Posted on 09/22/2019 10:43:36 AM PDT by rintintin
For the sake of a functioning society, quality journalism should always be around, but with the internet giving anyone and everyone the ability to easily share and receive an excess of information, the once seemingly indispensable institution of journalism has been struggling to adapt.
As a result, modern journalists have been forced to try to find a way to keep journalism alive, and unfortunately for anyone who values access to information, one popular idea among newspapers is that of the paywall.
Some of the biggest names in journalism, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, have decided that to keep themselves afloat readers will have to pay for a subscription to view online content. Many other papers have adopted this model as well.
While some people may see the paywall as a necessity to keep journalism alive, I would argue that it contradicts the very role journalists should be contributing to society, helps the spread of disinformation and demonstrates a lack of concern for the increasing struggles of working-class citizens.
(Excerpt) Read more at themontclarion.org ...
Never gone past one.
The Compost and the Slimes are in the propaganda business—anyone who pays for their lies deserves to be fleeced.
And it saves me from my habit of wasting time reading their crap.
Financial suicide.
Thinking people will not pay to read the propaganda published by the NYT and the Washington Post.
This article is pure wankerism.
Journalism today has nothing to do with supporting nor defending democracy in any way, shape or form.
The industry is corrupt from the floor up.
And his premise that paywalls are the problem? I’m real sure I don’t recall news papers of any size being for free pre-internet.
You might find them laying around *after* someone else paid for them, just like you’ll find articles of interest copy/pasted now.
But journalism has always been “pay-walled”.
The Nightly News pablum is still the available every night too, just as it was, and it’s just as useless now as it was then too, except for the occasional local event of interest.
Their reasoning is that people used to pay for the hard-copy/paper edition of their propaganda, so now they have to charge for internet soft copy.
I like your comment better.
Never gone past one.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Neither have I. One more thing ... I don’t disable my adblocker(s) either when they won’t let you read an article unless you do.
I thought the online papers were making money from the advertisers’ ads all over their websites.
I kinda disagree. In the old days if you wanted to read a newspaper, you’d get a subscription or buy one at the corner newsstand. I’m not seeing how a paywall is all that different.
The author sounds like a bit of a commie to me. And I didn’t like his swipe at Breitbart. (He accused Breitbart of peddling fake news. Funny how he didn’t accuse the NYT of the same thing.)
“I thought the online papers were making money from the advertisers’ ads all over their websites.”
How can they, if the paywall blocks non-subscribers from looking at the ads?
The original paywall - 10 cents a copy.
They need to get over it. Their news is trash anyway. Few will buy it and we can welcome truthful journalism back to the forefront.
The headline looked interesting but when I clicked on the article I quickly realized the author is a moron ... just one more example of an entitled A-hole whining that someone else should give away free sh!t. It sounds like the dope honestly believes these newspapers distributed their PRINT editions for free in the days before the internet existed.
“The author sounds like a bit of a commie to me. “
He does sound like a leftist. But his point about paywalls I still agree with. They certainly block me from looking at a lot of articles, in a lot of papers, that I would be interested in seeing.
I meant prior to the paywalls.
The problem that the newspapers are facing is two fold. They need viewers to sell electronic advertising, which is becoming a very important source of revenues. They also need regular and daily “content” that people are willing to pay for.
The unintended consequence is that stories are now more like “click bait” and not educational or factual, but just pandering to interest groups. That means that the demographic of “who will subscribe” to a given flavor of “fake news or click bait” is becoming a smaller and smaller segment of society and one that is limited in terms of advertising dollars.
I look forward to the suicidal destruction of the New York Times, the Atlantic, Hufington Post, and a host of others. We have already seen the demise of Newsweek magazine (Daily Beast) and others.
What I particularly like about Trump is how masterfully he lives in the head and gets all the media attention he wants from people at the NYT.
“I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.” P. T. Barnum
The MSM keeps itself alive by getting the Parties to fight and thus throw $$$$ at them for ad campaigns.
If they can get a Primary fight, they get even more $$$$.
Using this model, the Print Media and pay to view are going to be the first to die.
Broadcast and Cable News is going to be hard to get rid of as they have multiple roads of income and heavenly subsidized by the Cable companies, ATT and Disney.
I wasted a minute by reading the article. Believes the Slimes and Post are worthy to be read just not paid for. Thinks paywalls drive people to, sources like, the Washington Examiner which he says is dishonest. Thinks paywalls are an affront to the working class who cannot afford them.
THEN CLAIMS he doesn’t know the solution. But of course he knows it. It is government sponsored news sources. But just the trustworthy ones like the Slimes and the comPost.
That's not where I go for news anymore anyhow. There is some great content being put up by Breitbart, American Thinker, Epoch TImes, etc., where a modicum of actual journalism is still being practiced.
The monthly payment model is a death sentence to these publications. Everybody is looking to cut down on monthly payments. For instance, I just went three months without even watching Hulu Plus and yet I've been paying for it the whole time. So guess what, I'm cancelling that subscription. But if they had me on a model where I would pay, say, a dollar per hour of streaming, I would have no problem with that as I would be only getting charged for my actual consumption.
A better model for publications would be a "cost per click" approach. Maybe 50 cents an article. Something reasonable.
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