My solution was to subscribe to one reasonable newspaper (Washington Post). Between that, free BBC content, and NPR, I think I get a reasonable overview of world and local news.
But, that does mean I miss breaking investigative news from other sources. At least until it's picked up elsewhere or made available elsewhere. It's a bummer at time, but paying for a large subset of possible news sources would cost 10x+ what I pay now.
WaPo is the home of neocons Hugh Hewitt and Jennifer Rubin. When I first started reading WaPo, they were considered (and they considered themselves to be) far right neocons. These days, Ms. Rubin would be classified as a moderate (and considers herself to be an independent) and Mr. Hewitt is frequently accused of being a RINO. They haven't changed their political stances (if anything, Hewitt is more conservative now than he was before); it is simply that the Republican Party has moved extremely far to the right in the past decade and what was once considered extreme is now moderate.
See, for example: "New NPR Ethics Policy: It's OK For Journalists To Demonstrate (Sometimes)"
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2021/07/29/1021802...
I read a lot of Reuters during the trump admin and boy you could hear their tone subtly slip the whole time and when the election results were being contested, journalists everywhere were straight up calling it baseless and inflammatory. Not very neutral but also just facts. And at some point, trying to sound neutral no matter the circumstances is going to sound insane.
The WaPo isnt even neutral by American standards - it has an unusually tight knit relationship with the pentagon.
Essentially those 3 organizations provide 3 different angles on what the pentagon wants you to hear.
Growing up, the family had the Washington Post and Economist, plus the nightly news on one of the major broadcast stations. Some people might also get the WSJ. I can't think of anybody I knew who got more than that.
The group who does pay for news, as I've alluded to, are people in the financial sector, or those who's knowledge of the news affects or is inherent to their job.
Business people, basically.
On a personal note, in high-school I competed on a team competition – Academic Decathlon – and my testing subject was Current Events. So I may be somewhat outside the norm.
I subscribe to the Financial Times, the Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg, and more.
My parents may have been more well off so this might not be representative, but it wasn't just papers; we also subscribed to several magazines. Growing up I remember we had:
* New York Times
* Wall Street Journal
* The Economist Magazine
* Time Magazine
* Nintendo Power
* Highlights for Children
I remember my Aunt subscribing to Vogue, Ebony and Reader's Digest, on top of the finance publications she and my dad were subscribed to. 30 years ago, Vice might have existed as a magazine, not a major publication.
The modern equivalent is sending someone a link, which won't work so well.
A gaming would've been a good example - there's Steam and there's everything else, but is this the case for video streaming? One either shells out a noticeable sum for Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/ESPN+/HBO Max/Amazon Prime Video/Apple TV+/Paramount+/Peacock/... combo (with a number of those free on some year-long promotion), or, I've heard, as the those year-long trials come to end, fragmentation progresses, and diversity and quality of media on any single individual platform declines, people are simply starting to sail back to the high seas.
Maybe if this stream dies (and companies stop blaming it on password sharing or whatever, but realize no one is paying because it's not worth it anymore) there will be some partnerships and larger package deals. But I'm skeptical, as no one had solved how to slice the pie. Microtransactions were proposed to solve this but any attempts at those had ultimately failed.
But the decline starts much earlier in the 1980s/1990s with consolidation, infotainment newsfluff, disappearance of dailies in major cities. I can summarize in a single word, "Ganett".
1. I don't want to pay for what is currently called "news". That is, agenda-based editorials and selective fact-choosing.
2. I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe easily, from my phone, without dark patterns, or having to talk to a human.
The closest thing I have right now is paying for https://sumi.news and glancing at headlines.
only for them to take a political stance and discredit Bernie for their favorite candidate Hillary.
and even, then if you pay - are you gonna log in everytime before you read an article.
cancelling subscriptions is a pain for some of these media things
I prefer the guardian approach - where they ask for a donation. then yearly I put something towards that.
yeah their revenue numbers won't be strong as back then when people bought dead tree copies daily.
but if you think of media as a sunday type issue - I mean most important stories would have been a sunday type issue anyway. then the revenue they get is comparable.
You can see this right here on HN. Just submit a paywalled article and the top comment will be a link to the archive.org version.