Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches.
People don’t want to pay for something they don’t think is quality.
It’s not like these companies would clean up their act if they got another viable revenue stream. We can see that because when companies do, they regularly just keep the extra cash.
What you’d need is a boot strapped organization that actually had standards people cared about and didn’t bend. Its an impossibly hard situation, yes, but that does not make your snark prescient or clever. More than that, it doesnt at all back up your conclusion that people don’t want to pay for quality journalism. It just doesnt exist, because it gets bought out by billionaires.
anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.
Yet the only ones you listed are the billionaire backed ones. Curious.
Almost as if your argument is in bad faith because you yourself don’t have any great examples of the sort of thing people would want to support that are also news outlets with reporters, and so you are forced to use bad examples.
Ill give you an example though, just like the other person pointed out, there are smaller sources popping up everywhere. Even youtube journalism such as HowTown are pockets of not yet corporate information sources that people are fine with supporting.
I listed ones that are not random newspapers, what the other commenter suggested. I don’t have examples of the sort of thing people would want to support, because people don’t want to support anything. Not with ads, not with money, just everything must be free to them.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
I never thought about it this way but it makes total sense. We get fed what rich people buy for us to consume… <cough… cough … fox news>
People don’t want to pay for something they don’t think is quality.
It’s not like these companies would clean up their act if they got another viable revenue stream. We can see that because when companies do, they regularly just keep the extra cash.
What you’d need is a boot strapped organization that actually had standards people cared about and didn’t bend. Its an impossibly hard situation, yes, but that does not make your snark prescient or clever. More than that, it doesnt at all back up your conclusion that people don’t want to pay for quality journalism. It just doesnt exist, because it gets bought out by billionaires.
It was bought by billionaires after people stopped paying.
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
I don’t thing the likes of wsj, nyt or similar are “random newspapers”, and they still get hate for asking for money. Bezos finds that useful.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.
Yet the only ones you listed are the billionaire backed ones. Curious.
Almost as if your argument is in bad faith because you yourself don’t have any great examples of the sort of thing people would want to support that are also news outlets with reporters, and so you are forced to use bad examples.
Ill give you an example though, just like the other person pointed out, there are smaller sources popping up everywhere. Even youtube journalism such as HowTown are pockets of not yet corporate information sources that people are fine with supporting.
I listed ones that are not random newspapers, what the other commenter suggested. I don’t have examples of the sort of thing people would want to support, because people don’t want to support anything. Not with ads, not with money, just everything must be free to them.