, except it was about *which* sites have paywalls and which are free:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalle...

It's definitely a longform excellent (free!) article about how good content is paywalled, but the propaganda/lies are free.

-------------Excerpt-----------

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

In no particular order[0], issues and thoughts:

A: The product stinks. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, local publications, if they exist, are abysmal. National-level publications may be quality, but even that can be iffy. The typical large-city publication now consists almost entirely of press releases and foreign outsourced text, if not outright auto-generated copy. GPT-3 should be all the rage any minute now. My household did subscribe to the local daily well past its expiration date. Our patronage alone couldn't float that boat.

B: At the same time, there's a phenomenal resistance to providing information in sensible formats: tables or charts for quantitative information, maps for geographic (say: wildfire boundaries, natural disaster impact regions). The press appear to feel the public are entirely illiterate and are taking all possible pains to ensure this remains the case.

C: Partisanship has increased to the point that trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame.[1]

D: Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional phenomenon. Reading Kormelink's article, the claim is that "print readership has seen a steep decline over the last decades". That is a lie by omission: print readership has fallen almost continuously since the 1950s. World War II was the exceptional event that drove a strong interest in international news, at a time when broadcast media were not a viable alternative. And the Internet was in its extremely early stages.[2]

E: Historically, quality news was at best a minority interest, largely of business and political classes. Mass-consumer press began with the "penny paper" and John Law, not as a vehicle for delivering news to the public, but as a vehicle for delivering the public to advertisers. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

F: Read Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. Read Manufacturing Consent by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. Oh hell, here's a "short reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

G: For decades, listener support to public media stations has ranged from 15--20%. As with numerous other stubbornly-persistent percentages,[3] this seems strongly resistant to change. Perhaps it should be accepted as a given.

H: The incessent upselling. Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn't sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket. That alone was peace-of-mind justification for not subscribing even to print, and is orders of magnitude worse online. The public media variant is being added to other charities' solicitation lists.

I: Privacy. I don't want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I'm reading. The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.)

J: Relevance. As many have noted here, news really isn't. At the same time, the matters which are of significance ... aren't covered, and aren't rewarded in the market.

K: The market. Basically, information and markets don't work. Market dynamics turn quality information to shit and motivate shit in droves. It's the Sidam touch --- the reverse of Midas. Included in its entirety by reference: "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (2015) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...

L: Subscription fatigue. As streaming video providers are discovering, there are only so many services a household is likely to subscribe to, before cancelling, subscribing on an as-needed basis, or seeking out piracy sites. Entertainment and information budgets are limited.

M: The closest I've come to a solution is that media should be supported on a progressive basis. Preferably through taxes, though perhaps more feasibly through broadband service providers. It's the natural tollgate for payments, and greatly simplifies accounting. There's a reasonable degree to which actual readership can be assessed, though I feel that that alone is an abysmal basis for remuneration. Excluding specific prohibited behaviours, access from both readers and publishers should be without limits, though perhaps subscribers would be able to indicate specific excluded publishers (that is, no funds would be provided to those, from that subscriber's payments). Obligations for local coverage would exist. Separating the content gating from the physical infrastructure also seems highly advised.[4]

Yes, that's a very rough sketch, but it really seems to me the most viable and useful path forward.

Specifically excluded: micropayments, advertising (we tried that, it broke liberal democracy), NPR/PBS's public media model (it's devolved to corporate capture).

________________________________

Notes:

0. I've identified paragraphs by letter, for anyone who cares to respond to specific points. I'm hoping that this will tend to lessen the tendency to think of these as having some sort of ranking, no matter how much a lost cause that might be...

1. How you read that statement will, of course, tell much about which side of that divide you fall on. Likewise, this footnote.

2. Comedic understatment. Pedants, I love you, welcome to Costco, you're my third favourite people, except on the second Thursday of the month.

3. Just a few off the top of my head: literacy rates, espeically when rated by level (about 15% high, about 50% low or none), US high-school graduation rates since the 1950s (90--95%), food wastage rates (30--40%, though with improved transport, refrigeration, and processing, it now occurs later in the supply chain, at far higher cost and resource utilisation).

4. This concept has evolved from my earlier "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... That itself, of course, has numerous other precedents, including by RMS and Phil Hunt.

5. "Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...

I mean, the news is essentially corporate and political propaganda. If anyone should be paying for it, it's the corporations and political parties. We readers are the product, not the customer.

Supply and demand dictates that an infinite resource has zero value. And as such, all electronic content has no value

That's the reason we used to pay for newspapers but won't pay for online news (and have no need for newspapers)