The "morning briefing", which gives me a brief summary of key news items to go with my morning coffee, alone would have been worth the $3.75 a week.
Had none of the issues OP notes on getting an annual subscription - and at the NYT price point, I'm ashamed it took me this long to pay for good journalism.
Independent of what rag you support, if you don't currently pay for journalistic work, please consider doing so. The dollar figures are minimal and constitute a tremendous boost for the Fourth Estate.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8U939.h...
I have and will continue consuming my news for free. If an institution like the NYT dies because people don't support it financially then I'm ok with that. Someone else will take their place with a model that works.
AP and Reuters themselves are good too (even if you're typically used to reading about them as a source rather than a direct publication).
PBS and CSpan are good but underfunded. Other US news is too biased and full of pro-US propaganda which gets tiresome in a hurry. Plus if I wanted to read unverified "anonymous's sources" or "report: <some other publication>" I'd just read Reddit comments or Tweets. Unfortunately that's largely what US "news" is these days, unverified facts and others repeating those facts until they're true.
The Times is still among the most trusted sources for in-depth coverage; their perceived slant might be due to the topics they choose to put more focus on.
Another option is Blendle, which lets you pay per article. I don't know how many news orgs they have so far, though.
Otherwise WaPo has been good - but obviously slants to D.C. politics.
The end result is not too different from this:
https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/19/how-to-read-news-like-a-s...
I'm asking because your process could equally be used by someone very well informed, and someone who had managed to misinform themself severely.
The latter being due to cognitive errors where they lacked enough information to form a valid judgment, and Daniel Kahneman's "What You See Is All There Is" process silently filling in the gaps. I see this frequently in people overtly skeptical of the media.
But on the other hand, skeptical people are also often correct, as the media warrants critical reading.
Also those mini crosswords in the NYT app are pretty fun.
I'm all for supporting alternative means of journalism, but there will be a huge, huge vacuum if these large newspapers fail.
What stops any such institution fleshing out the details, then only showing those that support their narrative?
You need accountability to get quality, You also need transparency to get accountability.
I'm all for supporting local news but if I want quality journalism on a nationwide / global topic I'm not heading to my local paper.
Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had.
I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes that American monoliths as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs, pursuing the task without compensation, training, or for that matter, sufficient training to make public officials even care who it is they're lying to or who they're withholding information from.
Indeed, the very phrase 'citizen journalist' strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbour who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbour. He is not, in any sense, a 'citizen social worker'. Just as the neighbour with a garden hose and good intentions is not a 'citizen firefighter'. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters."
- David Simon
I get social media is how the results of journalism get distributed, but what funds the journalism itself if traditional news/media companies go out of business? Is twitter or facebook going to fund investigative journalists? What's the business model for a company looking to pay people to research and write about things if 'social media is the new journalism'? Do we rely on non-profits/donations?
Or are you proposing we'll get all our news in a decentralized manner via people posting what's going on around them?
This right here is why PayPal won online payments. They're extremely consumer friendly. One button cancellation, no fucking around. I don't even bother going to sites any more, I just open PayPal and hit cancel.
I basically won't work with anything that's not PayPal or Bitcoin these days due to hassles like this.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have any experience getting their credit card company to cancel all future payments to a company? Is this easy to do?
(I have a card, but am not otherwise affiliated with them.)
For example, people regularly cancel cards or move and assume "the gym will figure it out" only to discover two years later that that $20/month bill is now a $600+ bill and they're being hounded by a collections agency.
Credit scores make this even more risky (if you care about such things).
Bitcoin is still at the point where having it in your checkout process will confuse most people for most consumer sites, which means decreased conversion, and lack of take-up.
PayPal require large amounts of capital to be held as collateral, which has a significant impact on the cash flow of a business, and can make it essentially a non-starter to work with them.
By all means limit to those if you value the UX highly enough, and I agree that they have a great UX in some ways for consumers. But do realise that it cuts out entire categories of companies.
Even Google I now pay via PayPal - a few businesses who can't for legal reasons do business with PayPal or for trust reasons (ie: chargebacks cost them big as their side of the deal is irrevetsible) like game key sites I do via Bitcoin.
What companies are cut out like this?
Certainly not as simple as on online form though.
I actually vastly prefer the FT website to NYT/WP/WSJ, but would very much appreciate the prompt US-centric news feeds. I know it's Euro-centric and Britain-based, so I wanted to ask.
I actually do like a bit more Europe/World coverage.
I don't subscribe to FT, though - I barely finish The Economist each week.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/conflic...
edit: spelling ;-)
That does not appear to be true.
> Exempt Organizations include charities or certain non-profit organizations, organizations engaged in political solicitations or surveys, or Sellers or Telemarketers that call ONLY consumers with whom they have an established business relationship or from whom they have obtained the express written agreement to call.
But already have there product wide available in Netherlands and Germany
It's worth checking out if you have a separate email for things like that.
Although honestly, not shocked by anything here.
Nobody measures the lost repeat business due to these retention strategies because most people don't look beyond the current fiscal year.
Either way, i'm just a pessimist, going digital isn't easy for any legacy company and it's clear they're all struggling.
I've concluded the same about informational media such as books, magazines, music. If I'm paying attention to it and getting value, it's generally worth paying for and not agonizing about the price.
Newspapers all have digital departments, yet you can only cancel your subscription by calling a phone number...
From a european view, I think this should be regulated: enable the same channel used for easy subscription also for easy cancellation.
I absolutely agree that quality journalism is essential and should be paid for. But aim higher: In addition to subscribing, try to find a funding method that actually will work in the long run. Specifications, in no order:
A) Journalists have sufficient funds to do quality work, earn a decent living, and attract talented, dedicated people to the profession.
B) Journalists can speak truth to power and to an angry Internet mob. They are free from influence by their funders, to a great degree.
C) The quality work is as widely distributed as possible. This is essential: If only subscribers can read it, then only tiny portion of the online world can benefit and it's not part of the public conversation. Instead of the Internet dream (very achievable) of distributing valuable content effortlessly, we're back to the old days of it being available only to a few subscribers and everyone else subsists on 'fake news'.
It's a question that's been asked many times, but so far nobody has solved it (and specification C is usually ignored).
> The Scott Trust was originally created in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust
2. https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/oct/24/scott-tru...
To then cancel it, I had to make a call and stay on it for half hour. I still can't figure out who's coming with these hackneyed marketing "solutions" at media houses.
By analogy I trade money for code, and I won't sell code to you (nothing personal, just can't), so you can wonder how good my code is, but it doesn't really matter because I won't sell you my code regardless of its quality level.
That and all the great updates on OpenBSD development!
I subscribed because I like the paper and the newsstand in my building closed. But the process is bizarre -- They only let you subscribe in weird increments of weeks vs. months. Then you get what they call "bonus" weeks, but the outcome is that the billing system ends up double-billing you for up to one week, and you can't predict when the bills will come.
I think this type of interaction might make sense for a different type of customer. I imagine people who are getting the physical version of a newspaper might be older or less tech-savvy so the "bad old way" of waiting in a call center queue on hold might be what they are expecting instead of a fancy complicated web interface.
