It is really sad that actual journalism has no place in today's world because the Internet has made everyone want everything for free. So everyone ends up getting "free" information and articles that consist of drivel and superficial research all the while paying for it via their data being collected and sold.
The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.
Then I see this:
> The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co.
It's sad that National Geographic is effectively closing its doors when it's owned by Walt Disney Co., which has yearly revenue of nearly $100 billion. They seriously can't find the miniscule amount of cash in there to support National Geographic's journalism? Walt Disney is one of the most evil and exploitative companies ever, so I suppose I'm not surprised by their actions here.
> National Geographic spokesperson Chris Albert said staffing changes will not affect the company’s plans to continue publishing a monthly magazine
If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?
> That's what I really fear about LLMs, good content is going to get drowned out by endless bot drivel.
I anticipate the opposite.
Already AI content is better than crappy human writers.
In the medium term AI content is going to be better than most human writers (it arguably already is in some limited cases).
In the long term it may compete with the best human writers.
Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.
The AI produced content I've seen writes like a competent 5th grader. National Geographic wasn't being written by competent 5th graders.
I do think people are going to get tired of AI-produced this and AI-produced that - they're going to crave content created by humans. At least for some things. There may be a place for AI-created content that we love. That is this whole thing might be a false dilemma, it's not AI or human created content, it's AI and human created content. We'll find out which is better at what.
I imagine, after some decades living neck deep in a cesspool of AI generated content, there will be a renaissance of sorts where human produced content will suddenly break through the noise to resonate with some innately human trait that AI can’t figure out.
I imaging that in a not-so-distant future we'll have some "Genuine Human Generated Certification"
It has happened the same way in every areas where you have rampant counterfeit or simply cheaper competition.
As even if LLM can generate greate quality content, it will always be even cheaper to mass produce low quality. And once you cross the Rubicon of not being certified, it is just a matter of time that capitalism/greed will make it a race to the bottom.
AI content today is better than the worst human writers, but only because the worst human writers are so terrible. (Think of you trying to write an essay in a language that you’ve only studied for 3 months bad.)
That doesn’t mean that LLMs are on a course to inevitably surpass the 90th percentile human writer (which is what most full-time writers presumably are). I may be a Luddite here, but I don’t expect that in my young kids’ lifetime.
In my opinion LLM will never be able to replicate the human experience as it's solely based on language which in itself is only a poor facsimile of consciousness.
If writing is our best attempt to share our personal psychic experience then all LLM can be is fragments of those experiences and can not in itself experience the presence of being that is human.
(I'll note you wrote "AI content" not "LLMs", before anyone gets the wrong idea.)
> Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.
Thanks for daring to state this unpopular opinion. I completely agree that humans have a very poor (and hence inflated) idea of what they are good at, because they have only had animals and (recently) machines to compare themselves to, plus these opinions formed long ago are a very firmly held cultural memory (e.g. literary and movie tropes, religion). Creativity being IMO one of the most badly misclaimed abilities.
You are using an AI to write this? Or do a vast majority of actual humans rely on crappy writing? You do make a good point. I'll shove my next few wikipedia edits down an AIs gullet...
*This was written with an AI, and I told it to be spicy, salty and smarmy.
>In the long term it may compete with the best human writers.
AIs lack connection with real world. This is important if we speak about NatGeo.
>The evidence is starting us in the face.
AIs generate average texts. It is admittedly cool. But I think it just shows how much human drivel is out there.
Funny thing is that people optimized texts for search engines in attempts to hack ranking black boxes. Hence ML AI was the reason for bullshit for quite some time long before LLMs.
The other possible scenario is that people who want to create new content will quickly figure out that the LLMs are basically rewriting their original research and extracting all monetary worth from it, and so stop publishing in any medium that the bots can harvest the information.
So all new discoveries will get walled off from the GPTs and we will be stuck with constantly regurgitated old information unless you go looking in paid for publications.
>The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.
Yeah what we have today is not capitalism, at least by Adam Smith's standard, and definitely not the capitalism that was practiced between the end of WW2 and Reagan.
The US desperately needs to bring their anti-trust enforcement back to the standards of the post-war era
I am definitely a fan of anti-trust, but it sounds like you're saying today's unbridled capitalism is not captialism but that when we didn't let captialism run wild by actually enforcing anti-trust regulations, that was capitalism. I am confused.
Perhaps they are taking into account the increased current corporate welfare trends.
Want money to build weapons and blow up some people outside the US? Sure no problem! Want money to recuperate from the massive investment losses your bank or company incurred due to your bad decisions? Sure no problem!
Want another $30 a month for your social security disability check to account for inflation? Nah we can’t do that!
The discussion isn't about me, unless you meant the general you. However, that may be the case, but it doesn't reach the scale of the amount of people on the Internet and the pressures of that plus capitalistic markets.
Sounds more like the market doesn’t value “high quality journalism” as much anymore. Especially when you can find primary sources covering events on social media for free. At least for tech news, comments on HN are more succinct, less biased, and more hard hitting than any tech news site I’ve seen.
It's a bit sad what's become of National Geographic under Disney.
Once it was actually a part of the prestigious National Geographic Society, a non-profit. Now what's left of nationalgeographic.com is mostly a giant advertisement for Disney+. They even have Buzz Lightyear and Star Wars characters on there...
Between the things happening at Disney, and the discovery/hbo/cnn talent/production cull, I think we’re witnessing the biggest purge of the arts and journalism in the US in at least a generation.
It's kind of similar to tech. All these brilliant "executives" turned out to be complete imbeciles - unless they operate in an environment where money grows on trees and the economy is on fire (not that it's bad in the first place).
The [US] economy is actually fine, and all they know how to do is gut their own companies to "save" money.
Thats the Jack Welsch MBA school of business - gut the company, earn wealth and piss off. The fact that it destroys the society and makes the whole nation uncompetitive on the world market doesn't matter.
There is nothing wrong with Capitalism given the right incentives, proper controls, and some social responsibility. It used to work, until the rich gutted oversight and regulations.
To be fair, these scroundrels are needed. How else the world hegemony can be taken over by the Chinese, Indian and Russian? If VOC was well managed, you and I probably speaking Dutch right now. I am off to Russian class now. Bye.
If your task is to complete an exhaustive statistical survey on the issue, perhaps you're right, the comment is too vague.
If your intent is (as the parent's was) to contribute to a conversation by giving an opinion on what you observe happening to US journalism industry, with some example cases to illustrate the point, it's fine.
> Once it was actually a part of the prestigious National Geographic Society, a non-profit.
A non-profit that shares ownership with Disney over a crappy for-profit media network sounds more like a once-prestigious non-profit that turned sell out. Hopefully there's something good left in them, but as much as we can blame Disney for what it has become it was the National Geographic Society that let the mouse in to trash the place and their reputation.
Maybe you got a different A/B version of the page, but I went there and there weren't any of those. There's a Disney+ call to action but it shows naturalistic content. I cycled through the promoted shows gallery and it didn't bring up any Star wars or Toy story items.
I'm viewing it from Ireland, and half way down the page, I see a full-screen banner for Disney+ with a notable personality from each of their franchises Moana (Disney), Mr Incredible (Pixar), Thor (Marvel), Jyn Erso (Rogue One/Star Wars) and Jeff Goldblum (National Geographic). I suppose that's what you're seeing?
My maternal grandma had shelves full of National Geographic magazines going back to 1923 (or further). The photos and drawings were good but the stories were great. Endless adventure and tales about the world. I remember spending happy hours reading them on holidays to Queensland as a kid in the early 90s. A way to escape tiny world and join a bigger one, at your own pace, before the internet. Too bad my dumbass parents chucked them all away without a thought to who might want them nor asking…
Yeah, they weren't bad in the 90s either when I subscribed to them for a while. A lot of Bill Bryson-esque writing, anthropological portraits of places and things written with insight and empathy. (Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Bryson was one of the people writing for them).
Yeah, I also mean the ones way back. It was interesting, so fascinating. 60s to 90s vibe was good, too, and that classic editorial photography; the colors seeming to drip off the page and take me to another world. “Oil fields in Kuwait at dusk” (this was before the wars), “Women selling turnips at a market in Bangladesh”. So evocative.
The issues published before 1928 are out of copyright for sure. 1928 and afterwards, if it was renewed then copyright lasts until 95 years after first publication, which means those volumes will be entering public domain one year at a time.
Most of them at least were released on DVD though the version I got for cheap at a library book sale would require doing some magic with an old version of Windows and I haven't bothered. But there may be a newer version. But yeah, like the early days of CD-ROMs it's sort of one of those things you think would be great to own and you don't really do much with it.
National Geographic was an amazing publication when cultures were distant, travel was not as easy, areas of the world were still 'remote', and there was no internet. Where else could you see photographs of tribes in New Guinea, or an expedition to the North Pole, or elusive savannah animals?
Once everything was 'discovered' and conglomerated into wikipedia and YouTube, there was no content left for National Geographic. They started writing articles about science news, no different than Popular Science magazine. Then the political era started, and every issue was polarizingly politicized.
I have had a subscription for decades, and I can honestly say I stopped even opening the magazine years ago. The kids just cut pictures out of it for art projects.
> At the end of 2022, it had just under 1.8 million subscribers
1,800,000 * $20
=> $36,000,000
I don't know what I'm missing and what the overheads are but that seems like it should be able to support a fair number of writers easily?
Even so $20 per year seems impractically low. I pay ten times that for my Economist subscription. I really imagine they could strike a middle ground without losing too many subscribers.
Lunar Drive in cinema in Melbourne is tragically closing in a few weeks and they did the same thing. Ridiculous rates (council\land tax) of 1000$ a day really hurt them (corrupt bastards), and maybe it would've been unavoidable anyway, but they didn't even try putting up their stupidly low prices.
A carload of up to 7 people is STILL only 40$. A normal cinema would be 22 ish each!! Just charge normal prices!
>I don't know what I'm missing and what the overheads are but that seems like it should be able to support a fair number of writers easily?
At the current rate, it could have like 50 full time + part-time writers on staff (let's say 90K * 50 = 4.5M - might seem low for Silicon Valley, but professional journalists and writers would jump with joy for such a gig), plus dozens of office staff (say another 2M), plus fund 24 (2 per issue) year-long big stories with like up to 100K per story (2.5M). That would be like ~10M. They could pay rent, utilities, taxes, and other expenses with the rest of 36M (or even go remote, and save even more).
It's insane that so many of these massive companies look at successful businesses and go "close it, we make more money in other places" as if net revenue isn't a good thing on its own.
It is because there are all kinds of cost not being factored in here.
You aren't going to keep the subscription base without spending a ton on marketing.
I am sure many other cost that we aren't thinking about since not in the magazine business.
To me, I am a prime example of someone who use to absolutely love magazines who could not be bothered now. There is no price that will get me to subscribe. I just don't want to be sent paper in the mail.
>You aren't going to keep the subscription base without spending a ton on marketing
If you do quality work, you don't need to spend a ton on marketing. And this is very livable revenue - tons of media outlets thrived on less (inflation adjusted) back in the day.
The main problem is belonging to some conglomerate who doesn't care for such small profits or a business breaking even. They're an insect to them.
A corporation running from a non-profit dedicated to the mission (as opposed to those greedy people), or passionate private owner(s), would have no problem to continue.
I don’t know how to put this but you are just absolutely wrong about the economics of this and beyond that you are confidently wrong even when presented with basic numbers.
Producing what National Geographic magazine does is not cheap and they have historically had much higher revenue. Nevermind that they are still continuing, just without staff writers.
>Producing what National Geographic magazine does is not cheap
Nobody said it is. But what it used to cost to run it in the times of media excess and a much larger subscriber base, is not really reflective of what it can run on and still get good stories today.
Today though photo reporting and writing is much more competitive and cheaper than it has been, even at the top. Glassdoor puts NatGeo salaries at a $65K median.
And freelancers sent on a story are paid like 20K or so for 3 weeks salary plus expenses (for Americans. Regional freelancers can usually be paid even less). That makes 5 such stories per issue at 1.2M (internal editing, processing etc is already covered by regular staff, as is more generic articles that are not in the field assignments).
Though I'm agree with you about conglomerate that doesn't care I honestly kek'd at If you do quality work, you don't need to spend a ton on marketing.
To find a way to your potential customers is a continuous and never ending task for most businesses.
I was in the local drugstore yesterday, and browsed through the latest National Geographic in the magazine section. It cost $10 Canadian dollars to buy just that one single print issue (including a big map insert). Which is actually quite low; the hobbyist woodworking magazine cost about $15 (for one print issue).
The Economist, NYT, and WSJ in particular command pretty high subscription prices. Basically a coffee table magazine that most people are just going to flip through once a month probably less so. If I were more price sensitive, I'd probably think twice about my NYT and Economist subscriptions though my dad's on my Economist subscription anyway.
I pay 45€ per year for membership, and subscription of the magazine is the only part of the membership I enjoy. Sure, postage to Europe costs extra, don't know how much.
If quality of the magazine deteriorates, I will cancel my membership. If the price goes up by 20%, I don't think I'll even notice.
It's $20 a year, not $20/issue. That's $1.67 a month.
Every dollar counts when you're impoverished, but I don't think National Geographic is making or breaking it based on a demographic that makes purchasing decisions at that margin.
Nonsense. $20 a year for 12 issues of a magazine is absolutely nothing. Most lower income families probably spend more than that on two meals a day. Don’t cheapen the sympathy people have for the poor.
20 is a lot for some people, but it’s like 5/6 beers most places. Sure in the poorest parts of the country this could make or break, but the list of places where people could afford it is much longer than SV, Boston, NYC.
What about suburban DC? Dallas? Houston? Denver? Salt Lake City? Chicago?
Not sure if your last sentence was intended to be ironic, but there’s nowhere you can fly that’s less than an Economist subscription
I watched a movie today and ended up ordering pop corn + soda + water. 1 pop corn, 1 soda, 1 water freaking bottle (250ml). They charged me $30 + tips.
I think National Geographic (which I'm a subscriber) can charge 10x more without losing 90% of it's audience. It's the price to pay to receive good articles at your home and it's definitely worth tons more than drinking and eating junk in the dark.
National Geographic is no longer licensing images, art, text or video to third parties. If you are interested in using content seen in a National Geographic product for your project, please contact the original content creator about possible usage permissions.
They contacted me recently about licensing one of my photos, but the amount offered was pretty weak and not worth the invoicing and transactional emails.
I'm not sure this is necessarily such a bad thing?
The kinds of articles NatGeo writes are so spread across the world and really benefit from a diverse set of authors including local/regional/expert ones.
It seems to me that 100 articles on 100 different topics across the globe might be much better written by 100 different freelance authors rather than the same 19.
Regular news publications generally benefit from staff writers who have many years of experience on a particular beat. But NatGeo feels like it's on the opposite end of the spectrum, where all-freelance makes a lot of sense. It means many more voices rather than fewer.
It's the giggification of everything possible. Pay as little per story as possible (incentivizing the author to spend as little time as they can on it) and hope second jobs or social safety nets make up for the lack of a living the authors now make.
> It seems to me that 100 articles on 100 different topics across the globe might be much better written by 100 different freelance authors rather than the same 19.
You would think that but that hasn't really happened. The magazine had a point of view and editorial standpoint that people appreciated. What you are suggesting is basically what we get from digital outlets today.
> In an email to The Post on Wednesday, National Geographic spokesperson Chris Albert said staffing changes will not affect the company’s plans to continue publishing a monthly magazine “but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms.”
Meet audiences where they are on platforms, with different stories… presumably different from what it’s known for?
Sounds a lot like flushing the remainder of the brand down the same mass-market toilet as everything else, or wanting to dump the whole “property” but not wanting to give up on the last dying gasping pennies of revenue.
"At its peak in the late 1980s, National Geographic reached 12 million subscribers in the United States, and millions more overseas. Many of its devotees so savored its illumination of other worlds — space, the depths of the ocean, little-seen parts of the planet — that they stacked old issues into piles that cluttered attics and basements.[...]
The magazine was eventually surpassed for profits and attention by the society’s video operations, including its flagship National Geographic cable channel and Nat Geo Wild, a channel focused on animals. While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision."
What a trajectory for our civilization. Reminds me of the tidbit that Astronaut used to be the most named profession teens aspired to in the 70s and 80s. Now it's influencers. And don't call me old or jaded, I'm barely 30, I already grew up with ancient aliens on the 'history' channel.
>Among those who lost their jobs in the latest layoff was Debra Adams Simmons, who only last September was promoted to vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at National Geographic Media
Why did they need a VP of DEI for such a small workforce (that they've now laid off entirely)? Seems like some poor decision making internally.
National Geographic has somewhere between 1400 and 1500 total employees, from a quick look online. The magazine is just one tiny sliver (unfortunately) of their media presence.
Why does such a small detail matter in the scope of this large failure? Rather impressed that invoking the DEI boogeyman always seems to distract from the obvious, much larger dysfunction at play in the eyes of those who purportedly champion disrupting the status quo.
At least from my perspective, it feels at least plausibly linked for two reasons.
1) They had 1.8 million subscribers when deciding to shut down. Each subscription cost around $40, so you're looking at $70 million+ in revenue, from the magazine alone. How much does a full time of editors, photographers, reporters, and more actually cost? With many failing industries it increasingly feels like the burden is not coming from operational costs themselves, but from these enormous administrative layers which essentially just drown businesses, yet are the last to see major cuts. If you can [apparently] barely afford to fund your editors, photographers, and more - where exactly should DEI rank on your list of concerns, let alone expenditures?
2) Changes in themes tend to push people away from businesses. I actually had to check the Wiki [1] to make sure I wasn't have some sort of false memory. I wasn't: National Geographic was always an overtly anti-political magazine. For instance it was able to inspire awe about the progress being made during the space race, while sidestepping the fact it was also driving mass militarization. Or give interesting and fun cultural insights across the Iron Curtain of the "enemy" during the Cold War, without at all getting involved in the political dehumanization games of the past (and especially the present).
Now? [2] 'Elephants are in trouble and we're to blame.' 'These Native Americans were taken rom their families as children' 'Kosovo wants to decide its future - but will history hold it back?' 'This scientist analyzes African American's past to inform the present.' 'This ordinary woman hid Anne Frank.' And of course a super-sized serving of focus on typical concerns such as global warming. And I'm not cherry picking. These are literally the headline articles for just this month!? This is how you lose your readers. People don't want to be preached or lectured to about your values, or why they're the worst, most undeserving living 'things' on this planet.
I expect the National Geographic, as many of us remember it, likely died long ago. And that probably happened when the business started being bounced from one mega-corp to another.
> Now? [2] 'Elephants are in trouble and we're to blame.' 'These Native Americans were taken rom their families as children' 'Kosovo wants to decide its future - but will history hold it back?' 'This scientist analyzes African American's past to inform the present.' 'This ordinary woman hid Anne Frank.' And of course a super-sized serving of focus on typical concerns such as global warming. And I'm not cherry picking. These are literally the headline articles for just this month!? This is how you lose your readers. People don't want to be preached or lectured to about your values, or why they're the worst, most undeserving living 'things' on this planet.
I'm sorry, but if you manage to find offense in those topics and consider them too political and preachy, it's 100% a you problem. What exactly is political there more than an article about Chernobyl criticising the Soviet regime's incompetence and trying to lie was? Anne Frank is political and preachy? Or Kosovo's history and attempts at state building? Unless the article about African American's past says that everything wrong is the fault of XYZ living today, how is it preachy or lecturing? And honestly, you lost me at climate change. If you think that's a political topic, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem and are a massive part of it. Which is of course unfortunate because you consider it political preaching to try to educate you about it, and are thus immune to learning better.
The new times where in some countries any topic, including wide ones such as public health or the climate, are "political" and automatically partisan is extremely annoying.
Here [1] is a neat video, put together by National Geographic themselves, showing 130 years of covers. There's a hotkey most don't know about on YouTube. Pause that video somewhere, and you can then use "." and "," to go frame by frame forwards or backwards respectively. And you can see each cover quite clearly, month by month, for 130 years!
I think what you'll find, up until fairly recently, is that the covers are full of exotic topics that by and large you probably have no clue whatsoever about. If you're the curious sort, they probably make you want to crack open those pages just to see what's going on. And I think that is what many of us really remember about National Geographic. They were taking you exploring in places and parts of the world you'd have no idea about, and just showing you things for no real motivation beyond showing neat things to you. It was kind of like being on the HMS Beagle, from the comfort of your couch. And that was a really awesome feeling.
The only time they ever really slipped hard into politics (at least at a fairly lengthy glance) was during WW2, and I think we can probably give them a pass there. Even during e.g. the 60s, with a raging Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and more - they managed to stay focused on discovery. But the new National Geographic seems to have shunned its past and largely turned to identity politics, with a healthy dishing of geopolitics on the sider, into their bread and butter. I don't find that offensive, I simply find it trite. And that's a really bad place to be in for a magazine that was, at one time, about inspiring wonder and awe.
Of course they're free to do such, but readers are also free to decide, "You know, this just isn't for me anymore."
> But the new National Geographic seems to have shunned its past and largely turned to identity politics, with a healthy dishing of geopolitics on the sider, into their bread and butter.
When about do you think they made this shift? In my opinion, 2015, when Murdoch got ahold of a majority of the company, was the shift to identity, narrative, rhetoric. You seem to have a better grasp on their history than me, though.
Everything I know and loved as a kid is disappearing. This one really hits me deep. I sincerely hope that national geographic is not disappearing on me.
I think this is inherent to the American experience. The DNA of this country is constant, unceasing change. It's sad that the old things are disappearing, yes, but with that is the appearance of a bunch of cool new things. For instance, Nat Geo may be dying, but you can now watch 1000000 hours of amazing nature footage from the comfort of your couch.
“… realigning key departments to help deepen engagement with our readers…”
And nothing deepens engagement with readers like eliminating your full time writers. Who doesn’t simply adore getting a different voice for every regurgitated AP news article?
Next natgeo magazine issue made from midjourney 5 and gpt. Cover features the Afghan Girl doing the Youtube Thumbnail Face and involving Disney franchise IP somehow.
Too bad corporate operations are so smooshifyingly bland, robbing properties of their soul. Profit is nice, even vital, but a bad thing to maximize at the expense of all else.
Or maybe it was the colonialist taint that just doesn't sit right these days?
But... the world is still vast, and worth exploring. Maybe even moreso now we _think_ we know everything via Twitter etc.
One of the greatest deals I ever got (in my mind) was buying the entire set of National Geographic magazines on DVD disc for about $15. More than 100 years of articles!
Too bad that they have gone the way of the dodo, but the writing has been on the wall for many years.
Is it possible to backup and use the DVD content from local disk? Haven't had the best of luck with DVDs and buying one of eBay makes me feel even less optimistic the DVDs will last long.
The content is just a whole bunch of JPG files that have been XORed with 239. If you XOR them with 239 again, you get the original JPG images. If you do a Google search, you should be able to find several programs/scripts that will do the job for you.
I bought the DVDs. It used Adobe Air which I had never heard of and is discontinued. Each page of the magazine is in some encrypted format but I found software on the internet to decrypt it. You can use cp to get those files. Then you can google about the encryption.
My parents got me a subscription in 1987 when I was a kid and I'm still a print edition subscriber and linked my online account to my subscription. I can read any issue online as well and print to PDF so I do that every couple of months so I have every issue from 1888 to 2023.
Adobe AIR was a precursor to Electron in the late 00s. It allowed apps written in JavaScript, ActionScript and some other Adobe tech to be easily built for multiple platforms.
The Adobe Air program was basically just a front end to display and decrypt everything. I could never get it to work on Linux so I never actually even looked at it except the screenshots in the help document.
All the files are named well like NGM_1918_04_125.jpg
National Geographic Magazine, year 1918, 4th month (April), page 125
Yeah, it was annoying but I ran a for loop on every file in the 80GB or so to translate it to normal JPEG. It took about 24 hours and that was 10 years ago on a much older computer.
I remember Disk Utility on macOS being able to dump the raw data from a DVD or CD into a disk image. And I think virtualization software can mount the image as if it was a disc.
It’s been at least 5 years since I’ve done anything like that though.
1888-2020 is a torrent that will never die. Not to be trite, your $15 made effectively no difference to the longevity of the corporation while torrenting it made absolutely all the difference to the longevity of the content. I have for free what you got for $15. The person who made it a torrent is a hero.
If the dodo genome had been torrented it would be alive today.
I was speaking in terms of almost every kind of print journalism struggling and, usually failing to adapt their business model. It has been going on for a couple of decades now.
I and a lot of other people would pay good money for a bespoke magazine though. A platform where reputable writers, authors, journalists of various stripes promise a monthly article that's print only. The company would bind together the articles of the authors you subscribe to in a nice format, with some staff photogs and writers adding in their own articles, what have you. I'd order three, one full of editorials, one with science writers, and one with scifi/fantasy short stories, serials, and the like. To really individualize it, shovel all the reader's choices into an AI art generator and put the output on the cover. I'd pay $30 ($50 if the quality of the paper and binding was good) an issue to get 4 of these a year, and I think you could make it for that much.
I distinctly remember opening the fold out of an issue (April 1997) and staring for what must have been hours at the Hubble deep field image, just trying to comprehend what I was seeing.
I’d never seen the image on the Internet at that point. I guess it might have been published there, but viewing it in high resolution print would have been way more impressive than an SVGA CRT or whatever I was using then.
I’m one of many people with cherished long shelves of old copies of the magazine who stopped subscribing when the charity sold it to Disney.
It’s sad, I think as long as its sale was funding the fieldwork people were happy to pay. But make it into a normal for profit magazine and it’s just another crass commercial effort without heart. And people voted with their wallets.
I have such fond memories of going to my grandparents house and looking at the rows of yellow magazines sitting on their bookshelf. My favorite was an issue about the Loch Ness Monster.
This statement sums up the thesis of nearly every article they've published in the last few years before I cancelled my subscription. Every issue left me depressed.
I feel as if the problem in media, film, and television today was brought about by the anticompetitive behaviors of tech giants encroaching into media.
Amazon and Apple offer nearly free entertainment that they subsidize at a loss. Vertical media companies are trying to compete and are thus attempting to mimic the streaming model.
This is an unwinnable battle. Disney and NatGeo can't compete on price. HBO / Warner / Discovery can't either. They're being forced to awkwardly consolidate and cut costs to stem their losses while they try to serve the same customers.
Streaming is ultimately a game of throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. You can't charge a big premium for sludge content, especially now that it's a commodity.
Summers full of prestige drama and blockbusters have been replaced by shovelware Bird Box sequels and shows that get launched and canceled in one season.
Nat Geo could absolutely run a generational brand again but it sounds like it’s overloaded with old media dinosaurs. They have 280 million followers on Instagram.
Any media savy millennial or gen-z could build a hundred million dollar a year brand with that following alone but instead they’re posting articles about “skincare routines” and “birth control for cats” with almost zero engagement.
I watched a TikTok length documentary the other day of an Everest climb. It starts at basecamp and 30 seconds later they are doing selfies at the top. I cant' help but feel something was missing:)
FYI: The long lines at the Hilary Step were because someone stopped to play Zelda on their phone.
If you passively accept whatever mass media is spoon-feeding you, you're gonna have a bad time. The good shit is out there but doesn't have the same marketing budget, you have to go looking for it.
Obsolete models being replaced by current ones is a better explanation. NatGeo's video operations surpassed their magazine profit long ago. Why then retain the elements that can create a high-quality product in an obsolete medium? Customer demand shifts toward digestible video content in the form of Youtube and TikTok, and bingeable streaming content a'la Netflix and HBO.
I think it's more than just vertical media vs. tech giants, it is the nature of consumption via streaming.
Look at Disney, who does not make most of their content available to stream on other platforms. Their latest movies haven't been great, but compared to what they cost to make, they've absolutely bombed at the box office.
I suspect a lot of this has been because many people would rather wait a bit and let the whole family watch on disney+, rather than pay at least the cost of an entire month's worth of streaming per ticket, plus the high cost of drinks and snacks once you get in.
In my area, a family of four could easily pay $50 for tickets for a single screening. With the prices of everything going up, an $8-12 / month streaming plan on disney plus makes way more sense.
Disney is still a mostly theme park company, right? Everything else is secondary to that. I’ve seen only one of their latest movies, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and it was great.
I feel like there's an opportunity for a competitor that streams only a (comparatively) small number of curated, highly-rated shows and movies. At least, I would buy that. So tired of the same old formulaic Netflix slosh.
Apple has done a pretty good job of this but its not a money making strategy. They have to hand out AppleTV 3 and 6 month trials like they've got too many, and are pouring billions into it with no sight of it ever being profitable, basically the exact same situation as Disney+ is in.
I’ve found literally no shows on Apple TV that I’m interested in. The only one I got through more than two episodes was Ted Lasso and I had gave up on that after five or six as it got worse not better.
Have you tried Severance? Took me a bit to get around to it but probably the best sci-fi show to come out since Devs and by far the best show on Apple TV. Ted Lasso is too wholesome for me.
Apple TV has some other sci-fi with not great writing like “Hello, Tomorrow” but that are still fun for the visuals and what not.
Netflix has been going downhill for the past few years.
It is inspiring to see individuals succeeding on Substack - https://growthinreverse.com/archive/ It proves that people will pay for quality content and it is possible to build a successful business. If an individual can make a million dollars a year by himself, imagine what a business can do, if only they have the discipline to produce high quality content.
In the next few years, the web is going to drown in low quality AI generated content. It would be a good time for disciplined content producers who go for quality than quantity, to make a name for themselves - individuals or businesses
In the same way that Spotify bought podcasters, I wonder if Netflix or a new competitor could lure creators from YouTube. There are some great, quality solo or small-team creators on YouTube that could increasingly anchor a platform.
HBO should just keep giving Danny McBride money and free reign. I can't think of many people who didn't like Eastbound, Vice Principals, and Gemstones.
Star Trek is episodic, not a miniseries. There is no overall story arc.
Also, ST TOS is exceptionally good. I tried watching TNG several times, and find it just unwatchable. I'm probably the only person who has polar opposite opinions of TOS and TNG.
Also, advertising on reputable media sites had become much too cheap. (Had it been in the ballpark of what they made with print advertising and own advertising departments before, they should be thriving.) In general, advertising is much too ubiquitous and cheap on the web in order to sustain anything.
What about the many alternatives to old media that are now available? Video games, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit, HN, etc are all ways to spend time that do not involve money going to the old media companies.
Of course not, but how are quality newspapers and magazines going to get paid if people would rather spend their time on those other ones, especially since they are free (money wise).
The main problems in film and media today are over-consolidation and grossly inequitable compensation models. Blaming Apple is a rare, bizarre take.
Like - we have a huge writer strike right now, the second very large one in recent years. Meanwhile the CEOs and shareholders of every media company are paid multiples of what every writer gets combined. It's wildly perverse. And not Apple's fault, or even Amazon's.
That's not even remotely true. People pay for lots of subscription services; it's getting ridiculous. And we pay a very dear price indeed for getting blasted with ads and propaganda.
> nat geo magazine used to have millions of loyal subscribers.
And then Rupert Murdoch bought them. Immediately, people knew it would get strip mined to the bone and then sold off for parts. If anything, I'm surprised it hasn't been faster and uglier.
... If the negative externalities of advertising and propaganda were costed in, the entire media landscape would be wholly different. Most people can't even imagine how different.
The problem isn't that people aren't paying for content, it's that people are the product now; even when they pay.
man, it sort of seems like mass media should be publicly funded instead of controlled by rich people trying to make a buck. these guys (the media in general, not specifically Nat Geo) put out government propaganda anyway and hire government officials, I might as well get it high quality free at point of service via tax dollars.
Well, that sounds like a disaster. It’s like asking the project manager to create a program by piecing together some code.
I remember getting a spam call back in the 90s. They were trying to sell magazine subscriptions. I wasn’t interested, but when asked what magazine I liked the best I responded with National Geographic. The person on the line had never heard of it. I was honestly surprised that someone had never heard of it. They said they would ask a manager if they offered that magazine and I did wait since I was curious. They did not.
I, for one, worry about what will happen to the once prestigious PBS in the streaming age. Yes, there are half-hearted efforts to present shows, but I have never seen a promotion. Thankfully, the quality of the content tends to remain high. Yes, I am a subscriber.
We subscribe to A LOT of streaming services. I probably watch 2-3 hours of video content a day. But, probably the most edifying, enriching content I watch comes from PBS.
No, but he had quite a lot to do with killing off National Geographic as a reputable publication. While I realise 2015-2017 is basically a century ago thanks to Covid, it's not so long ago that we collectively forgot that Murdoch bought National Geographic and immediately started running it into the ground, is it? Did we already forget that there was a time before Disney owned Fox?
You didn't remember that Disney bought Fox years after Murdoch -through Fox- bought National Geographic Media and started running it into the ground, did you?
Except Murdoch, through Fox, bought National Geographic Media, and immediately started running it into the ground, so... pretty sure I'm blaming the right billionaire? Of course there's always room for more billionaires to blame, I'll happily add the Newhouse family to the list of "how to destroy things".
This is one of the few headlines here that truly makes me sad. In the 80s, National Geographic was the color commentary to the bland dryness of WORLDBOOK encyclopedias in the school library.
Has anyone "read" national geographic in the past 20 years? My understanding is "smart" people put it on their coffee table when guests come over, like the new yorker
Shifting risk to where it is least understood and priced is what modern corporate management is all about. Creating true value is hard work, what people used to do in the old days when the future was still a shiny something and progress was not discredited.
From eliminating defined-benefit from employee pensions schemes to "not having" any employees at all, that is the name the game.
Instead of fixed contracts where the entity carries the risk of reduced revenue, just take advantage of a willing pool of competing freelancers that race to the bottom and are at the mercy of economic cycles and their very own lifecyle.
People often rail about generic "capitalism" but this is an example of the countless levers available to tune the beast so that its less of a vampire: What type of labor contracts firms can legally engage-in is a simple political / regulatory choice.
It's hypocritical for people here to dismay about the fall of print journalism and long-form writing, when every article from a paid source is followed by a https://archive.is/xyz link.
It's unfortunate - the issue is in the age of the internet people read news from many different sources. Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader.
I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news - eg. pay some amount for articles from a number of different sources. I imagine there's some business reason that has prevented such a thing from being introduced.
I have this hair-brained vision of a world where all of the content is available on all the platforms that want to distribute it.
In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API.
Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like.
In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!
You may know this, but if not, fantasies like this in the digital world date back to Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson (who is still alive!). The unfortunate reality is that they are based on a different networking physics, whose primary purpose is to enforce Intellectual Property. Such a physics in practice is unusable. "Worse is better" dominates both in media as well as in engineering.
What you want is compulsory licensing. It exists for e.g. music. Radio stations generally can play whatever they want. They pay a (sometimes flat) licensing fee. All those station fees are pooled together and redistributed to the artists/distributors. I exists in other forms too, like the blank media fee in Europe (not sure if that still exists?)
I would love for something like that to exist for video and news. It would mean that a service like Netflix could offer all content.
I suppose you mean that content creators can't decide which platform can or cannot distribute their content, right? Because obviously, if they can, then they can sell exclusive rights and that's the system we have today.
I suppose you need to enforce that all the distributors pay the same price for the content (otherwise again, we end up with the system we have today, where some distributors can pay more and get some kind of exclusivity through that).
Then how do you imagine it goes when the content creator gains a lot popularity? Do they raise their price for all distributors? Then do the distributors have to forward that price to their users, or can they do what they like? You mentioned having their own pricing model, so again Netflix could buy content from a popular artist at a good price, but provide it "for free" to their subscribers (in which case, again, that's the system we have today).
TL;DR: I don't see how that can work. Even with smart contracts (which are known to solve most problems /s).
I was about to write a similar post. I think the only way it can work is a distributor paying a fixed price for every user that views the content. This way both big and small players can have access to it and you can even imagine some pricing it higher than others if the overall experience on their platforms is worth it for the users.
The author sets the price for every bit of content they offer. They can set it separately for every bit of content they offer or even change it after a while (although that will likely require some waiting period as without that promise buyers are unlikely to commit).
The problem here seems to be enforcement and accounting as there would be a big incentive to not report the number of users in an honest way.
We already kinda have that with FRAND for patents. That still has its issues, but the idea is workable.
The main question is what you want to prevent. For me the answer is "the stuff you want is spread over 15 different subscriptions". Preventing that was the main selling point of netflix or steam over piracy.
One good idea I've had (that anyone here is welcome to take, I'm not going to attempt it) is a sort of micro-payments model for news.
Like, for example, if I want to read an article from NYT, through some sort of browser extension, I pay them a small fee (let's say 5 cents) for access to that article with no ads. Each website can set their own 'fee' to read their articles, and at the end of the month I can 'settle' the bill with the extension. Either that, or I pay some flat fee to the service and they pay articles a flat fee, like Spotify.
If I had a nickel for every time I've been pitched an app/system like that over the past couple years, well, then I'd have plenty of money to pay for news subscriptions. It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem. The hardest parts will be money transmission and getting everyone to agree to your standards and processes (in a way that gets them paid and doesn't steer potential paying eyes off to a competitor because you want to build a platform or marketplace instead of an add-on payment tool). Of course with all the new things happening in fintech, this type of system is not that hard to build today.
Technology is a non-issue IMO. People don't want micropayments for the most part. Some people tolerated "midi-payments" for songs and mobile apps to some degree but even that has mostly migrated to subscriptions and "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
People don't want micropayments because even now in 2023 the entire payments industry seems to not be able to design a payment flow that doesn't suck. The UX on almost all payments is just terrible. Being gated behind login flows, awkward input forms, TOU acceptance dialogues, receipt and confirmation screens, and being bounced back and forth between the store and third-party systems is just an overall awful experience. I don't care how much something costs, if it takes me more time to pay for an article than it does to read it, I'm out. I still remember the very first time I used Google Pay on my Android in a physical store as it was such a magical experience. I actually stopped myself twice on the way out of the store to do a double-take at my receipt to confirm I had actually paid - it was that fast and easy. Micropayments need that magic and speed. If the only thing standing between me and an article I'm interested in is a FaceID auth, that's very acceptable. This flow can be done today, it's just that no one is willing to strip the process down to its most basic form. If you can solve that first step then there's only 99 more problems to go.
I think it's actually because people don't like spending money, even very small amounts, for things they have decided fall in the 'free' category. As previous poster said, it's a monkey problem, not a tech problem.
Yet, "free to play" games are ludicrously profitable. Surely a large part of that is addiction, but there also is a tech problem here. If paying for a newspaper article has lots of friction (sign up here, confirm email, credit card, 2 factor confirmation, now you have a subscription instead of just buying; cancelation only by carrier pigeon at midnight), then no way.
That is also why the Google and apple appstores can charge such large fees. Sure, buying on websites and sideloading are possible but much higher friction -> many customers simply won't bother.
I don't think so, the media has been pretty resistant to providing this kind of model. If they allow you to read a single article cheaply it would mean a lot of lost subscriptions and it isn't easy to price individual pieces of content.
It’s really the credit card fees that make it non-viable. That and it’s hard to charge someone $10 to read a $.99 article, and promise them they’ll have $9 in credits they can use in the future. That and network effects.
If I had the option to pay $1 each time NYT or other sources pay-walled me out, they’d have a lot of my money.
I'm pretty sure you're in the small minority. If people were clamoring for micropayments, there's a large fintech/startup world that would find a way to make it work. (And Apple sold/sells $0.99 apps.)
Probably 4-7 dollars before you read something not worth the dollar and give up.
Would you be willing to pay for all content? Reading the first few 2 pages here would cost 60 dollars. Should you be paying to read everyone's comments?
I topped up a multi site system back in 2018 with £3, something like 10p an article. PayPal I think, but fine sat online payment cost 10% fir that or 30p, still worth it for the publisher.
Alas not enough readers used the system and it shut down. People don’t want to pay.
> It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem.
Micro-transactions wouldn’t eliminate ads. How many years did people buy ad filled newspapers or magazines? How about paying for cable tv that channels show ads on in between tv show segments that also do in content ad placement? You’re just describing another source of revenue for websites, not the only one.
Paid users are better target for ads, so they cost more. Users are paying to self-select them for the costly, highly targeted ads, increasing income and reducing expenses. Win-Win
> I still say the web would be better than it is now, if microtransactions had been built into protocols ASAP.
No, for dog’s sake! Microtransactions are a cancer and come with perverse incentives leading to enshitification of everything they touch. They would not solve any issue with clickbait or sensationalism. Plus, I am not going to count pennies when I read news online or manage yet another pseudo-currency.
Some kind of all-you-can-read aggregated subscription is much, much better: more reader-friendly, it comes with incentives to keep readers happy on the long term, and media don’t need to rely only on hit pieces. In fact, Apple News would be close to perfect if it weren’t siloed into its app. I’d sign up with a decent competitor in a heart beat.
> An all you can read aggregated source is pretty much micropayments with an extra step involved.
From the user’s perspective, it is one less step involved. We just have to pay x every months and not think about it. We don’t have to babysit yet another number going up or down on yet another account.
> It's not a business model media companies are typically too eager to be involved with in either case.
Yeah, and I imagine the value proposition is not great, from what we’ve seen in music streaming services. Still, for me it would be better than either paywalls or microtransactions.
We already have the Payment Request API, which is more than enough to handle this. My general view on the "process" mostly revolves around the UX from the customer's perspective. Someone needs to build a flow and say, this is how it works, take it or leave it.
That’s basically the model of Apple News Plus, although it’s Apple ecosystem-specific. Users pay 10$ a month to get access to selected publishers via the Apple News app and then Apple takes 50% of the subscription revenue and splits the rest with publishers based on the number of times an article is read[0]. I don’t think it got any significant traction though as I haven’t really heard anything about it since it was launched 4 years ago.
It seems hard to justify a 50% take rate for this kind of service. I guess 50% is better than nothing, but it's still kind of shit. If apple is trying to be an aggregator (ie. drive traffic) it makes more sense, but for most news services IMO they don't need an aggregator - they just need some kind of payment arrangement, presumably with a much lower take rate (on the order of 5% or somesuch)
Even the "Plus" articles are still crammed with ads by the publishers, which makes the experience categoricallly worse than just reading on the web with adblockers.
I see so many complaints here about adverts. How much extra would you pay to read news without any adverts? I guarantee that it isn't enough to offset lost revenue from adverts. This is the primary reason why online news has so many adverts.
In the U.K. sky charges its customers a subscription. They have adverts on top of that. Last time I read he financial report adverts accounted for 1/10th of subscription income
I.e instead of paying sky £30 a month and having 1/3rd of content adverts, you could pay £33 a month and have no adverts.
It’s similar with the underground in london. I pay £3 to take a journey and am plastered with adverts. Instead £3.30 and there would be no need for adverts
These companies don’t offer that as free experience though. With sky there are alternates (streaming, or if that falls to the advert curse then pirate bay), with the underground alas no alternatives.
The answers in this thread are essentially all under $1. There seems to be not much rationale behind these numbers besides "it should be cheaper," so the anchor point is probably $0.
Apple News Plus almost sort-of makes sense as part of a broader package that lumps a decent, though far from comprehensive news bundle in as part of a broader subscription offering. (Sort of like Prime though Prime doesn't have news, in that enough people just have to find one or two components they value.)
But, as you say, it really hasn't taken off. A few news pubs that apparently are doing OK aside, people are an endless font of excuses about why they won't pay (or they just don't) even though many people routinely subscribed to a newspaper and a bunch of magazines.
> people are an endless font of excuses about why they won't pay (or they just don't) even though many people routinely subscribed to a newspaper and a bunch of magazines.
That’s not really fair. Back when magazine subscriptions were a thing, you weren’t exposed as much to other magazines or newspapers you were not subscribed to, or if you were you could just read them. Cafés used to have newspapers, various places with waiting rooms used to have stacks of magazines and nobody tried to shame you for reading without paying.
As a matter or fact, I am subscribed to the Atlantic and 3 newspaper’s websites (in different languages), which is equivalent to what my parents did when I was a kid. But I am not going to get a subscription for the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times, or some random local news website every time someone links to a story there.
I don't really disagree you had your magazine and maybe newspaper subscriptions and otherwise you mostly went without other than occasionally going to the library, surfing in a waiting room, picking up a free newspaper, etc. If you didn't care enough about a publication to subscribe you mostly did without and you were generally fine with that because you were unaware that you were missing anything.
Is that NYT article my 5 cents paid for going to be written by a real well-paid journalist who wrote the story without AI and will that article have spent even a moment with an actual well-paid editor or will I get a long-form regurgitation of something from twitter or APnews?
A lot of articles on the internet today aren't worth the free click I'm giving them now. A micro-transaction system is only going to work if the content is better than what we're getting today. You need to find a company who is willing to invest in high-paid professional investigative journalism and editors before you can convince people to shell out pennies to read their news online. Spotify works because the content was desirable and worth the subscription fee first.
At the same time, you also can't paywall off the content for non-subscribers. People want to share and talk about great news stories and a service should let them the same way we can listen to just about any song on youtube without paying spotify a dime. At that point, you can offer what amounts to a tip jar and an ad free experience.
You are setting a very high bar here. What do you consider "high quality news source"? And what do you read / consume? And what do you think it should cost? I guarantee that you will not be paying enough for what you demand.
A lot of articles on the internet today aren't worth the free click I'm giving them now.
And yet, you continue to click them.
the same way we can listen to just about any song on youtube without paying spotify a dime
You do pay: You are the product because adverts are shown.
Considering some of the articles I've seen it wouldn't be hard to do better, but you'd probably have to do better than just not being the worst to get people to pull out their wallets.
> What do you consider "high quality news source"?
Since you asked, here's what I'd look for in a high quality news source:
Low in bias/high in facts: I want to be able trust a news source not to lie or mislead me. Unverified and speculative reporting should be minimized and clearly marked as such. In emerging situations it's better to wait for facts than to publish false or misleading headlines to "get ahead of the story". Multiple perspectives should be explored. No need to give equal weight to both sides of everything, but if there are two sides to something talk about both and explore their strengths and weaknesses. Don't ignore or bury stories that offend, challenge, or fail to promote the writer's or news org's ideological views.
Give enough context/sources for informed conclusions: I've seen far too many articles about someone's controversial statement without any mention at all of what the statements were or without context to them. Same with reporting on laws where the name or text of the law isn't included anywhere. I should have enough information to form an opinion and look for additional information and sources not included in the article. If something must be quoted from social media, quote it in the story instead of just linking to it. Anonymous sources shouldn't be the entire story, just a starting point or a supporting one around verified facts.
Clear separation between ads and content: This includes press releases disguised as news stories. Once while working for a company I was poking around on their network shares and found a video of a report from a local news broadcast that talked about new services we were offering in that area. I thought it was really cool that someone had saved it, but then I read the documents included in that folder and realized that the company had hired a production company, the reporter was an actor reading ad copy written by my company, and that they'd paid local stations to air the content with no indication to the viewer that it was an advertisement. Not cool.
Independent reporting without constraint or consideration to partners/advertisers that might be inconvenienced by the truth: No killed stories because of pressure from some external corporation or industry. No killed stories because it makes the network/news org itself or their friends/partners look bad either.
Transparency: Edits and corrections are great, but the text as originally reported should always remain available and any changes made after publication should be clear and timestamped. Old stories should remain searchable and available even after years/decades. Updates, and especially corrections, should be heavily promoted. Potential conflicts of interest should be avoided if possible and disclosed otherwise.
Ethics are nice: Balance the public's right to know with the privacy of everyday people. Protect the identity of children and those innocent until proven guilty. Don't do things like hound people who are grieving for quotes, or who have expressed that they wish to be left alone. Don't hack into a missing child's voicemail
Little excessive fluff: A bit of color is fine, but I don't care what the author had for breakfast and while it's great to have specific cases as examples, I don't need paragraphs of meandering text about their personal lives either. I want information not entertainment.
Quality writing and editing: That means the people doing the work should be paid well enough that they can more than comfortably support themselves doing it. Talented and skilled people should be attracted to do the job. Reporters or editors who fail to perform to a high standard should be sacked. There are tons of people who are genuinely passionate about journalism. This should be so easy.
> And what do you read / consume? And what do you think it should cost?
The news I consume is often terrible and disappointing and my consumption is not an endorsement of the source or a reflection of their quality. I don't know enough about the costs of journalism today to put a price on it. I'd say that they should charge just enough so that their expenses are covered and they make a very modest yet sustainable profit. A news org shouldn't be attempting to maximize wealth or push to extract every possible dime out of subscribers. That leads to things like accepting money to publish or not publish something, collecting and selling the personal data of subscribers, and filling news stories with ads.
> And yet, you continue to click them.
A starving man eats out of the bin, but that doesn't mean he likes it. I get what can and do my best.
> You do pay: You are the product because adverts are shown.
Well, most people pay... I block ads. My point wasn't that nobody pays for music unless they pay spotify, just that if someone want to make "spotify for news" and offer unique and exclusive quality reporting they have to let people share it, and they should want to. It's free advertising. They should feel free to push ads on non-subscribers so long as the ads are clearly separated from content, clearly marked as ads, the ads have no influence over content, and the ads are hosted locally by the news org, not targeted to the user, and carefully vetted to be respectful to both the content and the user.
I don't think that's a very high bar. It's just basic journalistic integrity, not being greedy, and not exploiting subscribers (or potential subscribers). Is it actually sustainable in this day and age to offer high quality journalism to folks on the internet? I have no idea, but just once I'd like to see somebody try it.
This has been tried multiple times. Micropayments just don’t work well. People don’t want to create an account, break out their CC, and enter their info just for a 5c transaction. You also can’t even profitably charge a CC 5c, so you need to charge something like $5. Unlike music, most people can envision consuming $5 worth of news media unless they already have a strong preference for a publication like the NYT or WSJ.
Eg, consumers incur those credit card charges by topping up an online wallet. They “pay” 5 cents from that wallet itself. The news website only receives payment when the aggregated total paid to it hits a certain amount.
General epayment wallets are already widely (Grab in Singapore for instance), even with auto top up. There just isn’t one for news.
That solves the problem of profitably charging the card (maybe) but it doesn’t solve the issue of convincing people to sign up and pay for something that costs 5c.
There's flattr, but they never really took off (not many accept their payments).
Each flattr user sets how much they want to pay per month. Flattr collects the fees, and tracks which sites you visited (or which you click a button on). At the end of the month, they divide all the user's contributions between the sites visited in proportion to the numbers of visits (less a fee for themselves).
Google Contributor did that. Didn’t work. It never could amass a critical mass of major publishers to entice audiences, and the per-page fees for an ad free experience were too high when you look at consumption habits.
blendle [1] is still trying to make this work, and has been for years with minimal success in attracting publishers or readers. scroll [2] also tried something similar, with again minimal success in attracting either readers or publishers before being acquired by twitter and essentially shut down. every news site seems to be doing the math and deciding that the hope of $5-$10/mo is better than $0.15-$0.50 per read.
I really like the idea of Blendle. I signed up and paid for a few articles. I actually want to use it, and spend more there.
The issue has nothing to do with the cost, or quality--instead, it is just really hard to make it part of my browsing routine.
I realized I just don't sit down and read news anymore. I obviously get into articles throughout the day from links people share, but I never sit down and think--yeah, I want to read "the news" now.
loved using blendle, for about 2 years i regularly spent about 50 EUR/m on articles. then the honeymoon phase of blendle and the publishers was over and it became clear the model just wont work. for publishers an article (usually sold for between 99 cents and 2 euro) is more than a product to be sold, as the price doesnt cover all costs. they usually have only a handful of "flagship articles" with some kind of exclusive content. they need these to capture the audience into subscriptions. this regular audience can then also be sold ads and merchandise/other stuff.
for me as user it was essential that i had access to more than 80% of the best articles of all publications for sale. as most publishers came to see that publishing their flagship articles cannibalized them selling subscriptions and eliminated their secondary revenue streams they resorted to periodically publishing only some bait articles to lure audiences to their core offers. thus the incentives of all 3 (me as user, publishers, blendle) did not align and its usefullness as a product suffered.
some publishers tried to raise the price of their flagship articles to cover more of their costs, but who pays 4 EUR for a single article? so, the business model just doesnt work.
enjoyed it while it lasted though
People have been trying micro payment systems since the very early 2000s. Various internet comic book "publishing groups" had their own systems that allowed you to make sub-dollar payments to artists per comic strip daily out of a larger account. It's been tried my dude.
A few years ago, I had setup a publicly accessible Pihole and asked people to use my pihole as their DNS server. The idea was to pay websites a small fee every time someone looked up their IP using my pihole setup.
As a proof of concept, it worked fine but (a) i would need tons of money and (b) tons of misuse blocking to make this work.
Dropped the idea after a while though I think this could still work -
1. A group of friends set up a pihole and use that as their DNS
2. Transparently share usage with websites
3. Pay those websites a small per url fee per user
And not just that - if you only share your pihole’s IP with a small group of friends, do you really want to know when they ask your pihole to resolve some shady url?
> Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader.
I used to subscribe to The Information. They had really high quality content consistently.
But then they got greedy and introduced an even more expensive plan and moved a bunch of features to that more expensive plan, and what’s left in the lower tier (but still hundreds of $$) subscription is kinda crap.
I’m not sure I want to renew my subscription this year.
I noticed a decrease in the quality of their content as well. I did the entry level deal back when they offered 3 months for a $1 (I think that was the price - you used to be able to find it in Jessica’s Twitter bio). I got hooked and bought an annual subscription. But after they jacked the price up, and also started writing content that felt a bit too opinionated I bailed.
I used to work at The Information. The owners are extremely wealthy, and were constantly pushing to charge more, more, more. The recent subscription changes didn't surprise me in the slightest.
I wanted to build that once. The "cable" of the internet. One subscription, hundreds of websites, plus opportunities for each site to cross promote a little, via deals on ads or a quota of free ads within the network maybe. Plus heavy curation, to make sure every site in the network is high quality.
But it's 99% b2b networking and sales, trying to get websites on board and then negotiating contracts, and it sounded pretty unpleasant for a technical person to pursue.
I don't know why there aren't dozens of these. I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform, and aggregation is unappealing to them. But there's a lot of money just waiting for whoever does it, and it should benefit writers a fair bit too--they'll actually be able to get paid under this scheme; and a $10/month subscription might actually be worthwhile, instead of getting only a single website as it is today
> I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform,
But this is not about distribution platform. It's about the payment platform. They can all distribute in any way they like, as long as there is only one payment aggrgator.
Artist don't make a living from music streaming.. They get money from live shows, swags and other performance. Steaming typically make less than 10% of what they need.
The problem is that musicians (except, again, from the top-tier ones) aren't making money from live shows either. Tours are being cancelled because they end up costing the artists money.
Friend of mine is a big name artist. He has to pay his record label everytime he performs his songs. For big tours he gets exactly one dollar of each ticket. He can make money off of other stuff though depending on how the show is setup he can get money from alcohol and merchandise sales. He's done smaller sets of shows where they charge him 30-50k to perform even if the record label had no part whatsoever in putting the shows together. Like if he wants to play at a local bar where we grew up he has to pay them.
It's even worse, as the musical acts (once again, excluding Taylor Swift) that are able to survive/thrive from live shows are generally DJs or other low-overhead acts. DJs and other low-overhead acts go on the road with basically just an iPod. Exaggerated, but the point is that traditional bands can't compete, there's too much overhead (lots of equipment to travel with and maintain, more people to feed and manage, etc.)
It's really not that much equipment. Drumset, keyboards, a bunch of guitar amps. Perhaps some horns if your music has that. The rest is local sound and light equipment that is already at the venue. You need 1-2 to load/unload all that and you are set. A band of 6 can tour with 8 people no problem. That's only a 33% overhead. (Then you also need to rent a truck and drive it around, but you can do that pretty cheaply too.)
Main issue is that the 100% baseline is already too little. No matter that overhead.
They pay the publishers based on what articles you read, so you get to choose what is in the bundle, but not the price of the bundle.
The main problem with the model is that it encourages clickbait titles. The secondary problem is that many people that want to support independent journalism also dislike walled gardens.
Thats cause no one talks about Collective Attention available (Demand). Thats not increasing. In fact its getting overloaded and disintegrating from the info tsunami. The UN report on the Attention Economy says only .5% of content produced is consumed. What a useless and mindless achievement of the content creator class.
Instead of talking about that there is never ending jabber about supporting Content Creation (Supply). Cuz People love receiving attention much more than they are capable of doling it out (Goldharber's Attention Inequality). On top of that Broadcast tools have become cheap, distribution has become cheap, content creators a dim a dozen. So its a system with runaway Supply. Now mostly mistaking meeting sudden random huge spikes in Demand for success.
So dont ask your kids to get into content creation, unless they have infinite Trump like self promoting energies.
I think consumers would pay for access to X number of subscriptions for Y dollars per month. Probably the sticking point is the publishers wanting bigger shares. But yeah, bundling from a consumer perspective would be great —so long as they can select ala carte from a good catalogue of publishers.
It's been tried, a lot. What's perhaps curious is that some major media conglomerate hasn't pushed it -- a Hulu for journalism or something. There's enough consolidation in media that I find that somewhat surprising.
I'd be happier to pay for a bundle subscription than individual things. I subscribe to the Washington Post, and regularly donate to The Guardian, but for everywhere else, a full subscription just doesn't make sense for the 1-2 articles I may read a month.
Probably hard to do deals with publishing companies. I thought of this back in 2015. Maybe i should revive it. At one point i thought there was one called bundle news or something.
Literally all you can eat is probably more than most people would pay given that it wouldn't be that hard to hit $1000/year with a large handful of top news sources plus some specialty providers. NYT/New Yorker/Economist/Atlantic/some more political mags/some recreational sports/etc.
And as has been discussed for more than a couple decades, people mostly aren't willing to pay the mental transaction costs for micropayments at a sustainable level.
Some of it is probably the news/magazine businesses' fault in that they opened up the floodgates for free content during dot-com. But people wouldn't have liked the alternative either which was probably draconian paywalls and lawsuits over unauthorized content access.
print journalism and what passes for articles on the internet are very different things. Our family had a subscription to the magazine for generations. Great stories by actual journalists and amazing photos from people who traveled the globe to catch them. I don't see a lot of archive.is links here leading to websites where globetrotting journalists are capturing the imagination of millions of people. I see a lot of badly edited articles about tweets though. Not that everything behind an archive.is link is trash, but it is very very different.
It seems like a lot of quality paper publications wanted to get into the whole online thing and the quality didn't survive the transition. Maybe because the medium doesn't allow for it. People don't interact with websites the same way. Maybe low effort content made enough ad money that companies just shifted their attention there instead.
It should be noted that in National Geographic’s case, all content that is included in the print magazine is also available completely for free on the website. I still pay for the print magazine because the reading experience is better. I guess I’m old school.
Hm, nothing is paywalled for me. I’ve been reading articles on both my laptop and phone while not signed in. I guess the paywall is applied only to some countries.
Am I the only one who would pay micro transaction fees to read specific high quality articles? I guess so since so many companies just died instead of trying that model.
In my (Tiny East European) country, all the main outlets have tried this. Eventually, one had to pay close to the price of a whole printed issue to read a single article online. By now, essentially all outlets have ditched this model, pushing readers towards monthly subscriptions.
Might be different in the US, considering its scope, but around here, this "buy me a coffee" type model just doesn't seem to work.
I can authoritatively say that the business model sucks as well. They have to be tripping to think I’ll pay the amounts any of these subscriptions ask for. Pretty much every publication should ask for a third of what they do if they want to even justify the value they provide in this day and age.
I have continued to pay for my nytimes subscription because they never stopped my student discount. I’m perfectly happy with the value nytimes gives me for 4 bucks a month. I’d not pay 10 though. But I use nytimes a lot. Any other publication dare not ask more than a buck a month.
Yeah people hate ads, and are tired of having a monthly subscription to everything. The aggregators where you pay per article never seem to catch on. I really don’t know what the solution is for people who like to read several different news sources. Back in the day the paper worked since you only subscribed to that one news paper, but no one can afford to subscribe to cnn, Bloomberg, nat geo, CNBC, etc…
As I recall, back in the day (90s) my family subscribed to a regional daily paper, a local weekly paper, National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, Smithsonian magazine, various kids magazines depending on age (e.g. Highlights, Boys Life, etc), MIT Technology Review, and a few industry-specific publications.
In addition to that, we'd frequently stop by a newsstand or bookstore to pick up other periodicals if there was an article we were interested in, or if we had extra time to read that week.
The idea of halcyon days when all you needed was a single subscription is a myth. If you wanted regional news plus some pool reports from Washington, Wall Street, and somewhere in Europe, then sure, a single subscription would do. But if you liked to read several different news sources, you paid for several different news sources.
Will corroborate; family was subscribed to many newspapers and magazines when I was a kid. NatGeo included.
They all slowly got culled, though. Why? Because the content kept getting worse, and when it came time to deliberately renew one it simply wasn't worth the effort nor the money.
People don't pay for journalism because journalism went to shit.
I can’t see why a Spotify like model wouldn’t work for text. Buy a monthly subscription, read as much as you want, and have the monthly fee distributed pro rata.
The Spotify model doesn't really work for music though, unless you're a mega star who probably doesn't need the money. While something is better than nothing, but I don't think Spotify pays the bills for most artists, especially when the pot is not evenly distributed.
Who are we talking about here? More total money is spent on music now due to spotify. And the money has never been that widely distributed. What small artists did better before Spotify?
It’s not viable for journalism bc music artists have other avenues of revenue like touring and merch.
The point is that even Taylor Swift doesn’t make very much money from Spotify. What other sources of revenue does journalism have? It’s not like the NYT is going to make a few million going on tour.
Spotify has a lot of revenues with millions of users at $10 - $20 per month. Perhaps they give very little to artists but I’m not sure it is necessary to operate. If artists had no other ways to make money, I suspect they would pay more as otherwise the system wouldn’t work.
It's not the Spotify model that is responsible for this, but the scammy way which record companies have approached the Spotify model.
They offer artists a similar 'royalty' on Spotify revenue as they did on record sales. In other words, where they used to give artists 10-20% of a CD sticker price, with much of the rest going to retailer markup, manufacturing costs, etc. they now keep 80-90% of the Spotify money, when they have zero per-unit costs and are simply passing the money through to the artist.
Artists who are working with Spotify outside of this system are able to make money from streaming, just as YouTubers who own their own content are able to make money while musicians typically see tiny amounts from YT.
However, the record company are essentially a bank who fund firstly recording and development costs, and second (both important and very expensive) marketing costs. So to be able to license directly with Spotify you have to already have a bunch of funds.
So why does so much amazing music continue to get made, daily, as opposed to amazing journalistic content? Writing and producing music is no less challenging and time-consuming.
While not universal (e.g. newsletters on certain specialized topics), journalism has historically been associated with news organizations whereas music/art/etc. has been more associated with individuals or small groups. (Though certainly producers have played roles.)
Historically, (roughly), ads paid for the newspaper content and subscriptions (and newsstand sales) paid for the physical paper and distribution. But advertising rates have also gone way down (and classified ads, which were a huge money-maker, are basically gone) so it's not really comparable.
- Bookstores
- Encyclopedias
- Newspapers
- Radio
- Television
- Cable TV
And dozens (hundreds) of other industries have been/are being consumed by the internet/computer technology. We can miss them, wish them to continue, but change is inevitable.
I'm not convinced. I would gladly pay per article but I don't want a subscription. I noticed this on Canva. I wanted to use a non-free resource there and I was able to just buy it without subscribing. How awesome.
The incentives of paying per article aren't great though.
Instead of one article covering a school board meeting it gets split into one article per speaking, an article in cover why the meeting happened, an article on when they'll meet next, one interviewing the attendees, etc.
The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose.
New content vendors can spring up over night, even ones doing real news or expensive trips or whatever National Geographic (or any other outlet) is into these days. And now these writers don't even have the miniscule security of at-will employment.
They are going to respond readily to incentives because there is nothing tethering them to a way of doing business. They have no anchor so they will sail any way the wind blows.
When you have the security of actually owning land and equipment or having an employment contract you can sit back and think about stuff like professionalism and integrity. As it is, fewer writers are in the position to turn down demands that they churn out crappy little dopamine hits as fast as possible.
> The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose.
I don't know why you say that is the thing about that, or what the implications of it being the thing are. Substitute farms and apples for any product or service. A candy bar or a bottle of beer.
I am saying you can't substitute any product or service. The way that a product or service is produced is relevant.
I'm producing free content that's competing for your attention with National Geographic right now. If I wanted to make a beer that competed with your favorite beer it would take months (at least) and a substantial investment before the first bottle arrived at a store near you.
Additionally, competition has different effects on different products. You can compete with educational content by making content that is more educational. You can also compete with it by making content that is less educational but more fun.
And I'm saying you can. Splitting up articles is pretty equivalent to watering down beer or making smaller candy bars or selling apples in quarters for the purpose of this.
Am I the only one? I read news very casually, when I hit a paywall I just walk away. I checked so many times, and no one ever offers it within my parameters
Would gladly pay $1 or do a 5 pack for $5-6 with a 1year use expiration. They usually want $5 for one article or else expire credits in a month and charge $9. Just makes no sense to me, I'll get a pay per view rental on Amazon instead with my money and be entertained for 2 full hours. (I don't have Netflix or similar.)
I mean how would one rtfa to be able to discuss it cogently on a news aggregator site like this? Do you subscribe to a dozen news sources behind paywalls? I had a natgeo sub for years growing up.
I really wish micro payments were a thing where I could pay $20 a month and not hit upteen paywalls and they would all get a piece of that monthly cost.
Define woke please, because I struggle to make a link between "woke" and the examples you shared about European folk tales and Nigerian stories. And it's not like it's something new, I remember reading about some Amazonian tribe's folklore as a kid in National Geographic.
Well, in this particular case, it's European folk tales put into a different context by some Nigerian artist. It would probably be more suitable for an art magazine. There's nothing about Nigerian folk tales in it.
You mean the biased, agenda-pushing traditional media? I'm not paying a cent to be influenced by propaganda. If anything, they should pay me to read their crap if they want me to be influenced by it.
The fall of these "journalists" will be a net good for the world.
The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.
Then I see this:
> The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co.
It's sad that National Geographic is effectively closing its doors when it's owned by Walt Disney Co., which has yearly revenue of nearly $100 billion. They seriously can't find the miniscule amount of cash in there to support National Geographic's journalism? Walt Disney is one of the most evil and exploitative companies ever, so I suppose I'm not surprised by their actions here.
> National Geographic spokesperson Chris Albert said staffing changes will not affect the company’s plans to continue publishing a monthly magazine
If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?