@davidho I'm willing to pay for news (I donate to media), but I don't accept paywalls, and I do accept ads based on content (not on profiling readers).

Paywalls create their own issues, like:
* making news and facts are to check,
* making it hard to make a news item to be part of the public discourse,
* and block things like the Internet Archive.

The money that go for paywalls mostly go to owners of media, and commentators/columnists, very little goes to journalists.

@davidho it’s a paradox. We subscribe to our local paper, but the hedge fund that owns it recently slashed the payroll and reporting staff.

But if we cancel in protest… then we just hurt who is left.

We need more independent media: I regularly donate to Propublica, Virginia, Mercury, the 19th…

@davidho

and they should have some purpose i.e. to expand knowledge.

...not to earn points on uni ranking systems and maybe, just maybe, promotion for the writer in a few years.

... but of little value beyond that.

@davidho
I would add that industry standards and norms (ISO, IEEE, IEC, EUROCAE, RTCA, ...) should be free to read. They are written by volunteers, who quite often even have to pay for their own travel costs.

Costs of editing and publication could either publicly funded, or could be paid for by part of the fees for certification according to a standard.

Asking an engineering student to pay hundreds of euros (sometimes thousands) just to be able to read a standards document, is absurd.

@davidho would be more palatable to pay for news if journalism hadn't died on the altar of corporate interests, and turned into outright lies and propaganda.

Win-win for the billionaires ofc 👎

@davidho

I subscribe to my city's Gannett paper. I'd pay a small extra fee
for online access to all Gannett papers.

Not that they're great but they cover most of my state.

@davidho It's true for newspapers where journalists do the work of journalists for.

At least in Germany there is not one single newspaper with this quality out there.

Only online zines like @riffreporter seem to know what journalism is about and actually do a good job.
That's why I pay them, but not Springer et al.

@davidho It really doesn't work this way. As long as news is paywalled, even if some of us opt to pay for it, an uninformed majority who's not paying is going to be getting fed non-paywalled fake news instead.

Paywall the celebrity gossip and shit, not what the public needs to be informed.

@davidho

Yeah, this is a weird comparison. "Would you pay journalists/researchers"...ahh...yeah...."Would you pay some other random third person who did nothing to advance the thing you're reading who just happens to own the means of dissemination"....ahh...no.

Like...there might be something to this.

@davidho

Gentle response here that journal paywall systems have diversity and privilege problems. Not everyone doing climate-relevant research is in an academic position and paywall systems are not scaled to the economics of different fields.

I'm currently an independent consultant with a Ph.D. in anthropology doing work in climate change social science. My projects aren't directed toward producing peer-reviewed journal articles (meaning, that's not what my clients pay for), but their projects generate data and observations that are relevant to a range of climate issues. So I'm in the position of writing these up on my own time - and then being expected to pay out of my own pocket to publish the papers that I've written for free. Even when colleagues in my field get a grant, they are often in the range of $20-30,000* - and standard journal paywall fees often demand double digit percentages of that, with limits both the work and publishing we're able to do.

At the same time, climate change response needs creativity and innovation, which includes work on people and social systems. So when physical and natural science academics have grants that pay their publication fees and put up posts that assume that everyone doing necessary climate work is like them - this harms and suppresses fields like mine.

I don't have a solution to the paywall situation, but individual authors and projects paying to publish their articles isn't the answer.

* we're worth a lot more than this and could do a lot more with more funding, but see above re: systems, and power

@davidho The journals have staff to pay and the journals provide some value, but all publishing should be able to share their works openly as well.

Many journals went to this model over time, but not all.

@davidho

The #NewYorkTimes and the #WashingtonPost are both paywalled (and NYT even has paywalls for some of its sections on top of the basic paywall), and that still didn't stop the Post from being bought by a billionaire who uses the platform to promote his agenda. The New York Times has been in the same hands for a long time, but that hasn't stopped them from promoting their pro-billionaires agenda, either.

@davidho I've thought about this often, and think about how news used to be disseminated.

There's always the guy (my dad), who would look forward to breaking open today's fresh, unread newspaper. He loved that experience.

I on the other hand would hang out at the local coffee shop and pull together the different sections of someone's previously read newspaper. I loved that experience.

Maybe we just need to find a way to duplicate those experiences in digital form.