Fair point. I don’t mean to suggest that authors don’t deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon’s attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
Comment on the internet is worse.
spacecadet@lemm.ee 3 years ago
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
sbg@lemmy.world 3 years ago
Copernican@lemmy.world 3 years ago
That’s because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
bandario@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 years ago
Is anyone actually paying for it though?
Don’t get me wrong, actual journalists deserve a great wage. I just haven’t seen much of it worth paying for in recent years. Real journalists get locked up and it looks like the rest took that threat very seriously. I’m not going to pay money to read corporate puff pieces and controlled opposition.
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 3 years ago
The Atlantic often does long, in-depth stories and has proven to be a very reliable source. Their journalists have proven themselves in getting some great sources. Just in the last couple of weeks admissions by John Kelley and Gen Milley have proven stories The Atlantic broke 2 years ago with anonymous sources were accurate and credible.
Copernican@lemmy.world 3 years ago
The Atlantic is a pretty reputable source. And I think there’s a difference between subscribing to news for news reporting like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc, vs subscribing to magazine like the Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic that will give you more political commentary and analysis. Both have a role to play and both need subscribers.
CubbyTustard@reddthat.com 3 years ago
that was back before ad blocking was common though. The news sites used to make all their money from inline ads but you have to have so much more traffic to make the same amount these days and there’s exponentially more competition.
Maeve@kbin.social 3 years ago
Yt is complaining about adblocker not being allowed. Waiting for disable unless you whitelist
FireTower@lemmy.world 3 years ago
Worse than it had been previously.
PutangInaMo@lemmy.world 3 years ago
Oh the irony
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 3 years ago
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
WarmSoda@lemm.ee 3 years ago
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 they 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, and then suddenly take that away, you’re going to have a hard time getting money.
what_is_a_name@lemmy.world 3 years ago
You miss the bigger picture. The shut journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazines males try 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.
WarmSoda@lemm.ee 3 years ago
I’m just saying what happened. History is inherently hindsight.
cave@lemmy.world 3 years ago
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.
ZombieTheZombieCat@lemm.ee 3 years ago
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
Steve@communick.news 3 years ago
I can’t stand when companies double dip. I won’t pay if I still get ads.
willya@lemmyf.uk 3 years ago
What if it comes with one of those cologne insert peel back samples?
stillwater@lemm.ee 3 years ago
Doesn’t matter how it happened, only that it is happening.
The fact that yellow journalism is free and quality journalism is hidden behind a paywall, and the fact that many internet people are indignant about both quality journalism and paying for it while also guzzling down exclusively headlines and third hand information in comment sections through a firehose, are what will be studied in future decades about why there was suddenly a strange and convoluted anti-intellectual movement in this era.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 3 years ago
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.
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 3 years ago
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.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 3 years ago
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.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 years ago
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 3 years ago
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.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 years ago
Not really, for instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. An the US had minimal regulations prior to the 90s which is why the quality of journalism in my country 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.