I am so sick of paywalls. We have to find a more sustainable form of journalism. All general news articles should be free after 24 hours. Feature articles can stay behind the paywall. Those who want or need superfresh news can (and will) pay.
@shoq why we'll never have paywalls. They're terrible for sustaining media literacy. Information should be available to all, even those who can't afford it and it should be sustained by those who can't... at least that's how we wished it worked.
@shoq This war started when they made the ads so obnoxious. Overlaying the content, popups, sound on videos, flashing, etc. A couple of ads for relevant products in the gutter or headers would be fine. But they had to amp it up. So we had to protect our eyeballs. Same w tracker cookies. Couldn’t leave it alone; escalated; triggered. Sigh.
Could get behind a presentation where the bottom 1/3 of free access was an ad panel (no blinking, scolding, just static ad), and if you subscribed the ad panel would be gone. Think people who frequented the site and wanted to support the publication would subscribe.
They might have to start reporting again based on established facts, rather than predicting news that might be possible in the future to increase engagement.
@shoq I don’t care about super fresh news. Usually the drive to be the ones breaking the story means publishing articles with errors. The current journalistic practice is just get it out and then if it is wrong, well we may or may not print a correction or retraction. Fuck em all ain’t getting my money or emails.
@DanadasGrau I agree. We need to rethink journalism so that what rises to the top of search engines are somehow “recommended,” as at least relatively fact-based. There will be no perfect solution, but clearly what we have now is not too useful, nor sustainable.
@shoq I wonder whether microtransactions might be part of the puzzle for helping news orgs keep the lights on. I'm not going to subscribe to every site so I can read the one interesting article per month that comes up in my news feed, but I'd pay a few cents to read it.
@shoq
"should be free" is generally unsustainable proposition. Someone has to pay for all the work. But most of this is available thriugh the local public library or university library. They need more support than ever right now.
@Sandjar I think you mean “unsustainable” without some innovation to mitigate the loss of classifieds and other newspaper revenues that were disrupted by the web. Good journalism was always subsidized in some way. It can be again. So yes, it “should be free,” imo, but with a sustainable subsidy TDB.
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