So much for that dream.
So much for that dream.
208 comments
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Charge your phone
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Yes officer, I’d like to charge this phone with battery.
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I doubt they can read this. Rip ops phone
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OP's phone kept posting to keep Lemmy active until the bitter end. o7
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Perhaps he likes to live dangerously, and in the moment?
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He totally didn't knew about that
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It's giving me Vietnam flashbacks.
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The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven "news". Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.
Personally, I'm excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I'm hopeful we'll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.
High quality journalism can't exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can't afford it, visiting a local library for example.
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I know "state-funded media" is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it's always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.-
BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.
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The other nice thing for "state funded media" is they often have translations for international audiences
For example CBC / Radio-Canada also have an international page, Radio-Canada International offered in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic etc.
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I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.
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Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
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I honestly don't think this is a bad idea for the US...for now at least. Right now your typical options for official statements from government leaders are either through (1) politically polarized media like CNN or Fox, (2) paid subscription to better journalism, or (3) social media monopolies like Twitter (X) and Instagram. Can we really not fund something entirely independent of a mega-corporation to get official info out?
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The US government broadcaster is the Voice of America. For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now. Some Europeans may be familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that is also US-funded by the same agency as the Voice of America.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting (PBS), both have news. They receive government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is supposed to be objective although there have been issues in recent history. They also have corporate donors, which could affect objectivity.
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Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.
This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.
The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.
With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.
And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.
So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We ham fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.
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I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.
The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.
Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.
Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.
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Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.
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Everyone hates ads but no one wants to pay for it lol
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Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
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Well there are 3 alternatives.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
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This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.
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Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
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This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they'd remained a subscription service only.
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I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix...
Only so much blood in this here stone.
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With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I'm kinda soured on Streaming these days.
Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.
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No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today's ads, because they're literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn't have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I'm reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.
Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn't our fault for being pushed so far that we're fed up with it.
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I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.
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Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.
Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.
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That’s why I use an inverted ad-block list. I see ads unless they get intrusive or unreasonable, and then I enable blocking on the site.
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Firefox has an autoplay block setting, and I've never had it fail me.
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You can get NY times for just $4 a month. I personally think it's worth it.
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When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they've made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I've decided it wasn't worth it. The Guardian isn't paywalled at least.
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I'm perfectly willing to pay what I pay for the actual news paper for the subscription. The subscription turns out to be about 10x.
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If you are defending ADS (of all things) you are definitely part of the problem.
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I’m defending the right for people to make a profit from their labour 🤷♂️ even if ads aren’t my preference either
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There's nothing wrong with advertising in of itself, society has lived with advertisements for goods and services for a long time. Unless you're unreasonably susceptible to suggestion you should be able to safely navigate them. Some sites take the mick with how they present them but they have to make money somehow.
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Facts are behind a paywall and bullshit flows for free.
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There is a reason for it, isn't there? Bullshit is motivated to manipulate, and spread propaganda. While, truth based journalism needs professionals to do due diligence. While we can argue for better journalism, wishing for everything to be free ain't gonna work.
Unless we are okay with.. Ads. We won't tolerate that either, would we?
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NYT has a lot of bullshit tbf
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This is why we can't have nice things.
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It's not talked about enough how "traditional news" is culpable for the rise of "fake news" by locking vital information and reporting behind exactly these kinds of pay walls, thus causing people to seek alternative free means instead. This is how fake news sites thrive; pushed into the forefront by traditional media who refuse to adapt their business models to the modern landscape.
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How do you feel about government subsidies being used to bolster a free press? From past examples like oil, they don't become a shell company of the governments whims and I feel journalism is just as important to an educated populace in comparison to oil for our commerce.
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This actually isnt a terrible strategy. Right now the news sites require profit for survival. Leading them to do well frankly... Whatever it takes to make that happen. Which leads us to the road we are on now. If their survival was subsidized and they were simply paid to provide the service of good journalism. This would be beneficial as journalism at its core is a PUBLIC service. That is currently being sold as a commercial commodity.
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I am for it
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You can't have actually free and truthful news as long as people need money to survive
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I never said free, I said they needed to adapt their business model. I also never said the reason didn't make sense, but the ramifications remain the same even if there is good reason for the practice. Whether by design or not, they still share culpability.
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Looks like a login wall. While I get the “joke” or irony, Journalism has never been free. Servers, journalists, investigations, and apps still cost money. So did printing and delivery. There are countless sources of information online so you do not have to join The Times but for some the journalistic value is worth the price.
Wikipedia offers knowledge to the world for free and are maintained through donation (including myself) and philanthropy. It has its issues but provides free information.
I think we can a enjoy a variety of options. Paid journalism, ad based news, and “free” community supported. There likely are other models we can adopt.
Other free sources I use. Roca News app Gabe Fleisher’s Wake up to Politics Knowledge at Wharton
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Aye, very much this.
I don't know it is in other countries but here in Germany some "baseline" news is provided from money collected via a tax, which is very awesome as it ensures everyone has access to at least some news source. On top of that there's Wikipedia, as you say, but beyond that everyone still has to be aware that investigative journalism takes a lot of time and effort.
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This is an inherent problem with the concept of free information. I would love universal and free information, but that doesn't take into consideration that quality information requires labor. Wikipedia isn't free of that either, the labor is just largely unpaid.
At the end of the day, we need to pay journalists, editors, curators, and contributors. If you want quality news, you need quality people. And to get quality people, you need generous compensation, whether that comes from subscriptions, advertisements, or taxes.
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That was the dream.... Now it's....
Holy shit, someone get this man a charging cable.
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Now it makes sense. The dream of universal access to knowledge was actually the iphone's - and it was because the phone was dying, and seeing death visions, like life flashing before it's eyes.
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Bypass Paywalls Clean will do the job for you.
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A former newspaper.
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It's not a paywall, just a login wall. The account is free. Still funny however.
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Hopefully when you log in you haven't reached your limit of free articles for the month if you want to read it.
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Just curious --- how would you like this to work? If you want high quality journalism, you need to pay journalists.
You can pay them through ads, but 1) this is annoying, and 2) people just install ad blockers.
You can have state-sponsored media, which can work reasonably well...or can end up a propaganda machine.
Or...you can pay.
Journalism is not a crazy lucrative career for most. Financially, most of the folks writing for NYT would be better off in PR --- and I don't think that's a good thing for society.
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Or you can have voluntary sponsorship like NPR has done for decades and has high quality journalism because of it. Yes, they get a tiny bit of government money. Nowhere near enough to operate on. And they get corporate sponsors. Who they report against when they have a story about.
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Sadly, NPR is nowhere near as unbiased as they used to be. I listened to it recently, and it's just not good anymore. They engage in both sides whataboutism, only ask softball questions, and generally seem to toe the line of appearing neutral but not risking their corporate funding.
Now, if they didn't need corporate funding, that would be ideal. I believe that would lead to more unbiased reporting.
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As a paying NYT subscriber, I'd just like to add that unfortunately they still advertise to me.
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Adverts have been in newspapers since forever. They're giving you the full experience.
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You should charge your battery, sir!
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I found the image on Mastodon, so it's not mine, but I agree. I never let my battery get below 50% if I can help it. If it gets below 20, I'm in panic mode.
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Probably a Capricorn 🙄
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Universal access, as in everyone need to pay 8 dollars a month for the privilege.
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Yeah, I still dont get why people can't just work for for free! Greedy bastards.
Especially publishers. It's not like they play an important role in modern society, at all. They can do research, perform interviews and write stories during the day, and then, if they absolutely need food and a friggin' roof over their heads, they can work at McDonald's or something in the evenings.
/s
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I'd rather my taxes go to public services than being diluted into the pockets of middle-men. Publishers are still be valuable, but they have to adapt like everyone else. Education, healthcare, and information... sounds like a recipe for too much equality; better to stomp that out and continue forth, like the term "future" doesn't exist for everyone
Why would I want change when I'm finally getting the hang of things? That sounds difficult and scary, and I might have to adjust my lifestyle... and for what? Other people!? Morals!? Justice!? We already have those, otherwise I would've never made it to where I am today... backslash-fucking-s
If democracy wasn't constantly undermined by greed, we might actually solve real problems. But problems are too far in the future for me, when I'll no longer be alive to care. Continue status-quo than, nothing we can do
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I choose to believe the author did this intentionally.
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Pro tip: Adblock + JavaScript disabled (Ublock Origin can do both) will block most paywalls
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Ublock can unblock paywalls?
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Most of the time you can delete modern paywalls from the website by editing the HTML in your browser.
There are also several extensions that claim they can, uBlock is one of them.
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You should look for an archive (dot) today that can get you around those paywalls.
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Their site is broken right now.
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Easiest way of doing that is firefox reading mode , it takes one click and can bypass most if not all paywalls !
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We need a Netflix for online journalism/news. I'm happy to pay for my news... But I'm tired of subscriptions for everything. And basically all the major news organizations want their own damn subscriptions.
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Check your local library. They usually have subscriptions for newspapers/magazines that you can access digitally with your library card.
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Netflix for online journalism/news
So, like, regular removals of older material and ever increasing prices and restrictions? Oh, yeah, sign me up.
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Bad comparison, since Netflix is just one of many streaming subscriptions now.
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I meant like the early days.
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"democracy dies in darkness..."
Is my favorite ironic walled garden gate keeping paywall byline... I think the Washington post uses it.
It wouldn't be so dark if the paywall wasn't blocking the light...
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All this talk of state-sponsored/subsidized news/media gives me the wiggins, at least as someone who lives in the US. I'm sure people smarter than myself could come up with a bullet proof system to prevent abuse, but really, I would have little faith it would stand the test of time. I feel like any protections you put in place would be eroded eventually. All it takes is one "emergency" or "disaster". Maybe I'm wrong. It just feels so 1984ish.
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I'd say German state media is going OK. Its anything but perfect but definetly doesn't kiss any parties ass
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I wish I could just pay per article sometimes. Let the subscription be optional for people who read a lot from that source.
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Just download Firefox, install UBlock Origin, and disable JavaScript.
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And if that fails, enable reader mode on top.
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That person who took the screenshot doesn't care about anything in his life. Look at his phone's charge.
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That was sad and infuriating. Pirates are our only hope.
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12ft.io is a really good site for getting around these kinds of paywalls.
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12ft has been disabled for this site
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Archive.today works with more sites, such as NYT.
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Once upon a time tabloids were a joke and everyone knew they were a joke.
And then one day tabloids just became news sources and everyone decided their publishings were journalism.
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And people lost the distinction between tabloid and journalism, so when journalism now requests money to keep going, it gets scoffed at.
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News, and I would argue journalism in general, is not what the term knowledge is referring to in that sentence.
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I fucking hate this bullshit!
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Literally a game of whack-a-mole regarding paywalls and adblockers.
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You won't obtain much in the way of knowledge from the NYT anyway.
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Have they fallen that much? Or am I confusing them? Because I remember they were pretty well established and did comparatively good investigations?
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They probably still do a lot of those, but recently they've been using opinion writers to create outrage bait with writings they should know better than to print.
In the last few years they have been willing to post a large amount of transphobic nonsense. To the point where early in the year almost 1000 current or former contributors signed an open letter complaining about the issue (and made a callback to the paper doing roughly the same thing with gay and lesbian people in the 60s through 80s)
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They were "the paper of record" but they've fallen a long ways in the digital era. They were always slightly left and pro corporate, but as they transitioned to online they dropped in quality big time. They purposely make the line between editorial and news far more vague and pump out a ton of articles that are basically propaganda.
They do still occasionally do a good thing every now and then. They developed some impressive ways to display articles alongside pictures in a way that was satisfying on a website and not just like print. They also do occasionally write a decent article or have a deep dive into a topic that does its due diligence, but it's becoming more rare.
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208 comments