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Because journalism costs money, and journalists have bills to pay. If you don't want to pay money for news, some billionaire will happily pay it for you: https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo
Thank you. It really bothers me that there are so many people who expect journalism to fall from trees, or even that they're somehow owed it.
The situation for the last 20 years - the internet free-for-all with plunging ad revenues and spotty quality - is a historic anomaly. Before that it was normal to pay for journalism, and masses of people did. Seems we're slowly moving back to that model and it's not a moment too soon.
That said, there have always been free sources of non-billionaire-controlled news in the form of state broadcasters like PBS, BBC, CBC. In mainland Europe there are several that publish in English, including DW, France24, Der Spiegel. They have their biases, of course, but they employ professional journalists who take their jobs seriously. And there are more and more nonprofit publishers too: ProPublica and The Guardian spring to mind but there are a ton of specialist outlets too, financed by readers or philanthropic foundations.
To be fair, state controlled (or state financed) media has its own set of problems, depending on the country and historic period, and things can change fast with certain governments.
Sure. But apparently subtle differences are in fact important. For example, RAI, the Italian broadcaster, is traditionally kept on a tight leash by the government, and everyone in Italy understands that. The BBC by contrast is almost completely independent due to its unusual setup involving a charter. PBS is partly accountable to its audience directly because it begs them for donations. Russian state TV is obviously just the propaganda arm of the Kremlin. Where the money comes from is important but it doesn't tell the whole story.
For sure, but even the BBC has been under heavy criticism lately for some bias.
The BBC has always been under heavy criticism for bias, it's inevitable given its role. But the point is that the bias is not structural: its journalists are not worried about losing their jobs if they offend the government or a billionaire owner. The BBC's bias is the sum of the biases of the journalists, who tend to come from a certain section of society and see the world in certain predictable way. It's quite hard to address that.
Time for "Journalism Dollars"? Similar to Democracy Dollars.
You get X amount of money that you can distribute to news sources however you choose, if you don't do anything with it, it jist goes to PBS and NPR.
Vouchers, basically, as some countries (Sweden is one) do for schools. A pretty good idea IMO.
We're not in the mid-twentieth century. Journalism hasn't been a thing for decades.
Why is that the problem of online discussion spaces? News sites can paywall their content, but that doesn't mean anyone else has to allow paywalled links.
It doesn't. Doesn't mean anyone has to allow anything besides fox news either.
Just pointing out that journalism costs money and certain stories are very expensive to research and cover. As many things in life, you get what you pay for.
Well a majority of the ones I see seem to rather be lazy garbage editorializing a single quote or study that would be more informative presented by itself.
What I want is to talk about things with people who have also read the relevant context, news site paywall subscriptions prevent that even if you pay because everybody else will have only read the headline. Or they would, if they weren't so easy to pirate.
You can apply the same for movies, games, theater plays, theme parks, travel... so you just don't pay for anything just because you want to talk to someone about it?
If my primary interest in something is talking to people about it, then gatekeeping destroys its value to me. If my interest in a game is its multiplayer, but nobody plays it anymore, then yeah not only would I not pay for it I also would not spend the harddrive space to install it even if it were free.
Imagine you're organizing a book club. Wouldn't it make sense to require that prospective books to read are available through the library system? The nature of a book club is that you'll have to read things you might not be interested in on your own, but it's worth the effort because of the opportunity to share and gain perspectives of the other people there. Reading by itself is already an investment of time and effort, getting people to organize enough to have a discussion about something is already difficult, so the endeavor has a clear interest in avoiding the presence of an additional, financial, barrier to a successful discourse.
"You get what you pay for" doesn't make sense here. The paywall makes it worthless for the given purpose whether or not you pay, which is why it would make sense for people administering link aggregator/discussion sites like this one to ban paywalled links.
So we shouldn't have communities around videogames (or board games), professional sports, traveling, food, clothes, most hobbies, or anything else, because it costs money? Even in a bookbclub, the library won't have 15 copies of the same book, some people will have to buy it, unless your book club comprises 2 people.
You get what you pay for is exactly right.
IME this is not so much a problem because people are using ebooks and you can digitally check out books from other libraries than the one closest to you. If there is a lack of copies, that could be grounds for going with a different book.
This is not at all what I'm saying. Does wanting to ban paywall links equate to wanting journalism to die? No, but it makes sense to do, and if it making sense to do conflicts with the business model, that's not a moral problem because people aren't obligated to help companies make their (imo stupid and harmful in this case) decisions work out for them.
Are you suggesting that Propublica and The Guardian for example to have a hard paywalls?
Paywalls literally exist to support billionaires and their media empires.
Seriously? You may want to consider widening your news source, maybe.
I follow more than 300 news sources by RSS (all without paywalls), how wide you want me to go?
I did not mean 'widen' in that sense—reading and being informed is not about the quantity of news one can swallow in a day, you know—but with the idea of reading different sources.
Also, may I ask how can you be reading three fucking hundred news sources regularly (not daily, obviously) with any sort of attention?
I don't know what are you digging into.
I read by hour, due to my free time(usually it does fetch 50 articles per hour, much less on holidays and I only read the interesting ones to me.)
It's pretty perfect for me.
Digging into?
I just say that reading news may be more enriching or, if you prefer, more useful when it's not practiced like if it was a sausage eating contest.
You seem to enjoy eating a lot of news, that's ok if that's your thing, I'm only suggesting that eating less and more selectively could help you realize that all pay-walled content is not created for 'enriching billionaires', like you said earlier. Don't get me wrong though, this is just a suggestion and you're more than welcome to keep stuffing yourself with as much news as you fancy.
50 articles per hour? That's not reading, that's scrolling. Which is perfectly fine, here again don't get me wrong, but scrolling a list of titles does not equal reading them (aka, getting a clear idea of what the author wrote and then be able to summarize their argument reliably).
50 articles per hour means spending at most 1 minute and somewhere between 10 or 20 seconds to read each article (with enough attention to be able to understand what is read) and that's only if one is using every single minute of that hour, not doing anything else like scratching one's nose not even yawning out of exhaustion.
I'm impressed this is perfect for you, and glad you found a system that works wonders. It certainly would not be perfect for me. Even though I consider myself an intensive reader I'm also not much into stuffing myself like you may have understood already. Also, I do not worry much about people sharing links to pay-walled content since it rarely worries me when I can't read one specific article.
I don't get your opinion.
I scroll in my feed for articles that interest me and ignore the others.
Example:
I am not interested into both articles, so I would ignore them till I find a interesting thing to read. How much time did it take for me here for 2 articles? 5 seconds max.
If I found a article that I am interested in, then I read it which would take anywhere between 5-20 mins.
Following less news sources, won't benefit me at all.
Anyway, you seem to be focused on arguing without having any real argument to defend your opinion.
You seem pretty sure about that, I would not want to contradict you the slightest. I will get back to reading my (sometimes) pay-walled but billionaire-free articles. Thx for sharing your opinion, have a nice day.
You are making claims and arguing in a way that prove to me that you don't have any arguments to defend your opinion, neither articles to read in general.
I am sure All the billionaires who own pay-walled media companies, thank you for your contributions.
Thank you for arguing with me for several comments, without having any thing to say.
Have a nice day.