Hacker News Reader

Comment by Multiplayer | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the Apple News app has an incredible number of Magazines and Newspapers. News+ $10 monthly subscription is a solid deal.

View on HN

I has the same problem as outlined higher up: it moves money from the newspaper to the tech moloch, that can then exert control over the news. The paper will be forced to "popularize" its article stream (Did Aliens Invade the White House?) to the detriment of free news gathering and democracy, all for 30 silver coins.

The problem is a lot of the papers and newspapers want more money for a subscription to one single magazine or newspaper than the entire Apple News+ subscription.

And especially the newspapers already dropped their content quality decades ago before things like Apple News or the Kindle even existed.

I don't need an incredible number of magazines and newspapers—I don't have time to an incredible number of magazines anyways. I only want a small handful of them that are high quality, that I can read by my bedside without a phone. Currently I'm just subscribed to The Economist via Amazon.

Apple News is the unhealthy model Amazon is trying to follow.

Yet again, Apple leads the market into digital feudalism, and their fanboys are happy to lead the charge.

It’s hard to say if it’s unhealthy or not. It’s basically the same model as Spotify. Is streaming music bad for the music industry? It’s not obvious to me what the answer is.

I subscribe to Apple News and the $120 / year is far, far more than I was spending on magazine subscriptions in the past.

You can't compare entertainment (music) with journalism. The economics are completely different. You'll listen to the same song dozens of times, you're not going to read the same news article dozens of times, for example.

I guess it does say a lot about the state of the press if people conflate the two so easily, though.

You’re missing the forest for the trees. Do the details of pay per play vs pay per read really matter?

The point is that because of service X, business Y gets more money from me than they would otherwise. How typical am I of service X subscribers? As a group, are rights holders getting more money from us or less?

A couple months ago I cancelled my Apple News+ subscription because they take too long to fix it when it breaks.

Several months ago all of the newspapers I was reading through it stopped updating, or slowed down to one or two stories a day. Over the next week or two they slowly improved and got back to normal.

But then it happened again. And this time they haven't fixed it. The Seattle Times newest stories are 15 weeks old now.

The San Jose Mercury News "Top Stories" section at the moment has stories with ages 1x1d, 2x1w, 1x2w, 1x3w, 1x4w, 1x6w, 2x8w, 2x9w, 1x12w, 1x14w, and so on.

It was similar for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal when I cancelled. I don't know if they have been fixed or not since they are only in News+. The Seattle Times and the Mercury News are in regular News so I'm able to check them to see if they are fixed.

Still US-only though

Nice, but I can't find it on the play store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com