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Comment by timbit42 | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous how much they want to charge for an article. Some won't even sell single articles and want a monthly or annual subscription to see everything they produce. I don't want to see everything. I'm not your sheeple. I can't afford to buy 5 or 20 annual subscriptions. I want to read articles from a variety of news sources.

I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles, that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions full of crap people don't want.

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Right? I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days, though it was probably a huge waste of paper and water. Although the industry actually provided jobs back then.

If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay fifty cents once a month.

That's badly outdated pricing data.

The daily edition of the New York Times now runs $2 at a news stand, best I can make out.[1]

Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere.

Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) massively underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight.

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Notes:

1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the Times anywhere on the paper's actual website. Which is another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product, pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.

Their point remains.

No it doesn't. He could subscribe to the online NY Times and get ALL the articles for every day (including Sundays) for less than the cost of printed Sundays alone. So what's the missing element? Taking a fun article to work on Monday?

Their argument was:

> If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month.

The subscription is a major contributor to the problem. Also, NYT does the tricky "change the price to $25/mo after 6 months" game.

He says two things. My reply was responsive to:

"I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days..."

I was addressing the price specifically.

I do have fond memories of reading the Sunday Times all day, and for much of the next week. On that I'm in agreement.

I'll add another useful feature of both newspapers and more especially magazines. When you were done with the damned thing, you could pick it up and dispose of it ... trash, recycling, reuse as fishwrap or firestarter, take your pick. Rather than leaving a litter of individual browser tabs which are painful to collect and discard (even using tools such as Tree Style Tabs), the format was an aggregation itself.

What was harder of course was to maintain an archive of items of interest. That's not a primary role of publishers however, and many news sites have paywalled their archives (this strikes me as ... shortsighted), broken links, or both, which should be familiar frustrations to many.

I'm not sure how OP is really responding to the questions of how to fund and provide access to news and journalistic content, however.

I don't buy the NYT, but the Sunday print edition of the local paper is not the same product as the Sunday print edition of the local paper back when people paid for news.

Back when people paid for news, the Sunday edition was three inches thick and weighed around 5 pounds. I know because I used to deliver them on my bike.

Sunday mornings sucked as a paperboy, but you really could spend all morning reading the thing.

Fair, but I was reminiscing about "those days" (20 years ago) and used the costs from that time.

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