It's like a grocery store employee sidling up while you wait in line at the checkout, and politely asking you to put away your phone so you can examine the impulse-buy items on the racks around the checkout.

They remind you that having a good grocery store in your neighborhood is important, and don't you want to support that?

More like the clerk asking you to please take your hat and sunglasses off so their CCTV facial recognition system can identify you and keep track of your movements in the store.

Creepy. But then again if you make analogies for most web sites/services they get creepy real fast. This is how far things have moved since the previous "analog" days.

So WP is afraid I'll shoplift articles? Because the purpose of CCTV cameras is security, not marketing.

So lets put it this way instead: As soon as CCTV starts being used for marketing, any employee asking me to remove my sunglasses will have the effect of enforting my desire to wear them indoors.

Would you really be fine with that as long as no marketing was involved?

You sure about that?

Facial Recognition systems are out in the wild, busy profiling [0]

0: https://twitter.com/GambleLee/status/862307447276544000

I think the gp’s point was an analogy, not actually what is being used.

Better analogy: Please disable your data & use our "free wifi" to better triangulate your movements, download the contents of your contacts, emails, texts, browser history and while we're at it, drop a tracking app/cookie/x on your phone, etc....

Yup, I agree there are other, more accurate representations possible. I just wanted to clarify what seemed to be conveyed by op, as there appeared be a misunderstanding based on the reply. Thanks for the additional example.

And what's the purpose of cookies?

I'm saying if a store used ther CCTV systems to track the behaviour of individual customers, and was building a database of that information, and pestered their customers whose apparel foiled their facial recognition, then that would be pretty much exactly what WP are doing here. What the tools used might have originally been designed for doesn't make any difference IMO.

> They remind you that having a good grocery store in your neighborhood is important, and don't you want to support that?

Yes, exactly. It'll make me reevaluate which neighbourhood shops to patronize.

> It's like a grocery store employee sidling up while you wait in line at the checkout, and politely asking you to put away your phone so you can examine the impulse-buy items on the racks around the checkout.

That is a thing somewhere? Genuinely curious because I can't imagine that ever happening around where I live...

Personally, I appreciate the courtesy of them being up front. I'm happy to go elsewhere, and they save me the trouble of making sure my somewhat Rube Goldbergian-collection of privacy measures aren't acting up.

Win-win!

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article.

We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read. Also let me share my account with a few members of my household on a “family plan”. They would make a lot more off me than they do from ads, and I’d be a lot happier.

Careful what you wish for. With net neutrality gone, you might end up having to get cable tv style "sports" bundles.

Yes, that’s my thinking as well (also — I already pay my ISP for access to the web, why can’t they all just work together and find a way to share?)

There is a tricky point though. “allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read” implies mandatory, centralized tracking. I’m not at all sure I want that.

Mandatory? Yes. Centralized? No, think block chain. Anonymous? Yes.

I have yet to see anything improved by blockchain.

The Germans kind of have that (formerly called GEZ) and people complain about that, too! It pays for the wrong content!

And the private news sites hate it, too! It’s an unfair advantage!

I don’t think it will make a difference if a private company collects the cash, but who knows?

People who complain about the GEZ/Rundfunkgebühr complain about the fact that it is compulsory, even though the content and media being offered is irrelevant for many people (who don't watch TV or listen to the radio). Also there's significant issues with the way the pricing model is designed, putting very unequal load on singles living alone vs. families or shared apartments.

Sweden have something similar for allowing private copying of media. For all empty media we buy (cd, usb, harddrives, cassette tapes, vhs and so on) we pay a small tax that is collected by STIM. STIM distributes it to media creators according to their own payment model.

The problem here is that STIM is a private company handing taxes and payout. It is commonly argued that they are paying the wrong artists and has no real track on what is popular. The industry can easily game the system by making their own music popular (formerly pushing it out to all radio stations, not sure what they do now).

Micro transactions might just end up with a botfarm in china clicking articles to generate income for the newspapers. Or even more clickbaity headlines to click. A lot of problems to solve and no solution in sight yet?

I'm not sure compulsary payment a la GEZ and culture flat rates is the way forward, to say the least. With the recent cut-backs, public TV broadcasters have become outlets for low-quality pseudo-scandinavian crime series and similar palliative care. Also, they've lost any public opinion leadership they had with their media blackout towards the new populist parties. The only asset left are their talk-radio pearls.

Try Blendle: https://launch.blendle.com/

Articles cost between $0.10 and $1.15 (most between $0.20 and $0.50). You can request a refund if you don't like an article, which makes the transaction almost frictionless.

The one thing I miss is the ability to share articles without requiring the recipient to sign up for Blendle. Especially since the article can usually be read for free by going directly to the publisher's website. Five or so articles per month to share for free would sound about right.

What I couldn't tell from their site, and what really is the "killer feature": Do I need to go through their site to access articles, or can I follow a native link and have Blendle automatically authenticate that I can read the article?

No, you have to read the article in their app or website. The other way would be nice!

Apple News.

Upvoted. But why is this being down voted? It’s a perfectly reasonable product desire, a welcome opinion, and is overall a productive comment.

The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month.

However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.

We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.

That's what I like about Blendle [0]: you can request a refund for articles you don't like, so it makes the transaction almost frictionless. No need to think long and hard about the decision, just request a refund if the article is not up to your expectations.

[0] https://launch.blendle.com/

NYTimes is $16/mo Washington Post is $10-15/mo WSJ is $15/mo

Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low.

But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.

I tend to think that the low takeup suggests that we already overprice some of these news services. Some also seem to be oddly priced for marketing reasons (for example, to make the print paper look like a good deal to potential online-only customers).

But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.

Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.

And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.

So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".

There actually aren't too many national news gathering services in the U.S. You generally have NYT, WashPo, Reuters, AssocPress. Even LATimes, BostonGlobe, and ChicagoTribune, which are big, focus most of their real reporting locally.

So for most general national news, there really isn't as much content as many would think, and adding each one still brings significant value.

The 100s of newspapers you refer to derive most of their content from the big ones, and maybe add their own analysis and slant.

A subscription model that provides access to 2 or 3 of the big ones, plus 1 or 2 local ones, and 1 or 2 special interest ones seems to make a lot of sense.

The New York Times subscription price that they show everywhere is also only for an initial introductory period of one year. I can't actually find the real, non-introductory price anywhere, and I know others have commented that it's really deeply buried. It's amazing how sleazy the billing practices of the big publications are.

Should foreigners (or anyone really) be able to access the single article that interests them?

I really don't want to read a anything about American politics. I am not interested in the vast majority of "news" in newspapers.

I am willing to outbid advertisers to read an article - if there was a convenient way to do micro-payments.

Should newspapers cater to people who want to read a single article for pennies and walk away forever? I think not.

There is a much stronger interest to build a lasting relationship over time with their readership, so the reader becomes familiar with the paper's voice, credibility, and focus. This leads to more revenue: readers will pay more for content they respect). It also leads to better news: a stable revenue source allows papers to plan and better invest in their reporting.

> We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

Blendle[1] is exactly that. They are in semi-private beta, but if you follow a link from their twitter[2] you can sign up right away.

Their model is put a few dollars in your account and pay $0.10-$1.00 per article. You can also get an instant refund after you've read, which is supposed to solve clickbait type articles.

They have a lot of major publishers including WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc.

Not affiliated, just a satisfied user.

[1] https://blendle.com/ [2] https://twitter.com/blendle

And they track all you read, thanks to being a private, centralized service.

A monthly flat fee that gives access to practically all paywalled websites, video services and amazons digital bookshelf. The fee is divided to content creators based on time spent on content, not clicks. No ads, no other tracking. (You may need some time multiplier for different types of content.) I would imagine you could count me in with significantly larger monthly fee than what I currently spend on digital media. What I can't estimate is the ad revenue I generate to content providers.

> no other tracking

What other tracking could there possibly be once they're tracking everything I view on every site that monetizes its content?

Sorry, bad formulation. I meant that the tracking for this would not be used for any other purpose than distributing my payments.

Ads and tracking are honestly just fine and a perfectly good compromise. Fears over them are greatly exaggerated.

There's the overall creepiness of hordes of data containing your entire online history being used for the sole purpose of predicting what you'll buy and manipulating you into buying it.

But I think there's more to it than that:

It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y.

Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...

Except for the incredibly low quality ads that also make the article unreadable. The entire internet ad industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars and countless petabytes of analytics still suck at ads. The ad quality is complete garbage across the board.

the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.

So sell regular old display ads. Native ads are the future (again).

Not anymore. There's very low demand / price for run-of-site dispñay ads.

Then let's increase the demand by diminishing the ROI of the current ad model. Something that can be done, for example, by using an ad blocker and never ever turning it off.

Are you saying that if WaPo started selling only native ads nobody would buy them? I'm skeptical of that prediction.

I agree that news outlets serve an important function. That's exactly why it is especially disheartening to see them turn into organs of surveillance capitalism.

Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect their readers at the same time [1].

I frankly don't care if the papers who can't figure out how to function without selling out their customers fail. Let their corpses be a cautionary tale.

[1] One outlet I subscribe to, Talkingpointsmemo.com, is in the process of offering ad-free options. I blocked them previously, and they've made no effort to break the site in the presence of blockers.

Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way?

Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?

Agree with you mostly, though on occasion it's nice to know if my taxes are increasing or decreasing soon, and where most people in my country stand on "Merry Christmas" vs "season's greetings" (whatever that means).

It has saved my life once, via weather report. It has let me know that there was a disaster in the area where I knew people I cared about greatly were, enabling me to prep some support. And once, it told me that a project my then-company was working on was indirectly doomed by the advent of this little thing called the iPhone. Off the top of my head.

I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered.

Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?

Maybe the newspapers entire value is tied to a fraction of the staff and they wonder why we are all collectively disinterested in funding their worthless printing presses, managers, secretaries, and buildings?

Maybe so, but this discussion usually conflates four sentiments:

1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription.

2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business.

3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising.

4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads.

Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to make this content."

I read a broad selection of content and don't necessarily know ahead of time which publications are going to produce the useful/interesting content this month.

I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication.

Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking.

In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too.

In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money.

My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model.

As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem.

Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.

You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity?

(not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)

The integrity lies in the people and connections between same none of that lies in the building or the dead weight.

By that argument you could say that Silicon Valley and its clustering of technology firms are dead weight. All that matters is the people and their connections right?

The journalism that we aspire to today requires a lot of personnel and material resources. Independent vloggers and Facebook/blog randos simply do not have the resources to report like NYT

sure but that integrity may become a scarcer commodity as it becomes more difficult to earn a living.

The problem is that newspapers are leaving money on the table. I'd sign up for a Netflix style subscription service that offers me access to a broad range of media. I have a Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify subscriptions as I'm sure many here do. That's good value for money. Netflix is making way more than I ever spent on dvds & cinema visits combined. Same for Spotify.

As it is, all I have is paywalled niche news sites each thinking they can charge similar fees for very limited access to just they tiny corner of the market. I'm not going to pay per article. I haven't bought a news paper in years. I get all my news through ad sponsored crappy websites. Because they are so offensively bad, I have adblocking, tracking prevention, and other extensions trying to limit my exposure. Works great for me

So, that's money not spent by me or millions of other users that news papers are neglecting to make.

There are a countless ways of funding news. The reason for the current obsession with invasive tracking and advertising to offer "free" access is because it's seen as most profitable. Make it not profitable and newspapers don't go away - the profit model changes.

For me, most often I disable ad blocking for the site, so we have the opposite reaction!

I agree, I always leave those sites and never return.