jaredwiener

"Dutch startup Blendle's early success in Europe has already attracted 550,000 users, the majority millennials, to read and pay for individual articles from publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post." https://www.businessinsider.com/blendle-to-launch-in-the-us-...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...

Which sites/newspapers are you talking about? Many have metered paywalls, where you get a few articles for free before the paywall hits.

Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.

Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.

That said, this point --

> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.

is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.

Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it.

By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.

The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money

NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.

"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...

Exactly!

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.

Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.

FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

What makes you trust someone over someone else?

My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly.

Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better.

It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order.

We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)

We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.

Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news)

Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.

For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup for news. (More on that below.)

But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.

The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it?

That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.

These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.

There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles.

Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value.

Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click.

If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy.

Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type.

--

As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.

And now it appears to be back up.

To clarify, it appears Vercel's own website is down.

My own Vercel-hosted site (https://www.forth.news) appears to be working.

Of course, the status page is all green: https://www.vercel-status.com/

The irony - free speech absolutists ask the government to compel companies to advertise in a specific place.

FTA (or at least a link in it) - Macrinus was born in Africa. https://www.worldhistory.org/Macrinus/

But if you set your home server once, then it will just redirect.

Not sure yet!

This was a little afternoon project. I’d love to maybe make this a browser extension to find links in the wild, but am open to ideas/suggestions

Thank you!

This is heartbreaking.

The problems with local newspapers are so widespread that the venerable AP is looking for donations to keep up their reporting.

Journalism is expensive. And its being gutted.

> A good rule of thumb is that anything that can be replaced by a current-gen AI wasn't worth much to begin with.

That's the point, though. It isn't replacing journalists, it's just stealing from them. The reporters are the ones doing the work, the AI is just plagiarizing. It's using their work, while not only removing credit, but more importantly, undermining their livelihoods.

If that were true then why not just index the tweets?

Right. And my point is that it would still be wrong to rob that person.

Yes to all of your points, but I think you are missing my distinction between "potentially legal" and "not being terrible."

And yes, of course they are suing the LLM companies. Because they shouldn't be stealing their stuff, regardless of robots.txt.

"Moat" implies preventing competition.

This isn't competition, Perplexity isn't doing their own reporting and seeing who gets more readers/revenue. This is wholesale theft.

CVS's moat isn't the security guard standing at the door. But like parent comment said, this is going to create the digital equivalent of those plastic lock covers over the decongestants.

This is such a weird take.

If a house is robbed, you don't give the burglars a pass and say "well their security system wasn't very good."

Yes, the defensive measures probably need improvement. But that doesn't mean that the act they are defending against is wrong.

"You might as well make a deal with the people stealing your content because they are going to keep stealing it anyway" is not a great option.

Part of licensing is the implicit understanding that if the parties do not come to a deal, they cannot use the licensed content. It seems from this article that Perplexity is not operating in good faith, ignoring robots.txt, using unpublished IP addresses, and then lying about the amount of referral traffic generated.

Not to mention, whether or not its legal (and im not a lawyer) doesn't seem to be the issue. It's being so shortsighted that you build a business that steals a product from an unwitting third party, and when that third party is drained of resources, where will you pull from?

Because technology aside, its a new group of well funded companies who act as parasites on this already struggling industry.

I know HN (and probably SV at large) has an anti-journalist bent, but ultimately by draining the individuals and companies that do the reporting, they wont have new material to scrape in the future.

(Disclosure - I'm a former journalist building a way for the news industry to fight back. https://letsgo.forth.news)

And further, if you can't trust the AI to accurately describe itself, how can you trust it on any other topic?

FWIW, I'd like to plug a project I've been working on -- https://www.forth.news

We're not social media with a news focus, we're JUST news -- in a news feed.

Anyone can sign up, only journalists post.

We're ramping up coverage, but would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

For the record, I disagree with the bill.

My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.

Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.

And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.

I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law will have unintended negative consequences.

My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.