Yes officer, I’d like to charge this phone with battery.
I doubt they can read this. Rip ops phone
OP's phone kept posting to keep Lemmy active until the bitter end. o7
Perhaps he likes to live dangerously, and in the moment?
He totally didn't knew about that
It's giving me Vietnam flashbacks.
The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven "news". Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.
Personally, I'm excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I'm hopeful we'll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.
High quality journalism can't exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can't afford it, visiting a local library for example.
I know "state-funded media" is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it's always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.
BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.
I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.
You’ve just given whatever regulatory body significant power and influence. It will have its own biases if it doesn’t simply become outright politicized, and now they dictate facts or else. Inaccuracy or “fake news” are used by authoritarian regimes all the time to justify silencing of critics.
Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don't ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.
You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.
You also have congressional oversight adding another check.
If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.
The other nice thing for "state funded media" is they often have translations for international audiences
The BBC World Service is the largest and broadcasts in something like 40 languages around the world. I think the normal BBC news still uses some of the sound effects traditionally associated with their shortwave broadcasts.
Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
I honestly don't think this is a bad idea for the US...for now at least. Right now your typical options for official statements from government leaders are either through (1) politically polarized media like CNN or Fox, (2) paid subscription to better journalism, or (3) social media monopolies like Twitter (X) and Instagram. Can we really not fund something entirely independent of a mega-corporation to get official info out?
PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Voice of America through the United States Agency for Global Media.
People think they’re boring, not enough anger.
The US government broadcaster is the Voice of America. For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now. Some Europeans may be familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that is also US-funded by the same agency as the Voice of America.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting (PBS), both have news. They receive government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is supposed to be objective although there have been issues in recent history. They also have corporate donors, which could affect objectivity.
Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.
Should have long term funding structures in place (longer than election cycles) so that you dont have different political parties influencing things once elected into power
Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we've learned since then about media malfeasance.
Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.
This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.
The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.
With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.
And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.
So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We ham fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.
I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.
The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.
Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.
Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.
Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.
Everyone hates ads but no one wants to pay for it lol
Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
Well there are 3 alternatives.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
If I have to pay for it:
it cannot be sensationalized. It cannot even veer mildly from the found facts.
it cannot be filled with agenda bias
it cannot hold any false, non peer reviewed information
they have to pay their sources. And They have to pay their sources well. Especially the ones who are expected to uphold to peer reviews (science journalists, I’m looking at you)
If there is a free one with ads:
ads cannot fabricate their facts either.
Wanna regulate? Well. Then. Let’s regulate.
You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they're government subsidized they're still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.
Here in Finland we have YLE, and it has news, movies/shows, documentaries, radio/podcasts etc. It is funded with tax money, and I consider the two biggest pros to be that news and more are easily accessible for free to anyone and that since YLE isn't trying to profit from journalism, there are no clickbait headlines. Though, the worst flaw is that goverment-funded journalism is prone to propaganda, and once you control the media, you control the whole country, so people need to be very careful.
Yea that’s precisely it. Publicly-funded media definitely can be the best option, but there’s always risks it can fall into pure propaganda some day
You can always have it be publicly funded but managed by a non profit designated by the government, and make it organized in such a way that if a politician or government institution had a problem with some reporting, there's nothing they can do.
The same concerns about editorial independence and human fallacy apply in the private sector top. There has always been pressure between the editorial, marketing, and journalist parts of newspapers.
The problem with this is that a government could simply decide to cut the funds for public media if there are views contrary to the executive branch and thereby establish a degree of control. An approach to mitigating this attack vector would be to do it like Germany does, collecting a special fee independently of the taxes that goes directly to the news organisations. This means that the parliament cannot control or withhold the funding of the public media unless there were a major legislation change, which would have to be the will of the majority of the population.
I think you're missing a potential 4th one, though I'm not 100% convinced as to its feasibility, but a Universal Basic Income and greater societal wealth redistribution raises the bottom so much that everyone can easily afford 30 news subscriptions.
Though personally I think more arms length public funding is the better option since the incentives of capitalism often don't align with the incentives of high quality journalism.
I love the idea of UBI. But I can’t help but worry I’m wrong.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
I’m not clear I can justify that
I certainly can't speak for anyone else, but personally I would be useful in productive ways. I went through a period of every nerds' dream of staying home and playing video games all the time and it drove me nuts. Yeah, it was nice for a little while, but not having the money to go anywhere or do anything made me look forward to working again. If I'd have had money, I would not have been home very much.
I did that too; it was during Covid :)
I think/acted similar to you… which is why I think we might all be common minding.
That said, people that aren’t motivated to do good things are most likely motivated to do nothing… so it might not be a big deal if they don’t show up for a job.
TLDR: fewer workers at Burger King probably would t make service worse
Eh, the actual problem is that most people are shite.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
Very few people honestly want to do nothing. Even the image of the unemployed pot smoker who watched cartoons all day, maybe that person would find fulfillment in art? Or maybe they're passionate about something important in their community.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
There's still an incentive to work and make more money to better your living situation and contribute productively back to society, but you wouldn't be as beholden to it.
Another way to think about it was that in the 50s a single worker could make enough to support a family, whereas these days both parents have to work full time. Providing UBI would be a more equitable way of reducing the reliance on work and increase individual families' health and well being by providing the baseline financial assistance that would allow one parent to take time off work (or both parents to reduce time at work) to better support their family, community, and social structure.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
It's not quite that simple with PBS or NPR, but that's the basic idea. Open public funding with no political or corporate control sounds like the safest bet. It's as viable as people deciding to support it.
Not sure why you'd think "publicly funded" would seem like the "optimal" option. Same thing structurally as "state-run media", just friendlier phrasing. If we had direct democracy or something, that might be fine, but the fact that it has to run through politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests/agendas, that completely changes the picture. If you have that federally funded in the U.S., that basically just tucks under the executive branch like almost everything else, meaning it's just managed by the President, with basically only a paper tiger of regulations preventing interference in place.
In Germany, the independence of publicly funded media is guaranteed by the payment of a special fee that is collected independently of the normal taxes, and is distributed directly among the public media institutions. No parliament has to approve any funding, the only attack vector would be to change the legislation behind this financing but that would require a parliamentary majority and would therefore have to be the will of the people.
That's better than "all media is run by the Fuhrer" I suppose, but probably still preferable for people to have the choice of which to support.
This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.
I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It's a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what's happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.
But what keeps a local newspaper from creating an online service over which the papers can be bought, maybe even for a lower price because manufacturing costs are no longer extant?
They are all trying. I'm honestly not sure yet whether it will work. I hope so.
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can't operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it's not there at all, and that's why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
Because classified ads used to pay for the paper.
Heck, 'The Advertiser' used to be a popular name for newspapers.
You would sometimes pick up a newspaper specifically for the ads. You might be looking for a job or a car and that was a good starting place.
Back before VCRs were a thing, movies like 'Deep Throat' were only available in theaters. The local theaters ran ads for XXX movies on the same pages as the general stuff.
Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they'd remained a subscription service only.
I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix...
Only so much blood in this here stone.
With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I'm kinda soured on Streaming these days.
Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.
Please tell me you aren't getting your news from Disney. But seriously, a halfway decent local paper is probably more worth your attention than the latest attention grabbing headline at the NYT. Good choice.
My local paper has actual investigative journalists and a city desk, I'm happy to fund them.
No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today's ads, because they're literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn't have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I'm reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.
Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn't our fault for being pushed so far that we're fed up with it.
Unskipable ads when I'm browsing my files on my phone, how fucking obnoxious can you possibly make them?
Where did u experience this lol, Ive never heard of that
There're some wack lowly made phones sold in countries without good standards that do this.
A friend's phone shows ad in every app, from google stock apps to whatapp and even fucking phone/call app. Around 30 pixels of ad blocked at the bottom of the screen whenever mobile data is on.
It's a xiaomi, phone is great but the software bloat is horrible
Xiaomi, that was the worst update ever
What phone or service is this? Not in the states right?
Yeah that's what I ended up doing, but that never should have happen in the first place
I agree, needing to watch ads to view your own, local, personal files is insane
It's like you don't own anything anymore, using what you bought is a privilege
I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.
Idk, 15 years ago I was watching cable and 1/3 of my time was spent subjected to ads on a paid service. I think I prefer them now lol
We're talking internet here, bub. Cable ads are definitely BS, though.
Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.
Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.
That’s why I use an inverted ad-block list. I see ads unless they get intrusive or unreasonable, and then I enable blocking on the site.
Firefox has an autoplay block setting, and I've never had it fail me.
You can get NY times for just $4 a month. I personally think it's worth it.
When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they've made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I've decided it wasn't worth it. The Guardian isn't paywalled at least.
I'm perfectly willing to pay what I pay for the actual news paper for the subscription. The subscription turns out to be about 10x.
If you are defending ADS (of all things) you are definitely part of the problem.
I’m defending the right for people to make a profit from their labour 🤷♂️ even if ads aren’t my preference either
A little bird told me you're in cognizance of the way to finance online journalism without depending on ads and subscriptions of readers. That's a good news. Care to share how?
If you can't do it without ads then it shouldn't be done.
Fuck.
People are brainwashed.
This is a very naive take.
Nice to see you revealing your naivety. That's what I've intended to do in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with advertising in of itself, society has lived with advertisements for goods and services for a long time. Unless you're unreasonably susceptible to suggestion you should be able to safely navigate them. Some sites take the mick with how they present them but they have to make money somehow.
There is something wrong with advertising in and of itself. Imagine a sphere of all information available to humans, and inside that sphere there's a corruption of information that's deceitful, self-promoting for its originators, in excess of what people actually need to know about specific companies or products, and based on manipulation techniques and de-facto brainwashing. This twists decision-making for the entire society.
The only defense is that it's a "necessary evil" because of the perverse economic structures in our society.
And P.S., the fact something's been around for a long time is not an ethical defense, and people "unreasonably susceptible to suggestion" (i.e. influenced by ads) are a staggering % of the popularity, probably a majority.
Facts are behind a paywall and bullshit flows for free.
There is a reason for it, isn't there? Bullshit is motivated to manipulate, and spread propaganda. While, truth based journalism needs professionals to do due diligence. While we can argue for better journalism, wishing for everything to be free ain't gonna work.
Unless we are okay with.. Ads. We won't tolerate that either, would we?
NYT has a lot of bullshit tbf
This is why we can't have nice things.
It's not talked about enough how "traditional news" is culpable for the rise of "fake news" by locking vital information and reporting behind exactly these kinds of pay walls, thus causing people to seek alternative free means instead. This is how fake news sites thrive; pushed into the forefront by traditional media who refuse to adapt their business models to the modern landscape.
How do you feel about government subsidies being used to bolster a free press? From past examples like oil, they don't become a shell company of the governments whims and I feel journalism is just as important to an educated populace in comparison to oil for our commerce.
This actually isnt a terrible strategy. Right now the news sites require profit for survival. Leading them to do well frankly... Whatever it takes to make that happen. Which leads us to the road we are on now. If their survival was subsidized and they were simply paid to provide the service of good journalism. This would be beneficial as journalism at its core is a PUBLIC service. That is currently being sold as a commercial commodity.
This is really the case for all essential services (which I believe factual new is). Just look at the mess healthcare has made, or the 'food industry', or education.
I am for it
You can't have actually free and truthful news as long as people need money to survive
I never said free, I said they needed to adapt their business model. I also never said the reason didn't make sense, but the ramifications remain the same even if there is good reason for the practice. Whether by design or not, they still share culpability.
Looks like a login wall. While I get the “joke” or irony, Journalism has never been free. Servers, journalists, investigations, and apps still cost money. So did printing and delivery. There are countless sources of information online so you do not have to join The Times but for some the journalistic value is worth the price.
Wikipedia offers knowledge to the world for free and are maintained through donation (including myself) and philanthropy. It has its issues but provides free information.
I think we can a enjoy a variety of options. Paid journalism, ad based news, and “free” community supported. There likely are other models we can adopt.
Other free sources I use.
Roca News app
Gabe Fleisher’s Wake up to Politics
Knowledge at Wharton
Aye, very much this.
I don't know it is in other countries but here in Germany some "baseline" news is provided from money collected via a tax, which is very awesome as it ensures everyone has access to at least some news source. On top of that there's Wikipedia, as you say, but beyond that everyone still has to be aware that investigative journalism takes a lot of time and effort.
This is an inherent problem with the concept of free information. I would love universal and free information, but that doesn't take into consideration that quality information requires labor. Wikipedia isn't free of that either, the labor is just largely unpaid.
At the end of the day, we need to pay journalists, editors, curators, and contributors. If you want quality news, you need quality people. And to get quality people, you need generous compensation, whether that comes from subscriptions, advertisements, or taxes.
Now it makes sense. The dream of universal access to knowledge was actually the iphone's - and it was because the phone was dying, and seeing death visions, like life flashing before it's eyes.
I use it all the time and it's great. I'm kind of wondering the same thing now...
I think it got bought out
What's 12ft.io?
A service to remove paywalls.As far as I remember,it doesn't work with the NYT but does a good job with a bunch of other sites.
Another paywall workaround
It's the website I literally clicked to from the link in your comment. :D
Came here to post this
It's not a paywall, just a login wall. The account is free. Still funny however.
Hopefully when you log in you haven't reached your limit of free articles for the month if you want to read it.
And that no one else on your public IP has reached it, since it seems to be IP-based.
There are so many times I try to read an NYT article and it says I've reached my limit when I haven't even visited the site in the past month.
NYT account is free though. Washington Post is free to students and federal / DoD employees.
The account is free, but it doesn't affect whatever checks they're doing for your monthly free article limit. I've hit the sign in prompt and logged in, only to be told I've hit my limit anyway.
Clear your nyt browser cookies
Incognito, different browser, doesn't matter. It's IP-based.
I read i through my Library, through the Press Reader app. It may be worth looking at what dogital resources your local library provides.
Just curious --- how would you like this to work? If you want high quality journalism, you need to pay journalists.
You can pay them through ads, but 1) this is annoying, and 2) people just install ad blockers.
You can have state-sponsored media, which can work reasonably well...or can end up a propaganda machine.
Or...you can pay.
Journalism is not a crazy lucrative career for most. Financially, most of the folks writing for NYT would be better off in PR --- and I don't think that's a good thing for society.
Or you can have voluntary sponsorship like NPR has done for decades and has high quality journalism because of it. Yes, they get a tiny bit of government money. Nowhere near enough to operate on. And they get corporate sponsors. Who they report against when they have a story about.
Sadly, NPR is nowhere near as unbiased as they used to be. I listened to it recently, and it's just not good anymore. They engage in both sides whataboutism, only ask softball questions, and generally seem to toe the line of appearing neutral but not risking their corporate funding.
Now, if they didn't need corporate funding, that would be ideal. I believe that would lead to more unbiased reporting.
So I haven’t seen any of what you are talking about, and I’m an avid consumer of NPR. I love that they generally avoid rage bait and present the news in a calm yet accurate manner.
That being said, I am open to being persuaded if you can present some solid evidence.
As a paying NYT subscriber, I'd just like to add that unfortunately they still advertise to me.
Adverts have been in newspapers since forever. They're giving you the full experience.
You need to earn my trust if you want me to pay.
Many of these legacy media outlets are demanding Netflix-level fees for fanfic-level content.
The NYT is one of the biggest, most recognised publications worldwide. If they don't meet your requirements, I don't think that's a realistic expectation
I think many people also don't understand the difference between opinion and reporting. You can despise the opinion section of NYT, or WSJ, or whatever, but still respect the reporting.
I question a lot of the choices they've made in the opinion section, and which letters from politicians to publish, but it can't be understated that OP/EDs are totally separate from everything else.
I found the image on Mastodon, so it's not mine, but I agree. I never let my battery get below 50% if I can help it. If it gets below 20, I'm in panic mode.
I never let my battery get below 50% if I can help it.
that doesn't sound great for the battery
Modern Lithium-Ion batteries like to stay between like 40%-70% charge, and going above or below that wears of out a bit faster. It was older batteries where you needed to fully empty and fully charge them.
Most modern devices can manage the battery for you pretty well, helping with any harm it might do. But even then, it’s less bad for the battery than deep discharges and recharges (where the battery does get low). It’s honestly probably fine.
Seems to work fine to me.
Why?
Genuinely I let mine drop to 5% before charging, I think letting it discharges makes the battery last longer.
Nah you want to have like 20% or so. Dendrites and other li-ion demons enjoy lower charge, and enjoy when charging is done in cold weather
Pro tip: Adblock + JavaScript disabled (Ublock Origin can do both) will block most paywalls
Ublock can unblock paywalls?
Most of the time you can delete modern paywalls from the website by editing the HTML in your browser.
I choose to believe the author did this intentionally.
Universal access, as in everyone need to pay 8 dollars a month for the privilege.
Yeah, I still dont get why people can't just work for for free! Greedy bastards.
Especially publishers. It's not like they play an important role in modern society, at all. They can do research, perform interviews and write stories during the day, and then, if they absolutely need food and a friggin' roof over their heads, they can work at McDonald's or something in the evenings.
/s
News agency should've been operated by non-profit organizations IMO. The non-profit organizations can be funded by grants, donations, etc (e.g. like how wikimedia is funded).
Or public, like the BBC for example.
Probably not the best idea though for independent journalism. My country had a publicly funded news agency and it was notorious for never reporting any bad thing the government did.
Speaking from the US, so please forgive my underlying bias:
If we could figure out how to actually maintain a "separation of powers" maybe we could actually have a little more "for the people, by the people". And I don't mean it as just a US standpoint (though I am quoting our doctines), because I do believe that those ideologies have merit. But here I am in the US, still "wondering" how "separation of church and state" can't be (and never truly was) maintained.
People hold the power AND people need to be held accountable. I really wish we could find a way to balance that appropriately. Maybe simply throwing around a few more "-isms" could fix it (the last sentence is sarcasm)
I'd rather my taxes go to public services than being diluted into the pockets of middle-men. Publishers are still be valuable, but they have to adapt like everyone else. Education, healthcare, and information... sounds like a recipe for too much equality; better to stomp that out and continue forth, like the term "future" doesn't exist for everyone
Why would I want change when I'm finally getting the hang of things? That sounds difficult and scary, and I might have to adjust my lifestyle... and for what? Other people!? Morals!? Justice!? We already have those, otherwise I would've never made it to where I am today... backslash-fucking-s
If democracy wasn't constantly undermined by greed, we might actually solve real problems. But problems are too far in the future for me, when I'll no longer be alive to care. Continue status-quo than, nothing we can do
I mean, libraries do cost you money too. You just don't see the itemized bill.
Taxes are the subscription fee of life.
Well I'm glad we all agree that "universal access" always has a cost, so unless you want to nationalize the press I'm not sure what y'all want.
Maybe we can just leave them a profit driven third party that you are legally required to support with your taxes? Seems like praxis to me, no problems with that at all.
Equity. I just don't know how we'll ever achieve it. A common enemy of the human race, maybe? We've already perfected fighting each other. Maybe if a "physical something" were attacking us, that we could kill; we might find a little more "human camaraderie".
Put a scooby-doo-type mask on climate change, so we can have something physical to try and punch. But "Jinkies! It was something intangible this whole time!".
We need a Netflix for online journalism/news. I'm happy to pay for my news... But I'm tired of subscriptions for everything. And basically all the major news organizations want their own damn subscriptions.
Check your local library. They usually have subscriptions for newspapers/magazines that you can access digitally with your library card.
Netflix for online journalism/news
So, like, regular removals of older material and ever increasing prices and restrictions? Oh, yeah, sign me up.
Bad comparison, since Netflix is just one of many streaming subscriptions now.
I meant like the early days.
You should look for an archive (dot) today that can get you around those paywalls.
Their site is broken right now.
Easiest way of doing that is firefox reading mode , it takes one click and can bypass most if not all paywalls !
Also, I didn't see a paywall / login wall even when visiting directly
Maybe an extension you have is blocking something
Ahhh I have uBlock Origin 😎
Edit: Wait, I opened up a chrome tab and still can see the article (I don't have extensions on chrome, it's android, there's no support for destop extensions). Hmmm 🤔
I think they show you x articles before nagging. Try to read a few.
you can have desktop extensions on Firefox nightly
I have uBlock Origin on Firefox Android (well I'm using Fennec, but basically the same thing) and honestly, uBlock Origin is all I wanted. I don't want to use unstable versions like Firefox Nightly.
All this talk of state-sponsored/subsidized news/media gives me the wiggins, at least as someone who lives in the US. I'm sure people smarter than myself could come up with a bullet proof system to prevent abuse, but really, I would have little faith it would stand the test of time. I feel like any protections you put in place would be eroded eventually. All it takes is one "emergency" or "disaster". Maybe I'm wrong. It just feels so 1984ish.
BBC
And ABC
PBS and NPR
. . . what? Neither of those are state-run media.
Do you mean "American Broadcasting Company"? Because they are owned by Disney.
I think judging from his home instance he means Australian
Ah yes. The conservative government decided they would be in charge of choosing the chairman, chose a major party doner, and the BBC now kiss the conservative government's ass whenever possible. Flawless.
I'd say German state media is going OK. Its anything but perfect but definetly doesn't kiss any parties ass
"democracy dies in darkness..."
Is my favorite ironic walled garden gate keeping paywall byline... I think the Washington post uses it.
It wouldn't be so dark if the paywall wasn't blocking the light...
I wish I could just pay per article sometimes. Let the subscription be optional for people who read a lot from that source.
Once upon a time tabloids were a joke and everyone knew they were a joke.
And then one day tabloids just became news sources and everyone decided their publishings were journalism.
And people lost the distinction between tabloid and journalism, so when journalism now requests money to keep going, it gets scoffed at.
I fucking hate this bullshit!
News, and I would argue journalism in general, is not what the term knowledge is referring to in that sentence.
Literally a game of whack-a-mole regarding paywalls and adblockers.
You won't obtain much in the way of knowledge from the NYT anyway.
Have they fallen that much? Or am I confusing them? Because I remember they were pretty well established and did comparatively good investigations?
They probably still do a lot of those, but recently they've been using opinion writers to create outrage bait with writings they should know better than to print.
In the last few years they have been willing to post a large amount of transphobic nonsense. To the point where early in the year almost 1000 current or former contributors signed an open letter complaining about the issue (and made a callback to the paper doing roughly the same thing with gay and lesbian people in the 60s through 80s)
They were "the paper of record" but they've fallen a long ways in the digital era. They were always slightly left and pro corporate, but as they transitioned to online they dropped in quality big time. They purposely make the line between editorial and news far more vague and pump out a ton of articles that are basically propaganda.
They do still occasionally do a good thing every now and then. They developed some impressive ways to display articles alongside pictures in a way that was satisfying on a website and not just like print. They also do occasionally write a decent article or have a deep dive into a topic that does its due diligence, but it's becoming more rare.
Well, I'm from the UK and when they report on anything to do with us it is almost always completely wrong. Like they've never even visited the country.
guess it ain't called the london times for a reason
If you're going to report on another country, some basic knowledge of that country would be useful though, surely.
Charge your phone
Yes officer, I’d like to charge this phone with battery.
I doubt they can read this. Rip ops phone
OP's phone kept posting to keep Lemmy active until the bitter end. o7
Perhaps he likes to live dangerously, and in the moment?
He totally didn't knew about that
It's giving me Vietnam flashbacks.
The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven "news". Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.
Personally, I'm excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I'm hopeful we'll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.
High quality journalism can't exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can't afford it, visiting a local library for example.
I know "state-funded media" is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it's always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.
BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.
I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.
You’ve just given whatever regulatory body significant power and influence. It will have its own biases if it doesn’t simply become outright politicized, and now they dictate facts or else. Inaccuracy or “fake news” are used by authoritarian regimes all the time to justify silencing of critics.
Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don't ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.
You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.
You also have congressional oversight adding another check.
If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.
The other nice thing for "state funded media" is they often have translations for international audiences
For example CBC / Radio-Canada also have an international page, Radio-Canada International offered in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic etc.
The BBC World Service is the largest and broadcasts in something like 40 languages around the world. I think the normal BBC news still uses some of the sound effects traditionally associated with their shortwave broadcasts.
Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
Not much different from private...
I honestly don't think this is a bad idea for the US...for now at least. Right now your typical options for official statements from government leaders are either through (1) politically polarized media like CNN or Fox, (2) paid subscription to better journalism, or (3) social media monopolies like Twitter (X) and Instagram. Can we really not fund something entirely independent of a mega-corporation to get official info out?
PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Voice of America through the United States Agency for Global Media.
People think they’re boring, not enough anger.
The US government broadcaster is the Voice of America. For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now. Some Europeans may be familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that is also US-funded by the same agency as the Voice of America.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting (PBS), both have news. They receive government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is supposed to be objective although there have been issues in recent history. They also have corporate donors, which could affect objectivity.
Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.
Should have long term funding structures in place (longer than election cycles) so that you dont have different political parties influencing things once elected into power
Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we've learned since then about media malfeasance.
This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.
The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.
With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.
And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.
So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We ham fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.
I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.
The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.
Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.
Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.
Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.
Everyone hates ads but no one wants to pay for it lol
Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
Well there are 3 alternatives.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
If I have to pay for it:
If there is a free one with ads:
Wanna regulate? Well. Then. Let’s regulate.
You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they're government subsidized they're still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.
Here in Finland we have YLE, and it has news, movies/shows, documentaries, radio/podcasts etc. It is funded with tax money, and I consider the two biggest pros to be that news and more are easily accessible for free to anyone and that since YLE isn't trying to profit from journalism, there are no clickbait headlines. Though, the worst flaw is that goverment-funded journalism is prone to propaganda, and once you control the media, you control the whole country, so people need to be very careful.
Yea that’s precisely it. Publicly-funded media definitely can be the best option, but there’s always risks it can fall into pure propaganda some day
You can always have it be publicly funded but managed by a non profit designated by the government, and make it organized in such a way that if a politician or government institution had a problem with some reporting, there's nothing they can do.
The same concerns about editorial independence and human fallacy apply in the private sector top. There has always been pressure between the editorial, marketing, and journalist parts of newspapers.
The problem with this is that a government could simply decide to cut the funds for public media if there are views contrary to the executive branch and thereby establish a degree of control. An approach to mitigating this attack vector would be to do it like Germany does, collecting a special fee independently of the taxes that goes directly to the news organisations. This means that the parliament cannot control or withhold the funding of the public media unless there were a major legislation change, which would have to be the will of the majority of the population.
I think you're missing a potential 4th one, though I'm not 100% convinced as to its feasibility, but a Universal Basic Income and greater societal wealth redistribution raises the bottom so much that everyone can easily afford 30 news subscriptions.
Though personally I think more arms length public funding is the better option since the incentives of capitalism often don't align with the incentives of high quality journalism.
I love the idea of UBI. But I can’t help but worry I’m wrong.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
I’m not clear I can justify that
I certainly can't speak for anyone else, but personally I would be useful in productive ways. I went through a period of every nerds' dream of staying home and playing video games all the time and it drove me nuts. Yeah, it was nice for a little while, but not having the money to go anywhere or do anything made me look forward to working again. If I'd have had money, I would not have been home very much.
I did that too; it was during Covid :)
I think/acted similar to you… which is why I think we might all be common minding.
That said, people that aren’t motivated to do good things are most likely motivated to do nothing… so it might not be a big deal if they don’t show up for a job.
TLDR: fewer workers at Burger King probably would t make service worse
Eh, the actual problem is that most people are shite.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
Very few people honestly want to do nothing. Even the image of the unemployed pot smoker who watched cartoons all day, maybe that person would find fulfillment in art? Or maybe they're passionate about something important in their community.
There's still an incentive to work and make more money to better your living situation and contribute productively back to society, but you wouldn't be as beholden to it.
Another way to think about it was that in the 50s a single worker could make enough to support a family, whereas these days both parents have to work full time. Providing UBI would be a more equitable way of reducing the reliance on work and increase individual families' health and well being by providing the baseline financial assistance that would allow one parent to take time off work (or both parents to reduce time at work) to better support their family, community, and social structure.
It's not quite that simple with PBS or NPR, but that's the basic idea. Open public funding with no political or corporate control sounds like the safest bet. It's as viable as people deciding to support it.
Not sure why you'd think "publicly funded" would seem like the "optimal" option. Same thing structurally as "state-run media", just friendlier phrasing. If we had direct democracy or something, that might be fine, but the fact that it has to run through politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests/agendas, that completely changes the picture. If you have that federally funded in the U.S., that basically just tucks under the executive branch like almost everything else, meaning it's just managed by the President, with basically only a paper tiger of regulations preventing interference in place.
In Germany, the independence of publicly funded media is guaranteed by the payment of a special fee that is collected independently of the normal taxes, and is distributed directly among the public media institutions. No parliament has to approve any funding, the only attack vector would be to change the legislation behind this financing but that would require a parliamentary majority and would therefore have to be the will of the people.
That's better than "all media is run by the Fuhrer" I suppose, but probably still preferable for people to have the choice of which to support.
This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.
I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It's a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what's happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.
But what keeps a local newspaper from creating an online service over which the papers can be bought, maybe even for a lower price because manufacturing costs are no longer extant?
They are all trying. I'm honestly not sure yet whether it will work. I hope so.
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can't operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it's not there at all, and that's why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
Because classified ads used to pay for the paper.
Heck, 'The Advertiser' used to be a popular name for newspapers.
You would sometimes pick up a newspaper specifically for the ads. You might be looking for a job or a car and that was a good starting place.
Back before VCRs were a thing, movies like 'Deep Throat' were only available in theaters. The local theaters ran ads for XXX movies on the same pages as the general stuff.
Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they'd remained a subscription service only.
I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix...
Only so much blood in this here stone.
With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I'm kinda soured on Streaming these days.
Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.
Please tell me you aren't getting your news from Disney. But seriously, a halfway decent local paper is probably more worth your attention than the latest attention grabbing headline at the NYT. Good choice.
My local paper has actual investigative journalists and a city desk, I'm happy to fund them.
No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today's ads, because they're literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn't have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I'm reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.
Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn't our fault for being pushed so far that we're fed up with it.
Unskipable ads when I'm browsing my files on my phone, how fucking obnoxious can you possibly make them?
Where did u experience this lol, Ive never heard of that
There're some wack lowly made phones sold in countries without good standards that do this.
A friend's phone shows ad in every app, from google stock apps to whatapp and even fucking phone/call app. Around 30 pixels of ad blocked at the bottom of the screen whenever mobile data is on.
It's a xiaomi, phone is great but the software bloat is horrible
Xiaomi, that was the worst update ever
What phone or service is this? Not in the states right?
Maybe install a different file browser, here's one I think is nice
Yeah that's what I ended up doing, but that never should have happen in the first place
I agree, needing to watch ads to view your own, local, personal files is insane
It's like you don't own anything anymore, using what you bought is a privilege
I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.
Idk, 15 years ago I was watching cable and 1/3 of my time was spent subjected to ads on a paid service. I think I prefer them now lol
We're talking internet here, bub. Cable ads are definitely BS, though.
Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.
Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.
That’s why I use an inverted ad-block list. I see ads unless they get intrusive or unreasonable, and then I enable blocking on the site.
Firefox has an autoplay block setting, and I've never had it fail me.
You can get NY times for just $4 a month. I personally think it's worth it.
When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they've made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I've decided it wasn't worth it. The Guardian isn't paywalled at least.
I'm perfectly willing to pay what I pay for the actual news paper for the subscription. The subscription turns out to be about 10x.
If you are defending ADS (of all things) you are definitely part of the problem.
I’m defending the right for people to make a profit from their labour 🤷♂️ even if ads aren’t my preference either
A little bird told me you're in cognizance of the way to finance online journalism without depending on ads and subscriptions of readers. That's a good news. Care to share how?
If you can't do it without ads then it shouldn't be done.
Fuck.
People are brainwashed.
This is a very naive take.
Nice to see you revealing your naivety. That's what I've intended to do in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with advertising in of itself, society has lived with advertisements for goods and services for a long time. Unless you're unreasonably susceptible to suggestion you should be able to safely navigate them. Some sites take the mick with how they present them but they have to make money somehow.
There is something wrong with advertising in and of itself. Imagine a sphere of all information available to humans, and inside that sphere there's a corruption of information that's deceitful, self-promoting for its originators, in excess of what people actually need to know about specific companies or products, and based on manipulation techniques and de-facto brainwashing. This twists decision-making for the entire society.
The only defense is that it's a "necessary evil" because of the perverse economic structures in our society.
And P.S., the fact something's been around for a long time is not an ethical defense, and people "unreasonably susceptible to suggestion" (i.e. influenced by ads) are a staggering % of the popularity, probably a majority.
Facts are behind a paywall and bullshit flows for free.
There is a reason for it, isn't there? Bullshit is motivated to manipulate, and spread propaganda. While, truth based journalism needs professionals to do due diligence. While we can argue for better journalism, wishing for everything to be free ain't gonna work.
Unless we are okay with.. Ads. We won't tolerate that either, would we?
NYT has a lot of bullshit tbf
This is why we can't have nice things.
It's not talked about enough how "traditional news" is culpable for the rise of "fake news" by locking vital information and reporting behind exactly these kinds of pay walls, thus causing people to seek alternative free means instead. This is how fake news sites thrive; pushed into the forefront by traditional media who refuse to adapt their business models to the modern landscape.
How do you feel about government subsidies being used to bolster a free press? From past examples like oil, they don't become a shell company of the governments whims and I feel journalism is just as important to an educated populace in comparison to oil for our commerce.
This actually isnt a terrible strategy. Right now the news sites require profit for survival. Leading them to do well frankly... Whatever it takes to make that happen. Which leads us to the road we are on now. If their survival was subsidized and they were simply paid to provide the service of good journalism. This would be beneficial as journalism at its core is a PUBLIC service. That is currently being sold as a commercial commodity.
This is really the case for all essential services (which I believe factual new is). Just look at the mess healthcare has made, or the 'food industry', or education.
I am for it
You can't have actually free and truthful news as long as people need money to survive
I never said free, I said they needed to adapt their business model. I also never said the reason didn't make sense, but the ramifications remain the same even if there is good reason for the practice. Whether by design or not, they still share culpability.
Looks like a login wall. While I get the “joke” or irony, Journalism has never been free. Servers, journalists, investigations, and apps still cost money. So did printing and delivery. There are countless sources of information online so you do not have to join The Times but for some the journalistic value is worth the price.
Wikipedia offers knowledge to the world for free and are maintained through donation (including myself) and philanthropy. It has its issues but provides free information.
I think we can a enjoy a variety of options. Paid journalism, ad based news, and “free” community supported. There likely are other models we can adopt.
Other free sources I use. Roca News app Gabe Fleisher’s Wake up to Politics Knowledge at Wharton
Aye, very much this.
I don't know it is in other countries but here in Germany some "baseline" news is provided from money collected via a tax, which is very awesome as it ensures everyone has access to at least some news source. On top of that there's Wikipedia, as you say, but beyond that everyone still has to be aware that investigative journalism takes a lot of time and effort.
This is an inherent problem with the concept of free information. I would love universal and free information, but that doesn't take into consideration that quality information requires labor. Wikipedia isn't free of that either, the labor is just largely unpaid.
At the end of the day, we need to pay journalists, editors, curators, and contributors. If you want quality news, you need quality people. And to get quality people, you need generous compensation, whether that comes from subscriptions, advertisements, or taxes.
That was the dream.... Now it's....
Holy shit, someone get this man a charging cable.
Now it makes sense. The dream of universal access to knowledge was actually the iphone's - and it was because the phone was dying, and seeing death visions, like life flashing before it's eyes.
Bypass Paywalls Clean will do the job for you.
How long before this goes the way of 12ft.io
What's wrong with 12ft?
Disabled on lots of sites now
I use it all the time and it's great. I'm kind of wondering the same thing now...
I think it got bought out
What's 12ft.io?
A service to remove paywalls.As far as I remember,it doesn't work with the NYT but does a good job with a bunch of other sites.
Another paywall workaround
It's the website I literally clicked to from the link in your comment. :D
Came here to post this
It's not a paywall, just a login wall. The account is free. Still funny however.
Hopefully when you log in you haven't reached your limit of free articles for the month if you want to read it.
And that no one else on your public IP has reached it, since it seems to be IP-based.
There are so many times I try to read an NYT article and it says I've reached my limit when I haven't even visited the site in the past month.
NYT account is free though. Washington Post is free to students and federal / DoD employees.
The account is free, but it doesn't affect whatever checks they're doing for your monthly free article limit. I've hit the sign in prompt and logged in, only to be told I've hit my limit anyway.
Clear your nyt browser cookies
Incognito, different browser, doesn't matter. It's IP-based.
I read i through my Library, through the Press Reader app. It may be worth looking at what dogital resources your local library provides.
A former newspaper.
Just curious --- how would you like this to work? If you want high quality journalism, you need to pay journalists.
You can pay them through ads, but 1) this is annoying, and 2) people just install ad blockers.
You can have state-sponsored media, which can work reasonably well...or can end up a propaganda machine.
Or...you can pay.
Journalism is not a crazy lucrative career for most. Financially, most of the folks writing for NYT would be better off in PR --- and I don't think that's a good thing for society.
Or you can have voluntary sponsorship like NPR has done for decades and has high quality journalism because of it. Yes, they get a tiny bit of government money. Nowhere near enough to operate on. And they get corporate sponsors. Who they report against when they have a story about.
Sadly, NPR is nowhere near as unbiased as they used to be. I listened to it recently, and it's just not good anymore. They engage in both sides whataboutism, only ask softball questions, and generally seem to toe the line of appearing neutral but not risking their corporate funding.
Now, if they didn't need corporate funding, that would be ideal. I believe that would lead to more unbiased reporting.
So I haven’t seen any of what you are talking about, and I’m an avid consumer of NPR. I love that they generally avoid rage bait and present the news in a calm yet accurate manner.
That being said, I am open to being persuaded if you can present some solid evidence.
As a paying NYT subscriber, I'd just like to add that unfortunately they still advertise to me.
Adverts have been in newspapers since forever. They're giving you the full experience.
You need to earn my trust if you want me to pay.
Many of these legacy media outlets are demanding Netflix-level fees for fanfic-level content.
The NYT is one of the biggest, most recognised publications worldwide. If they don't meet your requirements, I don't think that's a realistic expectation
I think many people also don't understand the difference between opinion and reporting. You can despise the opinion section of NYT, or WSJ, or whatever, but still respect the reporting.
I question a lot of the choices they've made in the opinion section, and which letters from politicians to publish, but it can't be understated that OP/EDs are totally separate from everything else.
You should charge your battery, sir!
I found the image on Mastodon, so it's not mine, but I agree. I never let my battery get below 50% if I can help it. If it gets below 20, I'm in panic mode.
that doesn't sound great for the battery
Modern Lithium-Ion batteries like to stay between like 40%-70% charge, and going above or below that wears of out a bit faster. It was older batteries where you needed to fully empty and fully charge them.
Most modern devices can manage the battery for you pretty well, helping with any harm it might do. But even then, it’s less bad for the battery than deep discharges and recharges (where the battery does get low). It’s honestly probably fine.
Seems to work fine to me.
Why?
Genuinely I let mine drop to 5% before charging, I think letting it discharges makes the battery last longer.
Nah you want to have like 20% or so. Dendrites and other li-ion demons enjoy lower charge, and enjoy when charging is done in cold weather
Pro tip: Adblock + JavaScript disabled (Ublock Origin can do both) will block most paywalls
Ublock can unblock paywalls?
Most of the time you can delete modern paywalls from the website by editing the HTML in your browser.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/editing-website-code-in-the-browser-to-bypass-paywalls-makes-me-feel-like-a-beast.317572/
There are also several extensions that claim they can, uBlock is one of them.
Most paywalls can be bypassed by disabling JavaScript, which Unlock Origin can do on a site by site basis if you click on the advanced icon
Just found the Button, that's really really cool thanks!
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
I choose to believe the author did this intentionally.
Universal access, as in everyone need to pay 8 dollars a month for the privilege.
Yeah, I still dont get why people can't just work for for free! Greedy bastards.
Especially publishers. It's not like they play an important role in modern society, at all. They can do research, perform interviews and write stories during the day, and then, if they absolutely need food and a friggin' roof over their heads, they can work at McDonald's or something in the evenings.
/s
News agency should've been operated by non-profit organizations IMO. The non-profit organizations can be funded by grants, donations, etc (e.g. like how wikimedia is funded).
Or public, like the BBC for example.
Probably not the best idea though for independent journalism. My country had a publicly funded news agency and it was notorious for never reporting any bad thing the government did.
Speaking from the US, so please forgive my underlying bias:
If we could figure out how to actually maintain a "separation of powers" maybe we could actually have a little more "for the people, by the people". And I don't mean it as just a US standpoint (though I am quoting our doctines), because I do believe that those ideologies have merit. But here I am in the US, still "wondering" how "separation of church and state" can't be (and never truly was) maintained.
People hold the power AND people need to be held accountable. I really wish we could find a way to balance that appropriately. Maybe simply throwing around a few more "-isms" could fix it (the last sentence is sarcasm)
I'd rather my taxes go to public services than being diluted into the pockets of middle-men. Publishers are still be valuable, but they have to adapt like everyone else. Education, healthcare, and information... sounds like a recipe for too much equality; better to stomp that out and continue forth, like the term "future" doesn't exist for everyone
Why would I want change when I'm finally getting the hang of things? That sounds difficult and scary, and I might have to adjust my lifestyle... and for what? Other people!? Morals!? Justice!? We already have those, otherwise I would've never made it to where I am today... backslash-fucking-s
If democracy wasn't constantly undermined by greed, we might actually solve real problems. But problems are too far in the future for me, when I'll no longer be alive to care. Continue status-quo than, nothing we can do
I mean, libraries do cost you money too. You just don't see the itemized bill.
Taxes are the subscription fee of life.
Well I'm glad we all agree that "universal access" always has a cost, so unless you want to nationalize the press I'm not sure what y'all want.
Maybe we can just leave them a profit driven third party that you are legally required to support with your taxes? Seems like praxis to me, no problems with that at all.
Equity. I just don't know how we'll ever achieve it. A common enemy of the human race, maybe? We've already perfected fighting each other. Maybe if a "physical something" were attacking us, that we could kill; we might find a little more "human camaraderie".
Put a scooby-doo-type mask on climate change, so we can have something physical to try and punch. But "Jinkies! It was something intangible this whole time!".
We need a Netflix for online journalism/news. I'm happy to pay for my news... But I'm tired of subscriptions for everything. And basically all the major news organizations want their own damn subscriptions.
Check your local library. They usually have subscriptions for newspapers/magazines that you can access digitally with your library card.
So, like, regular removals of older material and ever increasing prices and restrictions? Oh, yeah, sign me up.
Bad comparison, since Netflix is just one of many streaming subscriptions now.
I meant like the early days.
You should look for an archive (dot) today that can get you around those paywalls.
Their site is broken right now.
Easiest way of doing that is firefox reading mode , it takes one click and can bypass most if not all paywalls !
The secret ingredient... is crime:
https://archive.is/oE6m7
Also, I didn't see a paywall / login wall even when visiting directly
Maybe an extension you have is blocking something
Ahhh I have uBlock Origin 😎
Edit: Wait, I opened up a chrome tab and still can see the article (I don't have extensions on chrome, it's android, there's no support for destop extensions). Hmmm 🤔
I think they show you x articles before nagging. Try to read a few.
you can have desktop extensions on Firefox nightly
I have uBlock Origin on Firefox Android (well I'm using Fennec, but basically the same thing) and honestly, uBlock Origin is all I wanted. I don't want to use unstable versions like Firefox Nightly.
All this talk of state-sponsored/subsidized news/media gives me the wiggins, at least as someone who lives in the US. I'm sure people smarter than myself could come up with a bullet proof system to prevent abuse, but really, I would have little faith it would stand the test of time. I feel like any protections you put in place would be eroded eventually. All it takes is one "emergency" or "disaster". Maybe I'm wrong. It just feels so 1984ish.
BBC
And ABC
PBS and NPR
. . . what? Neither of those are state-run media.
Do you mean "American Broadcasting Company"? Because they are owned by Disney.
I think judging from his home instance he means Australian
Ah yes. The conservative government decided they would be in charge of choosing the chairman, chose a major party doner, and the BBC now kiss the conservative government's ass whenever possible. Flawless.
I'd say German state media is going OK. Its anything but perfect but definetly doesn't kiss any parties ass
"democracy dies in darkness..."
Is my favorite ironic walled garden gate keeping paywall byline... I think the Washington post uses it.
It wouldn't be so dark if the paywall wasn't blocking the light...
I wish I could just pay per article sometimes. Let the subscription be optional for people who read a lot from that source.
Just download Firefox, install UBlock Origin, and disable JavaScript.
And if that fails, enable reader mode on top.
That person who took the screenshot doesn't care about anything in his life. Look at his phone's charge.
http://archive.today/bguar
That was sad and infuriating. Pirates are our only hope.
12ft.io is a really good site for getting around these kinds of paywalls.
Archive.today works with more sites, such as NYT. This is a link to the article OP was trying to read.
Once upon a time tabloids were a joke and everyone knew they were a joke.
And then one day tabloids just became news sources and everyone decided their publishings were journalism.
And people lost the distinction between tabloid and journalism, so when journalism now requests money to keep going, it gets scoffed at.
I fucking hate this bullshit!
News, and I would argue journalism in general, is not what the term knowledge is referring to in that sentence.
Literally a game of whack-a-mole regarding paywalls and adblockers.
You won't obtain much in the way of knowledge from the NYT anyway.
Have they fallen that much? Or am I confusing them? Because I remember they were pretty well established and did comparatively good investigations?
They probably still do a lot of those, but recently they've been using opinion writers to create outrage bait with writings they should know better than to print.
In the last few years they have been willing to post a large amount of transphobic nonsense. To the point where early in the year almost 1000 current or former contributors signed an open letter complaining about the issue (and made a callback to the paper doing roughly the same thing with gay and lesbian people in the 60s through 80s)
They were "the paper of record" but they've fallen a long ways in the digital era. They were always slightly left and pro corporate, but as they transitioned to online they dropped in quality big time. They purposely make the line between editorial and news far more vague and pump out a ton of articles that are basically propaganda.
They do still occasionally do a good thing every now and then. They developed some impressive ways to display articles alongside pictures in a way that was satisfying on a website and not just like print. They also do occasionally write a decent article or have a deep dive into a topic that does its due diligence, but it's becoming more rare.
Well, I'm from the UK and when they report on anything to do with us it is almost always completely wrong. Like they've never even visited the country.
guess it ain't called the london times for a reason
If you're going to report on another country, some basic knowledge of that country would be useful though, surely.