The Guardian is free, which is the most obvious omission from the OP, as is Reuters and Forbes. It's not just Tory drivel that's free.
The truth is paywalled but the lies are free
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People are idiots, democracy is overrated, were all doomed.
There is no 'magic' though I suppose it might seem that way. Marketing and advertising is a multi-trillion dollar industry. And with today's advanced data analytics, companies can measure ROI better than ever before. They wouldn't spend that if it didn't work.
Washington Post wouldn't need to get clicks. They already have a devoted following and a reputation that attracts a steady audience. I also didn't suggest that they move entirely to an all advertising model. For them, being owned by the richest businessman on the planet by a growing margin, they could easily make some of the articles free with ads. And they aren't making "click-bait" articles because they are simply hosting the ads for people to then read the article after 30 seconds - the way Youtube does it. Its a proven business model and could easily be implemented in conjunction with paid subscribers. It would be in Bezos best interest to do that as well as many of the ads would likely be re-marketing that Amazon would get a slice of anyway.
Even the Atlantic, which doesn't have a billionaire patron and offers higher quality articles than the WashPo, makes some articles free when they feel they need to counter the misinformation proliferating (like their COVID articles).
Associated Press and The Hill are also free. There are enough free resources for people to read, understand, and develop a well-rounded and coherent perspective on the majority of current affairs. But way too many people just go to one or two sources that are generally the same (e.g. OAN and Fox News), so of course they will not develop a broader knowledge of issues/topics.
A kernel of truth, but all the Murdoch stuff is paywalled over here. Sky, The Sun, The Times: all different tints of the same shit. Torygraph is not a newspaper but is paywalled. Just because they once came in broad sheet doesn't make their current iterations any less garbagey.
Almost all news media has been reduced to lowest common denominator rubbish, whether you have to pay for it or not.
There might be a bit less poison behind the wall but it'll still kill you.
Almost all news media has been reduced to lowest common denominator rubbish, whether you have to pay for it or not.
There might be a bit less poison behind the wall but it'll still kill you.
I think if it was in his best interests it would be done by now
I just went here https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/
Seems you can have a free account with a limited number of free reads per month. So you can access some articles for free.
How would it benefit his own interest? Serious question.
Just to add it costs $60 for access for an entire year. Thats 0.0016 cents a day! How cheap does this need to be?
Agreed. If you stay with the news and sport The Guardian is excellent.
No it was for the science community to share information, not created for organisations.
I expect research to be free yes. Not books, books requires editors and publishers and printers.
the one that frustrates me is FT, every time they seem to have an interesting/unique article i can't read it. and it's not cheap either.
for the article, i'm guesing it's US centric, and the guardian still isn't established here i think. i didn't know that about forbes, and had no idea reuters could be used as an equivalent to a news site, just knew them as a wire service.
I have FT and Times subscriptions from work. You used to be able to beat the FT paywall easily by just searching the exact headline on a story, but that was a couple of years ago, so they well have blocked that by now. Thing is my contract runs out in December, so I'll have to decide whether to splash out then.
The FT's political coverage is good and more international in its outlook than many UK papers. The Times is very strong for business news, as is Sky too tbf.
60/365=0.16 cents. Not 0.0016.
And yet most of those science communities require you to pay for membership to access the research articles...
yes it does, don't know why I divided .60, brain fart.
I think the real issue is around the incentives created by how media companies can exist today. Local ads were the bedrock funding model - if you were a small hardware store in a town somewhere, the only way to advertise was in local papers. Obviously now that has gone away, along with local reporting.
On a national level, subscriptions are done everywhere as people now switch to free sources. So there is no money to hire journalists and newsrooms and investigative reporters.
Then there's the facebook issue - circulation for free, with no fact checking and all the revenue goes to FB, not to the creator of the content.
Which forces a very good paper like WaPo to be bought by a billionaire. But should we have to rely on that? Do we expect them to cover him and his interests objectively?
I do believe that FB is the single worst actor in this, and that a change to their policies could massively alleviate the situation. But it's run by a moral husk who can barely keep his skin suit on straight. So not much hope there.
As society if we want real good journalism, we have to get back to paying for it. I pay for 3 services and it's not that bad (NYT/WaPo/Economist), but appreciate not everyone can.
On a national level, subscriptions are done everywhere as people now switch to free sources. So there is no money to hire journalists and newsrooms and investigative reporters.
Then there's the facebook issue - circulation for free, with no fact checking and all the revenue goes to FB, not to the creator of the content.
Which forces a very good paper like WaPo to be bought by a billionaire. But should we have to rely on that? Do we expect them to cover him and his interests objectively?
I do believe that FB is the single worst actor in this, and that a change to their policies could massively alleviate the situation. But it's run by a moral husk who can barely keep his skin suit on straight. So not much hope there.
As society if we want real good journalism, we have to get back to paying for it. I pay for 3 services and it's not that bad (NYT/WaPo/Economist), but appreciate not everyone can.
To someone with a stable work-from-home job, sure it's not much. But that doesn't describe the tens of millions being targeted by the propaganda, lies, and conspiracy theories flooding the internet in the past 4 months from Q Anon to all the COVID stuff (Bill Gates wants to microchip you in the vaccine, China created the virus to hurt the US economy, etc). To those people living paycheck to paycheck and worried about losing their job at any moment, with less than $400 savings, $60 will feel too much to spend when they might need it for food, rent, health care.
And it benefits Bezos in a less obvious way because it's not going to directly boost Q4 profits but having a more informed, stable population that isn't as easily swayed by propaganda and conspiracy theories benefits would benefit the largest retailer and number 3 advertising platform. Civil unrest, looting, conspiracy theories, all those are bad for Amazon's business over the long term.
not sure where that came from but the answer is no. I'd suspect that Bezos owns the WaPo for the opportunity to provide political influence to a mass audience, so it might be in his best interest to provide some or all of that for free, seeing as the impact to his personal net worth would be largely irrelevant.I will take a stab at this because it's something that's been bothering me. I agree that advertising revenue is proving difficult for media outlets in recent years but I think there's a good reason for that.
"Let's talk about your ad blocker" is one I've seen a lot lately. Sure, but let's talk about the lack of oversight on the ads you place on your website. The problem, from my perspective is that they are sold easy advertising solutions from companies like Google etc, who don't provide enough due diligence in screening advertisers, which results in users turning to ad blocking software or simply hitting the back button when this comes up on some outlets.
As @oneniltothearsenal noted, forcing users who want to access your content to put up with a short, unskippable ad for a few seconds isn't too onerous. They don't need to be 30 second spots, 10 or 15 will do. As I've mentioned, I think media companies have been sold short by internet advertising and are not doing it right at all. They can even provide sponsored content, like the Guardian does, to help pay the bills.
People can't or won't pay for more than a couple of subscriptions, which contributes to the problem in the OP.
Yes, which is a big debate. A certain Ukrainian scientist has however opened up all the articles.
The science community is also full of snobbery and archaical writing. I realised after getting my degree that I wanted nothing to do with that world.
I've heard that if you e-mail the author of a paper, they will usually send it to you for free (which they are allowed to do). Academics hate that system as much as anyone.
I might be lucky since both my professors have been quite young, but I've not heard anybody who likes this system.
Before I joined a lab, I knew about access issues, what I didn't know is that journals charge the authors between 2000 and 5000 dollars to publish a single article. And of course, peer review is done for free by academics. So the journal charges you to write, charges the public to read, charges universities to access, and their only costs are for their editing/printing staff and printing costs (which are increasingly irrelevant since it's almost all online). While the content is created and reviewed at no cost to them.
Sounds like I should get in the journal business.
Not too shabby indeed!
Leading digital marketing for a top tier firm so believe I’m qualified to explain this.
the first three results on google are paid placements for popular keywords. Advertisers: in this case NYT can set to their bidding such that if cookies indicate you are a subscriber, you will not be shown the ad. This is to avoid paying for traffic from existing customers (readers). They work under the assumption that you will visit the website anyways either by directly typing in the url, clicking a bookmark, some CRM activity or just scroll down on google till you find the organic entry.
Interesting, thank you.
I'd appreciate websites doing something like this, I hate buying a pair of shoes or having a premium subscription to Spotify and then being shown an advertisement for the same thing I just bought.
That’s poor but simpler execution which marketers sometimes do to cut corners. It’s called retargeting where ads are shown to people who visited a specific product page... normally it should be coupled with other qualifiers such as excluding people who have made a purchase or subscription, but as that requires more technical implementation, some employees just take the easy route and essentially just “turn on” retargeting without exceptions
library?