Why won’t some people pay for news?
In no particular order[0], issues and thoughts:
A: The product stinks. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, local publications, if they exist, are abysmal. National-level publications may be quality, but even that can be iffy. The typical large-city publication now consists almost entirely of press releases and foreign outsourced text, if not outright auto-generated copy. GPT-3 should be all the rage any minute now.
B: At the same time, there's a phenomenal resistance to providing information in sensible formats: tables or charts for quantitative information, maps for geographic (say: wildfire boundaries, natural disaster impact regions). The press appear to feel the public are entirely illiterate and are taking all possible pains to ensure this remains the case.
C: Partisanship has increased to the point that trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame.[1]
D: Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional phenomenon. Reading Kormelink's article, the claim is that "print readership has seen a steep decline over the last decades". That is a lie by omission: print readership has fallen almost continuously since the 1950s. World War II was the exceptional event that drove a strong interest in international news, at a time when broadcast media were not a viable alternative. And the Internet was in its extremely early stages.[2]
E: Historically, quality news was at best a minority interest, largely of business and political classes. Mass-consumer press began with the "penny paper" and John Law, not as a vehicle for delivering news to the public, but as a vehicle for delivering the public to advertisers. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
F: There's an extant literature. Read Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. Read Manufacturing Consent by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. Oh hell, here's a "short reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/
G: Stubbornly persistent percentages. For decades, listener support to public media stations has ranged from 15--20%. As with numerous other stubbornly-persistent percentages,[3] this seems strongly resistant to change. Perhaps it should be accepted as a given.
H: The incessent upselling. Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn't sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket. That alone was peace-of-mind justification for not subscribing even to print, and is orders of magnitude worse online. The public media variant is being added to other charities' solicitation lists.
I: Privacy. I don't want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I'm reading. The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.)
J: Relevance. As many have noted here, news really isn't. At the same time, the matters which are of significance ... aren't covered, and aren't rewarded in the market.
K: The market. Basically, information and markets don't work. Market dynamics turn quality information to shit and motivate shit in droves. It's the Sidam touch --- the reverse of Midas. Included in its entirety by reference: "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (2015) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/
L: Subscription fatigue. As streaming video providers are discovering, there are only so many services a household is likely to subscribe to, before cancelling, subscribing on an as-needed basis, or seeking out piracy sites. Entertainment and information budgets are limited.
The closest I've come to a solution is that media should be supported on a progressive basis. Preferably through taxes, though perhaps more feasibly through broadband service providers. It's the natural tollgate for payments, and greatly simplifies accounting. There's a reasonable degree to which actual readership can be assessed, though I feel that that alone is an abysmal basis for remuneration. Excluding specific prohibited behaviours, access from both readers and publishers should be without limits, though perhaps subscribers would be able to indicate specific excluded publishers (that is, no funds would be provided to those, from that subscriber's payments). Obligations for local coverage would exist. Separating the content gating from the physical infrastructure also seems highly advised.[4]
Yes, that's a very rough sketch, but it really seems to me the most viable and useful path forward.
Specifically excluded: micropayments, advertising (we tried that, it broke liberal democracy), NPR/PBS's public media model (it's devolved to corporate capture).
(Adapted from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449413)
Notes:
I've identified paragraphs by letter, for anyone who cares to respond to specific points. I'm hoping that this will tend to lessen the tendency to think of these as having some sort of ranking, no matter how much a lost cause that might be...
How you read that statement will, of course, tell much about which side of that divide you fall on. Likewise, this footnote.
Comedic understatment. Pedants, I love you, welcome to Costco, you're my third favourite people, except on the second Thursday of the month.
Just a few off the top of my head: literacy rates, espeically when rated by level (about 15% high, about 50% low or none), US high-school graduation rates since the 1950s (90--95%), food wastage rates (30--40%, though with improved transport, refrigeration, and processing, it now occurs later in the supply chain, at far higher cost and resource utilisation).
This concept has evolved from my earlier "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication"
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ That itself, of course, has numerous other precedents, including by RMS and Phil Hunt."Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/
#news #media #newspapers #journalism #NoGoddamnItMicropamentsAreNotTheAnswer #UniversalContentSyndication
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