Ask Slashdot: What Online News Is Worth Paying For? 361
schnell writes "The increasing prevalence of online news paywalls and 'nag walls' (e.g. you can only read so many articles per month) has forced me to divide those websites into two categories: those that offer content that is unique or good enough to pay for vs. those that don't. Examples of the former for me included The Economist and Foreign Policy, while other previous favorite sites The New York Times and even my hometown Seattle Times have lost my online readership entirely. I also have a secret third category — sites that don't currently pay/nag wall, but I would pay for if I had to — Ars Technica and Long Form come to mind. What news/aggregation sites are other Slashdotters out there willing to pay for, and why? What sites that don't charge today would you pay for if you had to? Or, knowing this crowd, are the majority just opposed to paying for any web news content on principle?"
50 cent (Score:5, Insightful)
I get most of my news from the state funded TV network's news section of their web site. The abount I pay for this in taxes comes down to approximately $ 0.5 per day.
Online Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should I pay for content that amounts to Propaganda, supporting increasingly corrupted civic institutions and companies, all against my own interest. And this is even more my eyeballs are the product being sold to advertisers.
Why should I pay one penny for a word of this?
Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
The Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where to obtain relevant news ? (Score:1, Insightful)
No doubt there *are* a lot of excellent news aggregator services available online but it's getting harder and harder to find relevant news, especially news articles written by knowledgeable reporters
Wrong answer.
Dice want to commercialise Slashdot and are asking you what you are prepered to pay them for it, not for real journalism.
So, a penny for your thoughts?
None (Score:5, Insightful)
If they expect me to pay, I expect them to bring me some original, exclusive news coverage/articles that's not easily found elsewhere for free.
STOP beta.slashdot.org ALREADY! (Score:3, Insightful)
JUST STOP THAT FUCKING THING.
NOW!
Or is nobody out there listening to what the users are saying??
Re:STOP beta.slashdot.org ALREADY! (Score:5, Insightful)
JUST STOP THAT FUCKING THING.
NOW!
Or is nobody out there listening to what the users are saying??
First thing I do is scroll down and click on the classic link. I don't mind if they move over to another platform, but please keep this layout! How difficult is it to offer both?
Why the Paywall Hate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I pay for the NYT, Ars, and The Economist, although the last 2 really aren't newspapers. Why does everyone here hate "paywalls"? Running a newsroom is extremely expensive. From the beat reporters and copy editors all the way up to the editorial board, plus all the foreign bureaus with their own reporters, a "real" newspaper needs to support a ton of people. I'm also a huge fan of investigative reporting, which you rarely ever see outside of major newspapers because the paper and the reporters must invest a huge amount of time and money.
Aggregation sites are nothing like a real newspaper. But at least Ars Technica has a large amount of original content (including their great feature articles), instead of resorting to Huffington Post-style click generation with "articles" that summarize someone else's hard work.
Re:STOP beta.slashdot.org ALREADY! (Score:4, Insightful)
Until they stop support for classic.
lizard-brain visual heroine (Score:3, Insightful)
You haven't paid a nickel until your willingness to tolerate the advertising seeps into your psyche in such a way that causes you to behave differently in how you participate in the economy to the advantage of those who generated the advertisement stream.
Ads function on at least four levels. The first is to create direct demand. Suddenly you know something exists and you decide you want it. The second is to make rational people less rational. You already had a perfectly rational plan suited to your economic interests and life goals, but then something changes, so you end up paying more for less (some part of your brain believes those beer girls are hiding inside those beer cans filled with inferior beer). The third level is to cause you to crave those munchies you already have in the pantry. This is a direct boost to consumption level, of a product you already buy. This works extremely well for salty snack foods. It's hard to watch people eat salty snack food on TV all day long and not get a craving. The fourth level is to get people to buy into status glow. When your friend buys three times as much truck as he really needs, it takes a lot of his buddies oohing and awing in suitable hushed and gushing terms, to back-fill the 10 k$ hole in his wallet relative to a different purchase where he would have hardly noticed the downgrade on a daily basis—not even getting into what he could have lived without.
I happen to believe that the engine that really drives the free market is rational decision making. Advertising for the most part reduces the contribution of rational decision making to the free market, to where we end up with a power law (or a law of power): the wealthiest and smartest 20% of the economy (these are not uncorrelated) makes 80% of the rational decisions. The other 80% of the market makes 20% of the rational decisions, in between mouthfuls of Cheetos.
Wired ran a retrospective recently featuring famous commercials of recording artists selling their souls. Take a look at the Pepsi commercial circa 1980 with His Dancing Whiteness. The entire cast look like well nourished Kenyan distance runners. There's exactly one physique I would even describe as burly (you catch a glimpse of half of his back as he provides a backdrop of some guy unloading a candy van). Burly man is not drinking a Pepsi. All the skinny people are drinking Pepsi.
Thirty years later all those Pepsi customers are so fat they need double-wide remote controls just to sink into the couch after school because the mere thought of going outside to dribble a basketball would cause their overworked hearts to explode.
Is that a free market outcome? Really, you think so? What all these rational economic agents wanted deep down was to become fat, unhealthy, and unsexy? It's a good thing God had the foresight to allow humans to copulate in a mutually horizontal orientation.
Bad things come from bad markets. Look around at the outcomes of so many people who willingly welcome these toxic payment streams into their lives stuffed to the gills with lizard-brain visual heroine.
Re:The Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
*blink* I just realized I didn't give wikipedia my annual donation. (Clicks over and fixes that.)
Thanks.
Re:Online Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where to obtain relevant news ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dice want to commercialise Slashdot and are asking you what you are prepered to pay them for it, not for real journalism.
You say that like it is a bad thing. The truth is that we live in a capitalist society where nobody works for free and running a high traffic website like slashdot costs money in hosting, routing, etc.
You have to get the money in to pay for all this stuff somehow be it subscriptions and a paywall or just tons of adverts which you have try and work show to people even though they want to avoid them with ad-block or similar.
If DICE one decided that slashdot was not profitable for them to run then they would have to pay money to keep it running as a loss leader of some kind. They MIGHT do this, but then they might just turn the site off instead. If you would rather that they turned it off you can simulate that quite well now by just leaving and never coming back. If you would rather slashdot still existed in some form then wouldn't you rather it was able to support it's own existence financially?
Content Depth. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sites like the Economist, Foreign Policy, and even the Wall Street Journal (At least pre News Corp). Are sites that give focused information into a particular area. You are getting information that it hard to get elsewhere.
The Times, or your local papers tend to be less indepth and that means you can find the same information almost anywhere.
Re:Content Depth. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point about the distinction between in depth coverage of some specific topic area that has value and general coverage. Especially since so much of the general coverage now days is repackaging the same AP articles in every news paper in America. I can't see a valid reason to pay for the online edition of my local paper when 90% of their content comes from the AP and is basically identical to what every other paper in America has. So to me the question is whether they generate sufficiently unique content that is of a high enough value to justify me expending money on it. So far I haven't found any sites like that. Doesn't mean that they don't exist I simply haven't found any site where I can't get essentially the same information for free someplace else.
Re:Where to obtain relevant news ? (Score:5, Insightful)
You say that like it is a bad thing. The truth is that we live in a capitalist society where nobody works for free and running a high traffic website like slashdot costs money in hosting, routing, etc.
In case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot supplies links to other news articles, and the members contribute the discussion/content. "Nobody works for free" - that's exactly what happens with comments; community members write them for free.
If Slashdot wants a paywall then it's going to need to significantly up the quality of the articles (start writing/researching its own material, rather than just link and have an editor write a summary). Or seriously beef up its various subsites (they are apparently called "topics" now): business intelligence, cloud, datacenter, etc.