[another_poster]

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

[dimitrios1]

PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaffordable healthcare system. So please help society by becoming a well-informed citizen, and taking everything someone is trying to sell you as the truth with a heavy grain of salt.

[arpyzo]

I completely agree with your "grain of salt" advice. That said, to lean towards well-informed and away from rage and propaganda, I suggest subscribing to long-form periodicals, and avoiding "here's today's list of horrible things that happened in the world" style publications.

[uncomputation]

And what headline are they supposed to run with long-standing, systemic issues? “US Healthcare System Still Bad”? News is about current events. Things happening, not the state of the world as a whole.

If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The free press is the only private organization mentioned in the US Constitution and often called the fourth branch of government because of the oversight that it provides.

[stusmall]

This doesn't really hold up in a conversation about paywalls. Clickbate generated ad revenues isn't typically from sites funded by subscriptions. Subscriptions actually help fight that.

[peppermint_tea]

it is fine, Biden said all of this will be fixed in the union speech. Like Trudeau in Canada, he says all the right thing, hard to disagree with him... let's see if the action will follow the words. Personally, I am disillusioned with all of this mess, NATO just pushing forward for decades, now we are in this mess and the ukranian people will be used as "chair à canon" and the russian people will be broke to an extent hard to conceive, even for the low tier of poor american people, which I am also sympathetic too. what a mess.

/rant

[pier25]

We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough.

[NikolaNovak]

Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.

[jrockway]

You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)

[jmckib]

Washington Post lets you cancel through their website without talking to anyone. It's also significantly cheaper than NYT last I checked. I'm a subscriber, and I think it's a pretty solid paper especially for national politics coverage.

[wrycoder]

How about a group subscription on Substack, distributed to the authors based on the log of the number of page views?

[yupper32]

I pay for NYT, but I can't subscribe to the paper of every article I want to read. I need some kind of group subscription for it to be feasible.

[munk-a]

I would pay for NYT but their unsubscription process has traditionally been notoriously and unnecessarily difficult. I have a personal moral objection to giving money to any company that makes it more difficult to stop giving them money than to start.

Yes, there have also been major factual blunders, but for the vast majority of information they seem to genuinely try and deliver vetted facts.

[endisneigh]

Well wouldn’t the answer be to rely solely on NYT for your news?

Ironically the real solution to this is more ads, but people will block that too lol

[zdw]

Ah, the NYT that helped justify the US invasion of Iraq based on falsehoods? That NYT?

Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.

[rplnt]

I don't want to pay a subscription, I want to pay for content I actually consume. I hate that paywalls incentivize to write clickbait even more than ads do. I hate opinion pieces pretending to be something else. I hate paying for copy-pasted texts from news agencies or press releases. But as with TV, you have to pay in bulk and if the good content is sold separately it's extremely expensive.

[coolso]

The NYT is my main source of news, but I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting it - much as I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting Fox or CNN.

The truth is the NYT is a heavily biased, establishment bootlicking far-left progressivism propogating propaganda machine. They will do whatever it takes to present the opposing view as racist, supremacist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-gay, and bigoted, while anything far worse but on "their side" is handled with kid gloves. Trump sneezed? Well that's racist, plus he wants you to drink bleach, literally, so we're going to cover that heavily for the next week. Something bad happened? It's Actually Trump's Fault. Here's Why. Trump was totally going to destroy America, except, well, that didn't actually happen, at all, but they're still trying to push that narrative.

Biden bungled Afghanistan, gas prices and inflation is through the roof, Putin invaded Ukraine under his watch, Biden very prematurely declared "independence from the virus" a year ago (!!!), Biden flip flops almost as much as Trump, has more deaths under his belt from COVID than Trump... everything is swept under the rug, a passing mention in all but the most egregious examples, and even then they treat him gently. I recently read an opinion column from a long-standing columnist there basically telling us how we should all support Biden because he just, like, has a really tough job, you know, and would you even wish such an important and consequential job on your worst enemy?

The NYT needs help for sure, but not financially, unfortunately.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Print media subscriptions are some of the best money I've spent. No bullshit, few unobtrusive ads, no tracking, no distractions. Supporting free press.

[z3c0]

Fair enough, but I often wonder if this new arrangement in the availability of quality information will cause any problems for the lower class. A lot of political rhetoric does gear itself towards the poor, after all.

[another_poster]

Agreed, I think it’s currently causing problems in the US.

In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from the wealthy, so their coverage skews towards their interests and conversational style.

I think the government should provide newspaper subscription vouchers to the poor.

[DeWilde]

True, but if a newspaper is open for bots to help promote it through SEO, I won't have many qualms about bypassing the flimsy paywall.