The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.
People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.
Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)
On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.
There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
> stuff pulled off news wires.
"Stuff" – also known as news.
Keeping up with the news can mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. I remember when Mr Joe Biden was in the news warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those who listened could get themselves and their family to safety before the travel ban and the draft. Many of those who didn't are in a mass grave right now.
But yes, we need to try to choose our news consumption to those things which actually matter in our own lives. A train wreck or earthquake on the other side of the world is probably not in that category. Neither is internal foreign politics, if you're for example a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
> the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
The typical news websites are the digital offering of traditional newspapers, aren't they?
Thank you for reading my comment on Hacker News ;)
For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.
Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.
They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.
> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience
Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.
> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).
Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...
Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
Presumably to “compete” for micro transactions, assuming there is a broad based acceptance of them and they add up to something meaningful, would allow for more local journalism
There's really no comparison anymore.
Any "valuable" news/sports/politics/stocks is all freely available from dozens of competing sources.
What's left is Opinions, Reviews and Editorials, which are freely available from thousands of free competitors.
the idea that anyone would blindly microtransact ("pay $0.02 to read my clickbait article ChatGPT wrote for me!") is one waiting for all free content to go away first.
Ya, I'd pay $0.25 or $0.50 on a whim for any random article. For good articles I'd pay more, but the problem is that you don't know if it's going to be good information or some clickbait crap until you read it, so it has to be priced with that risk in mind.
But maybe I'm unique, I currently have paid subscriptions to a few online publications because I believe it's important to pay for news with money instead of clicks (if you want the news provider to be incentivized to generate quality news instead of clickthroughs).