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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.

Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do not care about.

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> Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.

I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting aside concerns about the quality of the product, news subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through hell and back to cancel.

Local News Papers were a lot cheaper, plus you got news that no one else was reporting.

In most cases the news was balanced back then. Go to a Library and see for yourself by viewing archives.

Oh, I'm old enough to remember the days when we were all subscribing to the local newspaper. I'm still thinking about subscribing to our local paper, but last time I checked it was just too expensive, taking into account that all the news I need will get to me by social media, TV, email, or text message.

My local paper is about 9% local crime stories, 1% local politics stories, and 90% AP story reprints. For that, they want $10/mo for the online product or $20/mo for a 4x a week delivery of a dead trees product.

AP will give me 90% of that for free and unedited. The other 10% I can find through other channels or is of no interest to me.

> I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling?

uHH...yes?? Hello? We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember? Does this stuff being on the internet suddenly makes journalism a free labor or something?

Did we? I grew up middle-class and no one I knew got actual newspapers. That was always a marker for me of someone being rich. We maybe got weekly/monthly news magazines, but that's an order of magnitude cheaper.

What years ? Even in the 80s and a good deal of the 90s, many people got and shared newspapers. They were everywhere. I remember them being 15, 25, 50 Cents through the years.

Certainly normal to read both a morning and evening paper on the commute in London well into the 00s

Definitely did. Maybe not in your area, but many people here used to spend their idle times reading newspapers. Restaurants have them ready on the tables for people to consume as they come. Now its been replaced by phones.

Newspapers was the only the way I could get any insights on the outer world. This was in 2000s and early 2010s. There were TVs but newspapers were the only method where I could stare at pictures from all over the world and read random people's opinion.

No I didn't have internet back then.

> We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember?

I don't remember it being anywhere near that much.

Even today the local paper is a good chunk under that price, and if I forgo the actual printing then it's about a hundred dollars per year.

I only every bought like 2 newspapers regularly, canard enchainé (1.20 euros/per week) and monde diplomatique (5.40/per month). That comes around to 52 * 1.8 + 12 * 5.4 = 158.4 euros per year. So for half the price I get two newspapers with potentially different view on events. 325 euros per year sounds overpriced to me given that I like to hear multiple opinions from different publications. 325 to get access to 3-4 publications that only publishes weekly sounds good.

You can also look at other french journals like mediapart who do investigative journalism. Even they only charge 120 a year (https://abo.mediapart.fr).

Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to become informed.

The currency that is limited is not money, it is time. When news is presented digitally, it's just one more thing on your always-connected screen competing for your attention with every other website, app, video, etc. With a physical newspaper, you actually (most days) carve out the time to peruse it front page to back. Of course some days its a quick glance while other days you read every article. But the physical-ness of a newspaper somehow elevates it's priority and commands your time, in a way a digital version simply cannot.

>Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to become informed.

Not that, the only news I can find on-line is about National Items. I cannot find any information about what my City Council is doing, what is being built in the City. I can find only scrubbed items released by just the Council.

In the old days, the local news paper would investigate the local politicians and report if they are doing anything illegal. Now, we have no idea, so graft could be rampant in local politics and no one would know.

One crucial difference is that you could walk up to a newsstand and buy an issue whenever you felt like it.

Online, there's very other options that don't include a perpetual agreement.

This is so true. I'd anonymously pump 50 cents into those paywalls on a daily basis if that were a way to gain access to an article, but the only online option any newspaper or magazine I know of provides is an auto-renewing subscription of $5-10 a month, with the deal being a bit better if you go annual. Problem is, there are like 6,000 newspapers and magazines in the country whose articles I might stumble upon and like to read. No, I'm not subscribing to the Akron Times, the San Diego Tribune, and the Boston Herald just because someone linked me an article from each today.

Many publications have tried the 50c for an article approach, and it just isn't worth it. Those one-off purchases at best make for a single digit percentage of revenue.

What could possibly work is mega syndication, where you pay a monthly subscription and get access to a large amount of newspapers, á la Spotify or YouTube. But for that to happen, newspapers need to change their attitude and start seeing themselves not as arbiters of truth, but producers of news as a commodity. Then you could even have "enemy" newspapers on the same subscription. Just as you have rock, classical and rap on the same subscription.

The question is, does the population actually want news or do they want to read something that confirms their world view and snugly fits with their chosen political tribe?

That's pretty close to what I'm suggesting, and a superbundling / megasyndication is one possible shape (or at least interim waypoint) to getting there.

The term I've used in the past is "universal content syndication".

You used to be able to have them put real ink on real paper and deliver multiple pounds of it to your doorstep for less than they want to charge for the bits now. It's like in the 90s banks wanted you to pay extra to use the ATM. It saved them from having the office open and hiring tellers but they wanted to charge you for the "convenience" of using the machine.

Sure, none of the people involved in that had healthcare.

Those newspapers made most of their money through ads. Most of what people paid was their attention, not their money.

Exactly, that's the thing people keep missing in these discussions. That $0.25 for your newsstand paper didn't pay for the costs of paying reporters and journalists; it really only paid for distribution and maybe printing costs (e.g., a lot of that quarter went to the local newsstand, not the newspaper). These days, distribution costs are pretty close to zero since they don't need printing presses, trucks to drive papers around, newsstands, and all the people to staff this machinery. They do need IT personnel and some servers, but the per-viewer cost there is much less. Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, so readers' expectations haven't really changed that much, the newspapers have simply gotten much worse at funding themselves with ads.

Plus classifieds, that was a big revenue stream for them too.

Right, but that's another form of advertising.

But it's a good point. Classified ads were purchased by individuals or small companies usually. Now, the people things did with those, they do for free, or use some other paid service that's not affiliated with a news organization. Instead of paying for an ad in the "personals", people use dating apps (either for free, or they pay for a premium membership to get extra benefits). Instead of paying for a classified ad to sell their old car or appliance, they post it for free on Ebay or Craigslist or FB Marketplace, and in most cases pay a commission when they receive payment through the site. So basically, other services took this revenue stream away from the newspapers.

The real death of the news was that with the internet, these sleepy old papers suddenly had competition from around the world. No longer was it an essential regional monopoly or cartel of a couple news orgs being the source of truth for a given region. Now that they no longer have their moat, what do you know, old establishment folded to things people would rather spend their attention on now that they actually have the choice to do so.

True, but there's more: as I pointed out in my sister comment here, newspapers used to pull in money from classified ads too, but the internet made those completely obsolete. Basically, pre-internet, the only way to communicate with other people (other than directly or with a phone) was through TV, radio, or newspapers. Newspapers were by far the cheapest option, and most accessible to regular people (i.e., the classifieds). The internet replaced that: now people can communicate with others through the internet and various websites and other digital services.

It wasn't just about "the truth", it was about how people could participate in mass communications: the newspapers had a lock on one of the main ways to do this. The internet gave us a new communications medium.

This is the right answer.

Many newspapers gave away most of the value in their advertising power to Google and Facebook, for free, because they just didn't understand how internet advertising was going to work.

Now they've decided to blame and shame their own readers rather than actually try to compete against other media for people's dollars.

I used to pay for news, but then news started looking more like opinions and you can pretty much get opinions for free. So I stopped paying.

Depends what it is; some of the print newspapers in the UK have moved to online subscription. It worked for the 'premium' ones with longform articles, it has not worked for the 'red top' newspapers, and they've gone back to ad-supported models and have enormously declined in quality of journalism.

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