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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations.

I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.

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It used to be that you could get a paper for a quarter out of a machine on the street. That quarter covered printing and delivery. the newspaper had a classified ads section (plus inline ads, plus ad inserts) which actually funded the people who make the newspaper.

Not to mention they often had a rich owner who ran them at a loss if need be to ensure they keep being friendly to him/her when needed.

Because what you paid is far less ( think 10x) than what it takes to run.

Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.

> If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission.

General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.)

In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.

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