In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)

the same with npr, a crumbling sheen of objectivity thinly veiling increasingly blatant partisanship.

there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame.

i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.

The problem articulated by Antonio Garcia-Martinez:

> The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world.

Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...

that's a decent and succinct summary of the situation, and perhaps why the hybrid funding model of subscriptions, ads, and classifieds balanced out to objective-ish news for the few decades before the internet flattened out the business model entirely.

the news industry is roughly $100B in the US (depending on how you define it). as a thought experiment, maybe we could give each of our 330M residents $300/year (~10% of the military budget) to spend on any news source, and only news sources, and preclude other forms of revenue for the industry. that'd make journalism directly accountable to the entirety of the population rather than just to moneyed interests.

On the topic of objective curation, I've been appreciating The New Paper [1] enough that I started paying when they went subscription-only.

Top five or so stories of the day with a few lines of detail so you can understand what happened and why it's important, focusing on the actual events, not the narratives around them.

[1] https://thenewpaper.co/

After rewatching the film, Network from the 1970s last night I felt a weird sense of shame for supporting almost any modern news. The film conceptualized the modern issue with news and money in an unbelievably perfect manner for today.

The optimistic view is that there is a market for unbiased reporting and someone will step in to service that demand.

But who know.

>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage

Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting.

NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple

The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.

Yeah, Fox never had one of their Pulitzer prize winning journalists writing literal propaganda handed to them by the Soviet Union to cover up the Holodomor.

Lol, Fox has never won a Pulitzer and for good reason. They run propaganda in prime time every single night. Roger Ailes was a bona fide conspiracy nut: https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a1...

NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.

>They run propaganda in prime time every single night.

All major news outlets run propaganda - not just in prime time, but all of the time. That is their job. The NY Times does have the privilege of being one of the primary establishment press outfits, resulting in their main aim being setting the tone for propaganda outfits around the nation and throughout much of the western world.

If you want to know which way the wind is blowing inside the FBI or CIA, the NY Times is where you go.

To compare them to Fox is pointless, as Fox does little to no print journalism. NY Times excels in [often overly-]lengthy, well-written articles, whereas I don't think Fox has ever done much more than briefs and blurbs.

> The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces.

They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.

No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion

Just like every other high quality news source.

That doesn't refute what I said at all. Yes, they have an opinion section. They also inject a lot of opinion into articles that are nominally straight news.

This just isn’t true at all.

They are distinct and completely governed by different editors.

> They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle.

Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle:

A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...

Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title:

Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...

I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?

If subs-only model improves reporting and rids the pubs of propagandizing, I’m all for it. The price we pay now for free news is too high -click bait, us vs them, persistent shallow dives into inane subjects is taking its toll.

> If subs-only model improves reporting and rids the pubs of propagandizing, I’m all for it.

Yeah, if.

I'd argue it would increase bias, since now they need to cater to their audience even harder.

Do you think the average man is going to rely on a news provider like Reuters after this change?

My father reads a lot of third party news but actually fact checks on Reuters. A lot of friends and colleagues skip third party news and read directly from Reuters, because it is free. With this change, I doubt a great many of them will continue with Reuters as a source, and would rather stop at a third-party localized news outlet.

Reuters provides facts, and very little opinion. People believe that facts ought to be free, and only worthy opinions are worth paying for.

> Reuters provides facts, and very little opinion.

It's perfectly possible to provide facts in a highly opinionated way. The world we live in is a messy smear of mostly-contradictory evidence [1], so media can influence perceptions enormously by being selective in its reporting of that evidence.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAy7jujW4AAHhuu?format=png&name=...

Reuters has maintained a very neutral facts-based reporting style compared to other similar wire sources such as Bloomberg and AP.

I don’t know.

People used to pay for newspaper subs before. In real terms, this price is relatively cheap. Gathering facts requires time, money and able reporters.

I know people got spoiled for a while with free news. It’s time to go back to reality and pay for good news reporters.

Except that's not going to happen. Nearly every relative, friend and acquaintance of mine was a paying subscriber of the news before, but all have since moved to free digital, even though all of them can easily afford to pay for the rounding error. Expecting that whole set of people to go back to paying for news after more than a decade though, is going to be hard. People don't feel that news should be a paid commodity, simply because it's a commodity now. If they Google a topic and arrive at a pay walled site, they'll simply move onto another site that gives it for free. And this is in a world where 50%+ of the audience gets their news third party from social media, and not even news websites in the first place.

I'm not sure I agree. Ad-funded publishers will still get the scoop. While the lucky subscribers might get access to better news, the masses will be left with the dreadful reporting of the open websites.

Most of HN crowd I'm sure can spend a few extra bucks per month to get quality news.

What about not so lucky people, though?

Let's be honest, most of the HN crowd probably has a paywall blocker extension. That, or they just turn their cookies off and the website can't keep track of how many articles they have left. Not so lucky people can probably do the same.

In my mind, a subscription model for these websites is essentially a donation model.

> What about not so lucky people, though?

If it’s a civic issue, the government could offer them subsidies. Economics are an existential issue for news organisations. It’s unreasonable to foreclose them viable business models on the basis of equal access.

It's not either-or. Plenty of companies make money through subscriptions, and later on add the adtech garbage back in.

Most of the free alternatives, that is, the ones accessible to the precariate majority, will be propaganda.

This is not a good development.

Subscriber-based access excludes the overwhelming majority of possible readers.

Amongst the most successful subscriber paywalls is that of the New York Times, boasting about 5 million paid subscribers.

Given about 130 million US households, this means that 96.67% of the country's households lack access to this source.

And before any comments on the merits or failings of the source in question, again this is among the most successful and widely used subscription paywalls extant, and it excludes over 95% of potential readers.

The exclusion cost is absolutely immense.

Yes, but other outlets with subscriptions still have ads as well. It seems to be a strange holdover from print news where you also had to pay for a newspaper ... with ads.

There was of course a physical paper that had to be printed and delivered so a base cost at the very least kept printing and delivery down to reasonable numbers. The ads could pay the reporters wages, etc.

I'm not sure what the new rationale is for double-paying for the content.

It would seem to my naive brain that the more eyeballs on your ads, the more money you make from the advertisers. Needless to say a paywall (even a free subscription wall) blocks those eyeballs.

Interestingly, and I don't see this argument often, this situation can also turn into a rich get richer. If market information, political information, educational information are all hidden behind paywalls, the haves can afford information, and the have nots are kept ignorant. How can one perform their civic duty without accurate information? How can one invest in equities without up to date information?

I see this as making a strong case for more put into entities like PBS, CPB, BBC etc and for Libraries paying for access for their citizens.

Here's the thing with the proliferation of paywalls in news sites: it just makes disinformation and the spreading of fake news all that much easier if you can't fact-check easily. I understand people need to get paid, but I don't know if this is quite the right way to go.

They should charge for today's news, but give free access to older news (olds?) to facilitate research.

It also presents a problem for the news companies, as it makes it even harder to inform viewers of things that the viewers don’t want to know / believe.

The more neutral sites that go behind paywalls, the more people will turn to sensationalist sites which remain free. This divides the knowledge of the people, sorting the well off and the not into different news buckets.

Advertising-based is awful in itself, but I don't view this is a positive improvement.