The LA Times's investigation into Purdue Pharma in 2016 revealed internal Purdue documents demonstrating the company's culpability in fueling the opioid crisis.
> The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing.
I don't have many recurring subscriptions, and I don't live in LA, but I signed up for the Times the day the reporting came out. So rare is quality investigative journalism these days.
Fast forward 3 years, and "Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were in negotiations to settle the claims for a payment of $10-$12 billion" (Wikipedia).
As far as I know the settlement was never finalized. And I don't want to make it seem that the Times was the only organization looking into Purdue. But I wish a fraction of that settlement could be re-invested into investigative journalism.
And if you think about it, there is a lot more money to go around.
Purdue was only responsible for roughly 8% of the market. That means whatever money we get from the Sacklers, in an ideal world, should only be 8% of what we ultimately collect!
That could fund a lot.
Now all that assumes an ideal and non-corrupt US where everyone is equal under the law and all politicians are not corrupt and judges and lawyers are not bent etc etc. So, it would not surprise me at all if even among the billionaires, the pattern of only the smaller drug dealers getting prosecuted continues to hold true. I'm hoping at least for some media pressure to help take down some of these larger dealers. Probably won't actually take the big boys down by itself, but it can't hurt to try. 92% is a lot of money to leave on the table. (Not to mention a lot of crime to let go unpunished.)
I think there is a lot to this idea. I've wondered whether something like the False Claims Act (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act) could be expanded or modified (or just used) to fund journalism.
Not perfect by any means but it would protect one of the most important functions of the papers.
Wonder if they still work for the Times?
Maybe if we rewarded the journalists behind the investigations more than the newspaper itself, they could all bandy together and create something that only does investigative journalism.
At the end of the day, if a doctor is prescribing medication against clinical guidelines, surely the doctor is at fault? If a pharma warehouse is burgled then it's on the burglars.
Am I missing something regarding this case? Did they mislead doctors?
Edit: Downvotes to -4 with no engagement for asking a question. This place has gone downhill rapidly
Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet?
I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription.
I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment.
New York Times $50/yr
Wall Street Journal $100
Bloomberg $420
LA Times $98
The Guardian £119
Washington Post ~$80
I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers.
A news combiner or aggregator would charge me for every article I select. At the end of the month, he charges my account credit card for the sum of all the articles.
He gathers up the money that all readers have paid for reading NYT articles, and remits it.
The newspapers don't have to manage micro-payments, journalism is saved, everyone is happy.
Blendle looks like they are trying to do this, but they've been in Beta since 2016.
>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers.
A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. lol Renewals are a pain if they try to shift you to the vanilla rates; no one has email support and it requires a call.
Anyway, I currently subscribe to NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Las Vegas Review Journal and The Guardian US Edition. I would subscribe to the NY Post if they allowed it. Former WSJ subscriber, but they do not offer long time subscriber discounts. Bloomberg is too expensive.
My main complaint is only a few allow yearly subscriptions.
I suspect that most people, like me, don't want to be "nickel and dimed" for their news. There are very few articles that I want to read bad enough to pay $1 for. Almost as few for $.50.
For $50/yr, that means I could read 1 NYT article per week, or I could have the yearly subscription. If I care about that newspaper at all, the subscription makes a lot more sense.
The others are more like 2/wk instead, but still, if I'm only reading 2 articles per week from them, that seems really low.
But even if the price per article made economic sense, there's psychology to worry about. I can't find them at the moment, but I've read articles detailing that people will pick the 'unlimited' option over the cheaper per-piece option even when they know they'd pay less in the long run on the per-piece.
So while you might prefer to buy each article, that's generally not how people work.
The issue is you're looking at the value from journalism wrong. If you were to actually pay the cost of producing 1 article, it would be significantly more than you would be willing to pay to read it.
What you are paying for when you pay for journalism is not the value you perceive from reading the individual articles, but of supporting the entire organization's on-going production of journalism. You are a patron more than a customer.
Pick the one you want to subscribe to and stick with it. I would recommend subscribing to your local newspaper if you're only going to pick one.
>I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article
That sounds... fucking terrible! I assure you that you are in the minority. The last thing in the world I want online is to have to think about every click costing money.
Before you know it everything would try to move that way.. I'll be paying 5 cents for every HN thread because of "server load" or something.
I don't know what the solution is.. ads are a stupid way to prop everything up.. but your suggestion is even worst in my opinion.
People pay $1200/yr for cable tv but don't want pay a couple hundred dollars a year for news. Thats the real problem, people don't value quality journalism.
The whole "competing for clicks" model seems to lead inescapably to a race to the bottom.
I currently subscribe to the Boston Globe, but 90% of the articles I read from them is the sports section, but (I hope) less than 90% of my money is spent covering the Red Sox and Patriots. If it was pay by the article the incentives would be terrible.
Some systems need not to be optimized to chase metrics, they need slack and produce value that is hard to measure. This is the kind of problem that the technology and business worlds have been uniquely incapable of solving.
This is similar to asking why there isn't a SaaS subscription service aggregating all of the SaaS products that lets you pay $1 to use any SaaS product for a day. It's not really sustainable to run a business by having people pay you smaller amounts and more sporadically.
Microtransactions in that way don't generate enough revenue to pay for the up-front work required to create a story like the oxycontin one mentioned in a separate thread here. A story like that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work to create. It's not feasible to spend all that up-front work all for the possibility someone will maybe pay $1 to read it.
How about this. If you read, say, 10 articles in a month from a publication, go ahead and purchase a subscription. Financially, it should cost you the same as your proposed microtransaction scheme, but it is much more sustainable for the business you're supporting.
a... micropayments platform? Maybe regulated by a cryptocurrency or embedded blockchain based on eyeball tracking? That would analyze the articles you like and dynamically assemble articles that are related? That would collect "quality" ratings on the article based on how deep you scrolled into it?
Outside all the tech wordsoup I just spouted, there is real potential in that. Maybe it needs to be couched in an independent rating group that advertisers somewhat trust (aka Nielsen in TV land), that could actually drive legitimate ad revenue/investment.
It is strange, given that all newspapers are facing the same apocalypse now for a decade, and they (I think?) were subject to the same media consolidation that affected other channels.
This is a reasonable suggestion. I too hit paywalls on all those papers several times per month and more, but not remotely enough to be worth paying a full subscription to almost any of them save the NYT (which I do have a shared family subscription to). A newspaper passport that allows some form of limited access to all of them, like a multi-resort annual ski passport, would be pretty useful.
I would expect said passport to cost in the range of $100-200 per year (though they'd want to bill it at something like $15 per month to avoid sticker shock), and allow me to read a good number of articles from each newspaper, but maybe not an unlimited amount. And the funds from the passport could be distributed proportionally to members based on which papers you actually read most frequently, like how a ski mountain passport works.
Things are much worse at Gannett, parent company of usatoday. Personally, being laid off on March 31! Almost every employee is effected at this time, either furloughed for few hours a week, pay cut or let go !!
I'm surprised. I'd think online news would be one of the industries benefitting from this crisis. Is the revenue tied to lack of conversions on online ads?
There is no point in advertising if no one can buy your product right now. Retailers, dine-in restaurants, movies, hotels, travel, pro sports, big clothing brands, concerts, events, tourism. The list goes on and it is massive. All these industries are huge spenders on advertising.
Then there are all the products and services that _could_ be bought, but consumers and companies have pulled back on because of uncertainty. Why waste money on ads for TVs, new phones, SaaS software, hiring, etc?
We left our ads running even though conversion rates dropped by 75% because Google offered something like $!00M in ad credits for small businesses. We applied for the program but haven't heard anything. It might be time for us (marketplace for quality contract work) to stop spending on ads too.
Since ads are a supply-demand market, supply must equal demand. There is nobody who can store ad slots in a warehouse and sell them later.
Since publishers are unlikely in the short term to take down their websites just because revenue falls, that has led to prices dropping to near zero on the open market.
The only real revenues now are from advertisers who have fixed price per impression or per click contracts, or who aren't smart enough to see they could drop their bids 90% and still win the same spots.
And nobody should be spending money beyond necessities right now - and stocking up on backup necessities.
It’s not the time to be buying a new car, it’s not the time to be trying new makeup products, and then we have other issues - it’s not the time for new films in the cinema, it’s not the time for sports, the lists go on.
It’s not time to buy new products, and certain subsets of products are no longer allowed to exist.
I hope advertising suffers a lot, to be honest; it’s an industry of corruption, manipulation, and lately, privacy violation.
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
I understand modern media is slinging fear and outrage because that's what gets clicks, but their whole business model is anachronistic. I've watched previously reasonable publications go from honest fact-based reporting to pure narrative/agenda based drivel. Like wow, Washington Post, what happened bro?
If most media organizations went out of business from the impending COVID economic catastrophe, I think that would be karmic justice. They did their part to cause it after all. The stress they've induced, the fear they've sown; they've earned every bad thing that befalls them.
It's time for a new paradigm. Long form journalism as we knew it is gone. But there are other formats ascending. Podcasts, Youtube series, etc are all possibilities to fill the void of in depth reporting. Time will tell if someone can figure it out, but our current media is a problem, not an answer.
In related news I have noticed that most things I search on Google don't show any ads at all. I went hunting for it and found that common household items are showing ads, but other things don't. And most certainly there is no obnoxiousness like an entire page of ads before the content.
Is there a good news site worth paying for today that actually has ALL news. It infuriates me that when I go to CNN.com's "news" site, there are ads at the bottom with things like "Before you review Amazon Prime, read this" and "America's #1 Stock Picker: 'Must buy now'" How can anyone be okay with this?
This is like picking up an astronomy journal that has ads in the back for psychics.
Upon closer inspection I see that cost per click is down quite a bit. But the increased traffic makes up for it.
Strange, I would think that in the current times, the value of a visitor is higher for many companies. If they sell digital goods and services, people should have more time now for those.
Do we know how much of their ad revenue is from ads on their website and ads in the paper version? From what I have seen from other places it is ads in the paper version of newspapers that are hit the most
I think what is even worse is what recovery looks like. Seems like we are going to be recovering for a very long time. We don't even know how deep the wounds are yet.
We did have a similar Artie and discussion yesterday about how people making videos for/on Google see the viewing skyrocketing and ad-revenue collapsing. Nobody is selling this nobody advertised, plus the (thank you - I haven't thought of this) when crises hit, the ad budget is the first one to get slashed.
Are newspapers going to start selling subscriptions without advertisements and trackers? I would love to pay for one. I recently canceled my subscription to my local paper over the unnecessary tracking: https://twitter.com/mcculley/status/1247247733133660160
We've already been seeing this to some degree with harder and harder paywalls--which mostly don't work besides lucrative niche and global brands. But I suspect we're increasingly headed towards a case where quality content is only available to those willing and able to pay for it.
Just curious if Google has suffered similar level of revenue damage. If so it would be really bad since they got a hundred thousand people on paycheck.
[+] [-] rgovostes|6 years ago|reply
> The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing.
I don't have many recurring subscriptions, and I don't live in LA, but I signed up for the Times the day the reporting came out. So rare is quality investigative journalism these days.
Fast forward 3 years, and "Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were in negotiations to settle the claims for a payment of $10-$12 billion" (Wikipedia).
As far as I know the settlement was never finalized. And I don't want to make it seem that the Times was the only organization looking into Purdue. But I wish a fraction of that settlement could be re-invested into investigative journalism.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
So few "journalists" do anything more than repeat twitter trends these days.
[+] [-] bilbo0s|6 years ago|reply
Purdue was only responsible for roughly 8% of the market. That means whatever money we get from the Sacklers, in an ideal world, should only be 8% of what we ultimately collect!
That could fund a lot.
Now all that assumes an ideal and non-corrupt US where everyone is equal under the law and all politicians are not corrupt and judges and lawyers are not bent etc etc. So, it would not surprise me at all if even among the billionaires, the pattern of only the smaller drug dealers getting prosecuted continues to hold true. I'm hoping at least for some media pressure to help take down some of these larger dealers. Probably won't actually take the big boys down by itself, but it can't hurt to try. 92% is a lot of money to leave on the table. (Not to mention a lot of crime to let go unpunished.)
[+] [-] jrumbut|6 years ago|reply
Not perfect by any means but it would protect one of the most important functions of the papers.
[+] [-] soperj|6 years ago|reply
Wonder if they still work for the Times? Maybe if we rewarded the journalists behind the investigations more than the newspaper itself, they could all bandy together and create something that only does investigative journalism.
[+] [-] ummonk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|6 years ago|reply
Am I missing something regarding this case? Did they mislead doctors?
Edit: Downvotes to -4 with no engagement for asking a question. This place has gone downhill rapidly
[+] [-] GnarfGnarf|6 years ago|reply
I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription.
I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment.
New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA Times $98 The Guardian £119 Washington Post ~$80
I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers.
A news combiner or aggregator would charge me for every article I select. At the end of the month, he charges my account credit card for the sum of all the articles.
He gathers up the money that all readers have paid for reading NYT articles, and remits it.
The newspapers don't have to manage micro-payments, journalism is saved, everyone is happy.
Blendle looks like they are trying to do this, but they've been in Beta since 2016.
[+] [-] pgrote|6 years ago|reply
A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. lol Renewals are a pain if they try to shift you to the vanilla rates; no one has email support and it requires a call.
Anyway, I currently subscribe to NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Las Vegas Review Journal and The Guardian US Edition. I would subscribe to the NY Post if they allowed it. Former WSJ subscriber, but they do not offer long time subscriber discounts. Bloomberg is too expensive.
My main complaint is only a few allow yearly subscriptions.
[+] [-] wccrawford|6 years ago|reply
For $50/yr, that means I could read 1 NYT article per week, or I could have the yearly subscription. If I care about that newspaper at all, the subscription makes a lot more sense.
The others are more like 2/wk instead, but still, if I'm only reading 2 articles per week from them, that seems really low.
But even if the price per article made economic sense, there's psychology to worry about. I can't find them at the moment, but I've read articles detailing that people will pick the 'unlimited' option over the cheaper per-piece option even when they know they'd pay less in the long run on the per-piece.
So while you might prefer to buy each article, that's generally not how people work.
[+] [-] tguedes|6 years ago|reply
What you are paying for when you pay for journalism is not the value you perceive from reading the individual articles, but of supporting the entire organization's on-going production of journalism. You are a patron more than a customer.
Pick the one you want to subscribe to and stick with it. I would recommend subscribing to your local newspaper if you're only going to pick one.
[+] [-] mrlala|6 years ago|reply
That sounds... fucking terrible! I assure you that you are in the minority. The last thing in the world I want online is to have to think about every click costing money.
Before you know it everything would try to move that way.. I'll be paying 5 cents for every HN thread because of "server load" or something.
I don't know what the solution is.. ads are a stupid way to prop everything up.. but your suggestion is even worst in my opinion.
[+] [-] adrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrumbut|6 years ago|reply
I currently subscribe to the Boston Globe, but 90% of the articles I read from them is the sports section, but (I hope) less than 90% of my money is spent covering the Red Sox and Patriots. If it was pay by the article the incentives would be terrible.
Some systems need not to be optimized to chase metrics, they need slack and produce value that is hard to measure. This is the kind of problem that the technology and business worlds have been uniquely incapable of solving.
[+] [-] ericmay|6 years ago|reply
Isn't that what products like Apple News are?
[+] [-] donohoe|6 years ago|reply
This one, Scroll, looks promising:
https://scroll.com/
[+] [-] claudiulodro|6 years ago|reply
Microtransactions in that way don't generate enough revenue to pay for the up-front work required to create a story like the oxycontin one mentioned in a separate thread here. A story like that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work to create. It's not feasible to spend all that up-front work all for the possibility someone will maybe pay $1 to read it.
How about this. If you read, say, 10 articles in a month from a publication, go ahead and purchase a subscription. Financially, it should cost you the same as your proposed microtransaction scheme, but it is much more sustainable for the business you're supporting.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|6 years ago|reply
Outside all the tech wordsoup I just spouted, there is real potential in that. Maybe it needs to be couched in an independent rating group that advertisers somewhat trust (aka Nielsen in TV land), that could actually drive legitimate ad revenue/investment.
It is strange, given that all newspapers are facing the same apocalypse now for a decade, and they (I think?) were subject to the same media consolidation that affected other channels.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|6 years ago|reply
I would expect said passport to cost in the range of $100-200 per year (though they'd want to bill it at something like $15 per month to avoid sticker shock), and allow me to read a good number of articles from each newspaper, but maybe not an unlimited amount. And the funds from the passport could be distributed proportionally to members based on which papers you actually read most frequently, like how a ski mountain passport works.
[+] [-] rock8y|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsweeney21|6 years ago|reply
Then there are all the products and services that _could_ be bought, but consumers and companies have pulled back on because of uncertainty. Why waste money on ads for TVs, new phones, SaaS software, hiring, etc?
We left our ads running even though conversion rates dropped by 75% because Google offered something like $!00M in ad credits for small businesses. We applied for the program but haven't heard anything. It might be time for us (marketplace for quality contract work) to stop spending on ads too.
[+] [-] londons_explore|6 years ago|reply
Since publishers are unlikely in the short term to take down their websites just because revenue falls, that has led to prices dropping to near zero on the open market.
The only real revenues now are from advertisers who have fixed price per impression or per click contracts, or who aren't smart enough to see they could drop their bids 90% and still win the same spots.
[+] [-] lostgame|6 years ago|reply
It’s not the time to be buying a new car, it’s not the time to be trying new makeup products, and then we have other issues - it’s not the time for new films in the cinema, it’s not the time for sports, the lists go on.
It’s not time to buy new products, and certain subsets of products are no longer allowed to exist.
I hope advertising suffers a lot, to be honest; it’s an industry of corruption, manipulation, and lately, privacy violation.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric_b|6 years ago|reply
If most media organizations went out of business from the impending COVID economic catastrophe, I think that would be karmic justice. They did their part to cause it after all. The stress they've induced, the fear they've sown; they've earned every bad thing that befalls them.
It's time for a new paradigm. Long form journalism as we knew it is gone. But there are other formats ascending. Podcasts, Youtube series, etc are all possibilities to fill the void of in depth reporting. Time will tell if someone can figure it out, but our current media is a problem, not an answer.
[+] [-] DenisM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdbaggy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmvp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipunchghosts|6 years ago|reply
This is like picking up an astronomy journal that has ads in the back for psychics.
[+] [-] TekMol|6 years ago|reply
What makes the situation so much different for the L.A. Times then for a website?
[+] [-] mtberatwork|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TekMol|6 years ago|reply
Strange, I would think that in the current times, the value of a visitor is higher for many companies. If they sell digital goods and services, people should have more time now for those.
[+] [-] generalpass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rypskar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annoyingnoob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryBemis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryBemis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcculley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivankirigin|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] irrational|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] donohoe|6 years ago|reply
Support journalism. Subscribe for a month and see how it works for you.
https://www.latimes.com/subscriptions/land-subscribe-evergre...
[+] [-] jsjddbbwj|6 years ago|reply
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