Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don’t want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
I don’t thing the likes of wsj, nyt or similar are “random newspapers”, and they still get hate for asking for money. Bezos finds that useful.
The NYT is what billionaires want to tell me, and if they expect me to pay for the privilege they’re out of their minds. Oughta be paying me to read that trash.
If you were talking about actually independent sources providing other perspectives then you might have a point.
I’m talking about all sources, the average lemmy user doesn’t distinguish nuance, they complain about all paywalls. And billionaires take advantage of that and obviously buy the papers with the widest reach first, but with time they’ll reach everywhere.