> If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites

Isn’t this exactly what Apple News[1] is?

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[1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

It serves ads even if you pay, so for me, no.

The ads are less intrusive than paid subscriptions from the providers IMO. Not a fan of the double-dip either though.

…which makes it no different practically every other form of periodical news media that’s ever existed.

Apparently they can be blocked (mitigated?) with PiHole. But your point stands.

Isn’t this true for Netflix as well?

Except it doesn't work with links, which is usually how I find news stories. I have Apple One (which includes News), but If I click on a link to the WSJ, I get the paywall. To read the article, I have to copy the article title or headline (if I can find it!), and paste it into the News app to read it.

Use the share menu and select the News app and it’ll open the story in it. Not as easy as those app banners but still not too difficult.

Thanks. I never would have thought to do that - the News app wasn't even one of the default targets for me.

TIL, thanks for the tip!

Even netflix suffers from this, for a while they were great, pay them watch anything. but then the traditional publishing houses started cutting their works off from netflix in favor of running their own streaming. which had two results, a balkanization of streaming video (you can't just go to one place anymore) and netflix investing into making their own content so they have something to stream.

I'd rather have paywalls than the privacy shit storm ads on the internet brought us. Paying for content is totally fine.

You paid to read a book. You paid for the paper. You paid to see a movie. Yeah they had/have ads but not ones that retarget and manipulate you.

Think of how much more sane the world would be if you had to pay for Instagram and Facebook.

I say bring on the paywall.

I understood that ads paid for newspapers. The nominal fee they charged was probably for pulp and barrels of ink. (If the papers were completely free people would just grab armloads to line their bird cages.)

When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.

Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?

I would like paywalls, but only if they had been extremely different from the current paywalls.

First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.

Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.

I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.

I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.

But you didn't pay for ten books just to check a couple of pages in each!

It forces you to decide what's important to you.

Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.

People demand access to everything.

We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.

It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.

With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.

Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?

Advertising doesn't cover the bills anymore/ever.

And CBS might as well be state controlled media and ABC just bribed Trump and very much kowtows to the administration.

Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.

You can copy/paste (or share to, if you set that up) what is visible before the paywall into Perplexity or similar service to see if the article is syndicated elsewhere paywall free, or find similar sources, e.g. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/apple-privately-threatened-...

If you have Apple news you can share to that in a similar way.