You are writing a lot of stuff about wanting to pay for good journalism. Why not just simply subscribe to the Economist? Nobody's going to track you when you're reading a PDF. Probably especially not when you go completely offline. You could also listen to the ad free CDs.
There's also still physical newspapers. You could go up to your nearest little shop and, for just a few dollars really, try out a couple of the newspapers. You can get a different one every day, see how they compare, then you can subscribe to that one!
There, now you can pay for good journalism, and support that radical new monetization model.
Re:LA Times and ads
by icebraining on Sunday March 26, 2017 @06:55AM
(#13960119)
Whatever one thinks of the Economist, they can't be the newspaper for the whole Earth. A broad view is important, but far from enough if one wishes to keep abreast of what's happening around them.
As for physical newspapers, I hear they were decent once, but nowadays they're all so shitty around here that I believe one is better informed by not reading them, as at least it's easier to keep an open mind on issues, than after having been fed heavily distorted facts.
That being said, I believe the media companies should start accepting the inevitable fact that people don't care about their financial struggles or hardships in finding ways to monetize content. As long as the said content is visibly free (even if it comes with strings attached as invisible tracking) then the people will continue to believe it's free and the more technical users like myself will go the extra mile to actively impede your tracking. You can't escape from that.
I would actually pay for good journalism. But as a possible consumer of the theoretical good journalism, I can't trust anyone. Every month there are news about very shady ads or nasty ransomware snuck through ad networks. How can I trust anyone who is after making money in the industry?
Both the ad and publisher industry have repeteadly shown their profits are their most important priority, not the readers safety. This is never gonna change, they must make money.
I can understand their motives but I have zero sympathy for them due to the methods they employ.
If they are smart business people, they have to sit and actively think of new and non-intrusive ways to monetize content, like right now. The current publishing and monetization models golden days are long behind them, all of the companies are fighting over scraps (obviously I can't prove this but I believe it's a legit theory, judging by the desperate methods) and the bean-counters should stop trying to beat this game and rather look for a new game.