pivot_rootLeave it to a Bezos-owned company to confuse customers and mislead them for profit.
cobysevI still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay for access to news articles. There are plenty of free and legitimate articles on the Internet, and public access TV still broadcasts news. You never need to pay anyone.
Honestly, putting a price on access to news just makes me not trust that organization. It feels like a scam, like paying for bottled water when water is one of the most abundant resources in the world.
Paid subscriptions are only a thing because people bought into it and normalized it instead of boycotting it. That’s why everything is a subscription nowadays and no one can just buy and own a product now. We have to spend our lives paying a regular fee for access to something we never own.
I would understand paying for online news as an alternative to ads, and only if the news organization does actual reporting free from political or billionaire interference.
Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one news website that seems to meet that criteria at a surface level.
For everything else, fuck 'em— archive.is :)
News no, analysis maybe, but I don’t know if wapo actually does that.
I pay for access to the local newspaper and a few other things. I agree it isn’t ideal but the people producing the content need to eat.
Also, having a subscriber base directly providing funding can potentially make a news org more trustworthy. Being reliant on your subscribers for funding provides a mechanism of accountability to them that a news org dependent on advertising doesnt have.
See, the problem is, free news has to make revenue from somewhere.
If they aren’t taking subscriptions, then they are probably showing ads, so their content is at the mercy of their sponsors.
Even if they are taking subscriptions, they are probably showing ads. That makes it doubly bad.
Because the more a news source depends on ads revenue the shittier it is.
LibbGoogle offers things for free, see the shitty stuff they're doing?
Personally, I'd rather keep on paying for my newspapers and have them not do, or not as much, shitty things. And that's exactly what I do (plus I like to receive my news in print knowing no one is tracking what I'm reading and how) ;)
I actually pay for 404 Media
Do you work for free? No? Then why should journalists?