The reason I never subscribe to news sites is not that I can't or won't pay for it, but that I assume signing up will be impossibly cumbersome, and that they'll both auto-renew the subscription and refuse to let me cancel without calling them on the phone.
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Exactly. If I were building a news business, I'd rather rely on payments from people who love my product (subscribers) rather than smaller payments from people who only kind of like my product and aren't willing to pay a lot.
One problem with that is that this tends to drive biased coverage, because what people really love is to hear their prejudices confirmed. I think this is why the NYT has shifted from a neutral(ish) "newspaper of record" to something way further to the left in just a few years.
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Single-access paywalls lead to biased coverage. However, the current paywall load is unsustainable. Eventually subscriptions will bundle together like cable. Say what you want about cable, but it’s the only distribution method that supports Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow.
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It depends. The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg also rely on subscriptions, and I think they are better news sources because of it.
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Just for curiosity, to what sources are each of you subscribed ? I used to have an Economist corporate membership and I'm on and off the cheap deals they offer from time to time
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Incidentally, one of the keys to writing good essays is to remove those "with that is that this"es before anyone sees them.
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