Historically you could read any newspaper for free. It would be left all over the place: at work, at cafes, on the bus seat. Short of that you could go to like a grocery store where the paper is kept in a rack not a box, read all you want, and put it back. Libraries had papers too.

Today publishers want an unprecedented level of restriction to solely the subscribers. News was never like this but they are trying to repaint our expectations on it for profit.

As far as I remember things, newspapers used to carry a lot of advertising. And the face value of a newspaper was more-or-less a nominal amount, I suspect largely to support the distribution network.

I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper lying around with ads cut out or scribbled over - which I guess is a simplistic analog of the ad-blockers and such that modern news outlets are up against. You can understand the push to maintain revenue that's needed to support quality journalism.

At the same time, as a consumer of news, print ads would not be centrally and intrusively tracking your every thought either, so the desire to block modern ads is entirely rational.

Modern advertising methods have broken the social contract that used to exist to help keep things in balance.

Now Google takes the ad revenue before people get to the content generating sites.

>Libraries had papers too.

Have.

Practically every public library in the US (over 17,000 as of right now) currently, today, has online access to local and national newspapers.

My public library offers free online access to the following national newspapers:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlantic (HAH!)

The Chicago Tribune

The Los Angeles Times

The New York Times

USA Today

The Wall Street Journal

They also offer access to local newspapers, print and digital magazines, foreign-language newspapers, historical newspaper archives, scientific journals, and more.

I live in a highly-populated, urban and suburban, highly-affluent region. To test and see if smaller public libraries have access these resources I went to the website of the public library system of the rural Indiana county my grandparents lived in. They have one branch serving 28,000 people in a poorer region of the country where average household income is somewhere around $48,000. They have access to newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals through the Indiana Digital Library system.

Then I went to the library of the poorest county (19,000/$22k) in the entire country and did the same thing: WV Reads provides access to all of that, too.

All for $0.00-- today.

Not "had", "have".

Support, by using, your local library.

To your knowledge are these news subscriptions things that can be accessed from my own devices in the comfort of my own home via a library card or is it something I have to go to a library in person and sit at their computer to read?

This is all good news, I suppose, but I think that if it were widely adopted the system would fail. I doubt the libraries pay enough to support the news rooms if everyone tossed aside their subscriptions and started using the library's subscription.

> Requesting free journalism is like requesting free food. Both are essential, but few would expect food being distributed for free.

But unlike food, many people are willing to report on news freely without expectation of payment. For example, I get better local news coverage in my local city subreddit than I do in any professional publication.

Of course this type of citizen “journalism” is less rigorous, but nonetheless it is good enough which is why I believe charging for news has been a tough sell in the age of social media.

> There should be a way to pay for a single article. Some micropayment service(s) so you don't need an account with every web site you might want to read.

I think the idea of Reddit gold comes close to a feasible micropayment system. At the moment it only profits Reddit, but there might be room for some profit sharing.

> For example, I get better local news coverage in my local city subreddit than I do in any professional publication.

Agreed. And the "professional" local news is more and more just regurgitating photos, videos, and descriptions they've lifted from Instagram, Tiktok, X, and Reddit anyway.

I always wondered if Spotify could do it for music (which I think are much more zealously protected), why there is no similar service for news articles?

Is it because a news article is one time consumption, whereas music is not?

There actually was one in the past that did just that. And I don't mean that apple thing because it's way too locked into their walled garden and it's too US centric.

Edit: It was blendle. It seems to be still around even. But it's only focused on the Dutch market now, they used to have bigger plans. They only have some magazines now anyway, they used to have all the major newspapers onboard.

But anyway in the Netherlands we have an excellent state-owned news company (NOS). They're just funded by taxes. So I'm not bothered to pay for anything else. Also, all the other media are in the clammy hands of 2 huge Belgian media concerns (DPG and Mediahuis) and I have no intention of funding them.

Apple News+?

It's how I read a bunch of paywalled content -- New Yorker, NYTs, Slate, etc.

Is there room for multiple "Paid RSS reader where funds are distributed per article reads or time spent reading"..?

Are paid podcasts in the Apple ecosystem successful, or "Join" in Youtube? Maybe people will pay to listen/watch but not to read?

Music and articles aren't so different in time based consumption. Most music is short term, like 90% listener fall off within 6 months. Though there are still classics that maintain relevancy, just as there are articles that stay relevant.

Spotify is a great example though, because people would find it preposterous to pay $10/mth to listen to each band they wanted to.

> few would expect food being distributed for free

uhh

For me, the right concept would be that rather than pay every website I want to go to $10, $20 or even $50 / month for the at most 3 articles that I would read that I would have an add on in my browser that would pay a fraction of a penny to each website I visit.

Then it would be up to me. Do I want to put $10/month into browsing the internet without paywalls? Sure, fine, then I get an ad or two but I would have access.

Add a little more, fewer ads, better experience.

Then at the end of each month, the wallet extension empties and is split evenly among the websites I visited.

This would probably not work for high cost high bandwidth streaming sites like netflix, but for all of these piddly new sites that would bolster their income dramatically and allow them to stop fiddling with the stupid paywalls and trying to force every person who visits their site to pay them money to read their mostly poorly written and generally completely worthless text while being bombarded with ads and auto playing news videos about today's latest tragic political intrigue.

I wrote a PoC / master thesis exactly on this idea + the lightning network to support micro transactions. The revenue distribution is the hardest thing to solve. My approach was to have a rolling budget and spending it percentage wise in real time per page view.

https://lightning-sprinkle.github.io/master-thesis/thesis/ma...

I like the general idea, but I'm not fond that it is centered on Brave's BAT. BAT is not a bad idea, but the narrow scope of acquiring them and being locked into a walled garden grates at my desire to not be trapped.

Something that works in a similar way, by using blockchain to record site views per person and allowing cooperating websites to cash in on the views would be my preference.

I imagine that there would be other issues like people impersonating other people and spending their web views, or people setting up "fake" sites and then using dark methods to redirect page views to their site, siphoning off user cash from websites that actually add value, just for starters.

If I remember correctly many if not most newspaper readers seemed to be free loaders when you paid for it. They were shared alot.

Yeah food should be free that would be good.

I'm a pro-market person. However, these are the problems I see, and similar ones are what led us to government fund so much of education.

Independent "purely get to the truth" journalism, that people access, is a bedrock of a well functioning society. It's another form of an educated populace. I think what we're seeing right now is that a smaller and smaller upper middle class people are able to read a variety of sources to stay well informed, while most will now never pay or read informed articles. We all vote, so we should want everyone to have easy access to good sources. Instead, now most people purely consume low quality clickbait "for the ad revenue" drivel, and I see that is a contributor to society's poor understanding of the world around them in general.

So, I see government paying to make quality journalism accessible the same way I see education. We know that removing K-12 public school and state universities would be an unmitigated disaster in many of peoples' abilities to think, though they will still vote.

> should be a way to pay for a single article

It fundamentally doesn’t work due to journalism, particularly investigative journalism, having high fixed and sporadic costs. Consider the trivial example of defending ones’ journalists against a lawsuit. You can’t easily borrow against clickstream revenue.

Caveat: it could work, but at effectively a a few months’ subscription price per article.