Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
I agree, but
They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren’t going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn’t be an issue.
If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you’re going to have a hard time getting money.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I’d rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It’s probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet
To your point, maybe if what we got in return were worth a shit, people would be more willing to pay. But it gets shittier and shittier, more and more inundated with ads, worse journalism with more clickbait and AI, all for prices that go up every year to multiple times per year.
It was more reasonable when you could go to the store and pay for one newspaper or one issue of a magazine. Then if you really liked it you could subscribe. Now there’s no other option but to subscribe. Not everyone wants to be paying a bunch of separate subscription fees per month just to get decent news, and not everyone wants one hundred percent of a news outlets content. But we’re charged for it regardless. Fuck no, no one wants to pay for that.
Maybe if it were one of the only things that required a subscription. Like it used to be. But now, almost every single thing we use comes with a subscription charge and there’s usually no other way to pay for it. It’s all or nothing. And it gets totally exhausting, aggravating, and ridiculously expensive, especially when they force you to pay for a bunch of shit you don’t need, or they charge you cancellation fees on top of an extra month, or raise the monthly price without telling you, or tack on extra charges for shit that should just come with it in the first place, etc etc.
My point is, no one should defend the subscription model. If an outlet does good journalism, they’ll have donors. PBS Newshour, NPR, Democracy Now, they’re some of the best souces and they’re all nonprofit. And, what do you know, none of them have actual ads.
And shoutout to local libraries to loaning current magazine issues online. I get a Libby notification every time the New Yorker comes out. And I’m sure they’re losing a ton of money because I don’t personally pay for a subscription /s
That why I refuse to pay for the “ad-free” version of Hulu. You still get ads during day-after-broadcast new episodes and popular titles.
But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
My point is they don’t have to rely on paywalls. And I don’t know about The Guardian, but NPR isn’t trying to make a profit, which is probably part of it. Anyway, I use it for a lot of my news. It’s not wholly impartial, but it tries a lot harder than most American news outlets.
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
I think that would be opening a pretty nasty can of worms. I don’t trust any ruling power to decide what “quality” means for the press.
Not really opening up anything. For instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. And the US had minimal regulations which were removed in the late 80s and others removed in the 90s. That’s why the quality of journalism in the corporate-controlled world has crumbled in my lifetime.
Or another way to put it: the ruling party DOES regulate the news in America, but the ruling party is the wealthy folks who own the news. There is almost no worse system than “funding” the news to get quality.
