[hamhock666]

Don't people already pay for things like the NYT?

I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.

[Telemakhos]

Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...

The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.

[pegasus]

If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.

[bboygravity]

It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda.

I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?

[echelon_musk]

It's depressing to see the paper that once had the courage to publish the Pentagon Papers seen as publishing political propaganda.

What alternative revenue incentive do you see that could support independent journalism?

[IggleSniggle]

It's a form of tithing. You give to the propagandists providing the slant you align with, even if they're wealthy billionaires. It's been common for belief communities for centuries. Poor people do it for access to wealthy individuals or as a form of gambling on the promises of the propaganda, and wealthy individuals, when they give, are also doing so for influence (access to poor people en masse). Its propaganda all the way down.

[Symmetry]

Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.

[Onavo]

NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.

[bobthepanda]

Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.

There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.

[Mtinie]

I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.

For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...

[mejutoco]

> The problem is that nobody would pay for it

User "api" said "nobody", so that is enough to refute their point. Some people would might pay for it, it seems.

[thaumasiotes]

> NYT is an exception

> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.

How is the NYT an exception?