I understand that effective journalism costs money to produce, proficient journalists should get and will go where they are paid, and sites need funds to maintain their operations. All that makes sense. However, I don’t read one website I use Lemmy and internet searches to find news I’m interested in reading. I maybe go to the same paywalled news site twice a week at most, but rarely if ever quarce a month. It would make no sense for me to have a subscription to any paywalled news site even if I wanted to spend money. I have no option other than to use proxies, assume the article from others’ comments, or just read the title.
The internet news media system sucks, but I don’t see a solution.
Your local library may have a digital subscription to newspapers, though the coverage may be delayed a day or two.
Also, pbs, npr etc do a lot of daily reporting for free.
If you’re lamenting that the best journalists don’t let you have the biggest news on demand, well yeah, if you could just buy the biggest/greatest hits in terms of clicks etc, the journalists (and the news ecosystem) might be in serious trouble.
As someone who spent a few decades in it, the advertising/subscription model for media is wholly broken and hurting the public.
Honestly maybe they should be funded hands-off with public oversight by ISP money. Lol.
We never made a micro payment system so I can pay $0.25 to read an article
There were some tries (at least where I live). Problem was that they expected you to pay for the articles and not showing more than the headline. If you unlocked it, you just found out, that it was often just regurgitating the other (free low quality) news articles from elsewhere. It was hard to find some quality articles and after a few tries I stopped using that. They didn’t last long. I wonder if no one wanted to pay in general or if no one was interested to pay for low quality articles.
