Funny, I recently donated to the Guardian. I thought there was something refreshingly honest, open, and unobtrusive about their call to action at the end of the article. I'm glad it seems to be working out for them.
I too donated after reading an article from the Guardian. I have donated to Wikipedia too. I have however never paid to access any paywalled article. I love having the freedom to pay when I can and I don't want to have a weekly/monthly subscription. I don't read enough news to justify a subscription.
I don't want 15 different subscriptions. I'll pay a premium for 1. I think a lot of people would do the same. Why haven't they figured this out yet and formed some kind of group/alliance?
"Mastercard, originally known as Interbank/Master Charge, was created by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc."
SWIFT:
"SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1983) and was supported by 239 banks in fifteen countries"
It's not the right comparison. Yes, banks compete with each other, but when someone changes their bank they don't change it that soon/often (unlike newspaper subscriptions, which rarely last for longer than a year). Additionally, banks have to interact (at least when transferring funds), unlike newspapers which have no incentive to exchange anything.
It works for things like Spotify as well. Competitors offering their products on a common platform. Revenue can be distributed by how often content from a certain provider is consumed.
Car2Go will probably soon be owned by Daimler and BMW as well.
BMW owns the carsharing service DriveNow together with Sixt. Sixt just agreed (today? yesterday?) to sell their stake to BMW so that Car2Go and DriveNow can merge.
This. And local news will have to jump on this too, and form groups with national/global.
A NyT/Guardian type outlet can live through subscriptions. A local newspaper could thrive in a city with 100k people and decent ad market - but not now that Facebook eats their lunch. That’s the problem that desperately needs solving.
I’d love to pay for e.g a guardian sub that includes personalized local bits from my country, city etc.
> And local news will have to jump on this too, and form groups with national/global.
Local news already is largely owned by a few very large conglomerates, which often also own major national outlets. In fact, that's a big part of what was killing newspapers long before the internet came along to help; those conglomerates cut local newsrooms to the bone as cost cutting measures to boost short-term numbers, turning local newspapers into a thin layer of local customization over shared (often mostly wire-service, even the national news desks at the papers were cut deeply) content.
I've been looking for this for years. My local newspaper from my small city is crap for anything beyond local news but there's no one else covering those. I'd like to combine that with a German section from one of the bigger newspapers (SZ) plus a few parts from international papers (Guardian, NZZ, Economist, NYT etc.) and I'd especially like to leave out stuff I'm not interested in like sports.
I'd pay around 50€ per month for this.
I know there's Blendle and it actually does have a good selection but I don't want to pay per article because that leads me to not read as much as I would with a flat rate.
Or you could use Blendle. I don't like it because, politically, you build your own bubble with selective reading apps like Blendle, but it's a nice way of supporting the writers that write the things you want to read.
Agreed. News is a lean-back experience because you don't know what you don't know.
At inkl (www.inkl.com) we rank articles based on news value by tracking and understanding heuristic choices being made across the world's top newsrooms in real time.
Kind of like cable companies with their package subscription deals that people love to complain about because "why do I have to get all of these channels I don't want when I just want to watch these three? I can't wait for Netflix to disrupt that industry and create some totally new problem!"?
There is blendle, but there's a problem we're running into. What we spend our time on is not necessarily what we want to make sure exists. Some may spend a lot of time watching TV, and spend almost no time interacting with the fire department, but they want to make sure that the fire department is always available. This type of demand can't be financed through usage fees or advertising, it has to be met through taxes or a subscription (BTW fire departments were and in some places still are financed by subscription). We need to figure out how news and information fit into what we demand as citizens.
This is a bit of a problem. Fire departments are a classic public service, local monopoly, emergency use only... Journalism benefits from diversity, choice and independence.
OTOH, most countries have a public broadcaster funded by a TV tax or somesuch. These are (IMO) hard to justify as public services in 2018. Newspapers are becoming the place where the gap is, and I think public funding is justifiable. The trouble is finding and implementing a good way of using it, one that preserves independance.
On the third hand, I think it is very dangerous guaranteeing business continuity to any business or sector. Disruption happens and the publications themselves need to figure out alternatives. Like the Guardian found, the type of revenue model is intertwined with content and quality. I feel that independant publications scraping to find business models is likely to yield some important finds, like this patronage based model.
We need to remember the distinction between currently important publications and journalism. Like the difference between pro business and pro economy. These can be at odds with eachother in some cases.
> I don't want 15 different subscriptions. I'll pay a premium for 1.
Is the premium you'd pay equal to or greater than the sum of the 15 services you'd subscribe to? If not,then you've answered your subsequent question (why haven't they done this) -- between one and all of the 15 would take a hit.
Sure, it may be overall better for each to do this, and obtain your patronage, but it's a trivial assumption to make that they've collectively run the numbers and determined it's not that compelling a path.
What's the problem, by the way, of having 15 subscriptions? Is it the 15+ emails a year to renew, the hundreds of spam emails you're likely to get (you'd still get those with an aggregated subscription model, I suspect), or some other factor(s)?
I think jeamish makes a reasonable assumption. The 13 or so sources (it's annoying to find, see image near the bottom) that inkl.com has are often sources that are on the front page of HN. So a $15/mth subscription seems like an acceptable cost for the OP if $10/mth is OK for 1 newspaper.
The problem is that you pay for a lot of content you're not going to read. I'm going to assume that no one reads everything from 15 sources. And 15 subscriptions are expensive. NYT for example is relatively cheap (like 10$/month) but the large newspapers in Germany and Switzerland are more like 40€/month each.
I'd never pay that because there's at least 60% of content I don't read because it doesn't interest me or I have no time. To get a full picture I'd need multiple subscriptions which is prohibitively expensive. So instead I pay none (at least no daily) and just read what's free on the net.
A flat rate subscription model could also prevent a bit of the filter bubble because it would allow me to read at no further expense different views from paper that I'd never pay to subscribe to separately.
I disagree with your assumption as well. Maybe they have room their numbers but in my opinion their are missing out on a new business model. Feels very much like the early music business.
All these new digital portfolios (including okay ones like the guardian) are only the very first and limited step the industry should take. They are really very limited in functionally and vision.
I know there are others like me but I'm not sure how many. I'm hoping for a change. Good information and well paid journalists are getting more and more important I think.
I don't want any subscriptions. I want to pay for the content I actually consume. With money back option to discourage clickbait headlines and sensationalist intros.
So what any group/alliance should solve is micro-payments on web.
Ok, wow, I did not know about this. It seems promising at first glance, but...
I can't find a list of partners anywhere (not counting the header image)? There's also no mention of how (much) the publications get paid. I don't want to support this if they take say 30%. I might as well pay with a credit card.
There doesn't seem to be any backlink from the publications to the inkl service, which makes me a bit suspicious.
The fact that they filter stories is weird too.
Overall, I'd prefer sort of an embedded platform where I can visit any news service and pay for an article there. Ideally it wouldn't be tied to news at all.
I dunno, I kind of think that any paywall has elements of competing goals.
The current cat-and-mouse of paywalls but with exemptions for facebook, search links, n-visits... it's an inevitable mess trying to do both wide distributions and access restriction.
A paywalled article can't be discussed on HN, retweeted and such. This isolates it from the wider conversation. That doesn't work with what media is today.
If "still losing money after years of losses, might break even in a couple of years or might not" can be defined as on the "path to profit", can any company not be described that way? Does the phrase mean anything?
It means that while earnings are negative (i.e. no profits yet), the first derivative is positive (i.e. it will reach profitability if the trend continues, it is on the path to profits).
The article doesn’t mention the trust that owns The Guardian, now a limited company, which is quite interesting because it was set up to own The Guardian for purely philanthropic reasons.
Did you read your own link? It says right there it was created to avoid death duties. It was a tax avoidance measure.
>>The Trust was established in 1936 by John Scott, owner of the Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and the Manchester Evening News. After the deaths in quick succession of his father C. P. Scott and brother Edward, and consequent threat of death duties, John Scott wished to prevent future death duties forcing the closure or sale of the newspapers...
The one does not preclude the other, for instance in the case where I want to run something for philanthropic purposes, but death duties may force it to close.
The Guardian and tax avoidence goes hand in hand. The Guardian Media Group is based in the Cayman Islands and notably used the tax haven to avoid paying any tax on the £302 million in profit it realised from the sale of Auto Trader in 2008.
> ...it was set up to own The Guardian for purely philanthropic reasons.
You're right, of course, but the Scott Trust is not philanthropic in itself. It only exists to keep the Guardian and Observer going as they are. As such when finances become tight there are undoubtedly tensions between the overall philanthropic aims of the Scott family and the brute need for the trust to survive so the papers survive.
The intentions of the Trust were explicitly carried over to limited company in its constitution. Whether that's sufficient to protect it, well we'll see.
Interesting that 214 million GBP revenue with 1500 employees works out to just under 143K GBP per employee. Obviously, I'm not in publishing, but it seems to me that there is still quite a lot of fat they can cut. I'm guessing that their sales channels are horrendously expensive. However, their digital revenue is now approaching half of their overall revenue, so perhaps those sales channels are not so necessary as they may seem. And maybe the print infrastructure is expensive to maintain. Still... if this was a software house, you'd be expecting to be making pretty hefty profits with that kind of revenue...
I feel you are completely overlooking all of the costs the business incurs. The cost of premises, printing costs, image licensing, insurance, marketing budget etc etc.
I am and I'm not. Normally when I'm looking at financials I break it apart with external costs and internal costs. For the internal costs, you can get an estimate of a reasonable cost with the "loaded labour rate". This is the amount of money it costs to maintain an employee (usually on average). It includes premises, equipment, insurance, and other costs incurred for the work they do. External costs are things like costs for maintaining a sales channel, marketing, etc, etc. In between you often have some capital costs for large equipment (which you usually account for using a depreciation model). As you say, there are also some operating costs for running a printing press, etc.
What I did was to divide the total revenue by the number of employees. Then if we make a reasonable guess for average loaded labour rate, say 70K GBP (which I think is probably generous for London) that still leaves us 70K per employee for external costs and various operating costs that are not included in the loaded labour rate. That seems quite high to me. Like I said, I'm not in the publishing business, but even when I worked on shrink wrapped software, I would consider that level to be bleeding money. I could easily be wrong. It would be interesting to hear from someone in publishing.
I expect a world-class newspaper like the Guardian to have plenty of costs that don't fit the regular butts-in-seats of a regular office. They have correspondents living and traveling all over the world, with the associated costs that implies (plane tickets, rented houses, hired guides, bribes, etc).
I'd rather pay the guardian (and I do) for content than pay any news limited (murdoch) for the same (I don't) both have a bias, but only one is being even remotely honest about it. News ltd try hard to claim centrist positions but are both far more rightward than they want to admit, and much less open about advertorial and content which materially advances Rupert Murdoch's personal causes. The guardian wears its heart on its shirt. Many comments in the guardian are vituperation but if you break the paywall to read news ltd comments they are racist, and worse. They have editorial control on comments and chose not to apply them which I feel speaks volumes to their readerships expectations and their own.
but only one is being even remotely honest about it
It’s funny because if you take an objective look at the Graun - based in a tax haven, all its writers seem to have double-barrelled names and went to Oxbridge from an exclusive boarding school - it’s clear that their left-wing schtick is just an act, a product they sell to a gullible audience. They’re as establishment as it gets.
I don’t buy any Murdoch products either but don’t kid yourself that the Graun is any different
You think people who go to Eton can't be left wing? Gosh, the Cambridge five.. seriously. If you think it's 'just an act' I don't think you understand British left politics at all. The establishment has had a left wing since before the second world war. Even the daily worker had people from Oxbridge working for it.
It's left wing, not working class. The sun is working class, tits and all.
For me the Left is that which fights for The Workers. The Graun may pay occasional lip service to say the NHS but they literally won’t put their money where their mouths are. They are as guilty of exploiting The Workers as all bourgeoisie - worse even.
The bourgeoisie are what Lenin called 'Useful idiots' and in that regard, the Guardian writers perform a role. If your reason to hate the guardian is that they vest ownership in a non-profit which uses tax minimisation, you've driven to a very specific corner.
Your root cause argument I suspect is true: because I value the editorial message I overlook the flaws. In this regard, the News Ltd and Guardian are the same thing: they are newspapers. But, my root position also remains. I chose to give one money and not the other. I should just be more open to the reality behind that decision. The only person I am fooling, is probably myself.
It’s one particularly egregious example but there are plenty more: education is another, why are state comps good enough for The Workers while Graun types go private? Or housing.
Owen Jones, as a specific example did not attend private school. Polly Toynbee attended a state school before university. Martin Kettle went to Leeds modern. This idea that the 'guardian' is packed with public school toffs is reed-thin. I didn't bother looking harder because I'm pretty confident its not true. Its just what you want to be true.
Oxford is biassed to private school entry because its competitive. But it is emphatically not closed to state school pupils, and never has been. But in any case, whilst a lot of guardian journalists and columnists went there, I doubt all did by any stretch.
It depends on your definition of "establishment". The Guardian writers tend to represent middle- and upper-middle-class istances, which are not the same as working-class ones but can also be pretty divergent from proper upper-class objectives.
Maybe, but at the same time, they clearly don’t believe in fair taxation or comprehensive education or anything else they seemingly advocate. One rule for the toffs and another for the plebs, is their real message.
> they clearly don’t believe in fair taxation or comprehensive education
I disagree on that. Some of them do, some of them don't. The work they've done on Panama Papers and other stuff was pretty good, and overall unmatched in the UK. I have my complaints with the Guardian, but I wouldn't brand them with a scarlet letter.
The article concentrates on the technical and administrative sides of running the Guardian, but it completely overlooks the political situation.
The Guardian benefited from two very politically-charged years where left-leaning groups were dramatically beaten. This sort of event traditionally results in increased attention for left-leaning media in the aftermath. They've also reigned in their all-out campaign against the current UK Labour leader, under pressure from their own readership.
These factors are pretty big on their own. I'm sure the internal reorganisations and wikipedia-style appeals helped, but going where the readers actually want to go likely helped as well.
70 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadBut hey there is https://blendle.com I think it works pretty well
"Mastercard, originally known as Interbank/Master Charge, was created by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc."
SWIFT:
"SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1983) and was supported by 239 banks in fifteen countries"
Several others I can't think of right now.
Car2Go will probably soon be owned by Daimler and BMW as well.
This is the readability/brave model. I don't know why it hasn't taken off yet, but I really want it to.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bmw-daimler-carsharing/bm...
A NyT/Guardian type outlet can live through subscriptions. A local newspaper could thrive in a city with 100k people and decent ad market - but not now that Facebook eats their lunch. That’s the problem that desperately needs solving.
I’d love to pay for e.g a guardian sub that includes personalized local bits from my country, city etc.
Kudos to Neil44 for the link above.
Local news already is largely owned by a few very large conglomerates, which often also own major national outlets. In fact, that's a big part of what was killing newspapers long before the internet came along to help; those conglomerates cut local newsrooms to the bone as cost cutting measures to boost short-term numbers, turning local newspapers into a thin layer of local customization over shared (often mostly wire-service, even the national news desks at the papers were cut deeply) content.
I'd pay around 50€ per month for this.
I know there's Blendle and it actually does have a good selection but I don't want to pay per article because that leads me to not read as much as I would with a flat rate.
Also I'm not sure if you provide all the content from these sources or just a selection.
I'm curious because of the price. 15/months seems very low so I'm expecting limitations.
Can you elaborate?
At inkl (www.inkl.com) we rank articles based on news value by tracking and understanding heuristic choices being made across the world's top newsrooms in real time.
OTOH, most countries have a public broadcaster funded by a TV tax or somesuch. These are (IMO) hard to justify as public services in 2018. Newspapers are becoming the place where the gap is, and I think public funding is justifiable. The trouble is finding and implementing a good way of using it, one that preserves independance.
On the third hand, I think it is very dangerous guaranteeing business continuity to any business or sector. Disruption happens and the publications themselves need to figure out alternatives. Like the Guardian found, the type of revenue model is intertwined with content and quality. I feel that independant publications scraping to find business models is likely to yield some important finds, like this patronage based model.
We need to remember the distinction between currently important publications and journalism. Like the difference between pro business and pro economy. These can be at odds with eachother in some cases.
Is the premium you'd pay equal to or greater than the sum of the 15 services you'd subscribe to? If not,then you've answered your subsequent question (why haven't they done this) -- between one and all of the 15 would take a hit.
Sure, it may be overall better for each to do this, and obtain your patronage, but it's a trivial assumption to make that they've collectively run the numbers and determined it's not that compelling a path.
What's the problem, by the way, of having 15 subscriptions? Is it the 15+ emails a year to renew, the hundreds of spam emails you're likely to get (you'd still get those with an aggregated subscription model, I suspect), or some other factor(s)?
I'm not sure I follow.
Are you assuming that parent's desired 15 resources are included in inkl.com, or do you think that I'm claiming that they're not?
I'd never pay that because there's at least 60% of content I don't read because it doesn't interest me or I have no time. To get a full picture I'd need multiple subscriptions which is prohibitively expensive. So instead I pay none (at least no daily) and just read what's free on the net.
A flat rate subscription model could also prevent a bit of the filter bubble because it would allow me to read at no further expense different views from paper that I'd never pay to subscribe to separately.
I disagree with your assumption as well. Maybe they have room their numbers but in my opinion their are missing out on a new business model. Feels very much like the early music business.
All these new digital portfolios (including okay ones like the guardian) are only the very first and limited step the industry should take. They are really very limited in functionally and vision.
I know there are others like me but I'm not sure how many. I'm hoping for a change. Good information and well paid journalists are getting more and more important I think.
Probably not but I would be happy to do $30-$50 depending on whats included. I prob only read a couple of articles on each which is another reason.
> If not,then you've answered your subsequent question (why haven't they done this)
So take $0?
So what any group/alliance should solve is micro-payments on web.
I can't find a list of partners anywhere (not counting the header image)? There's also no mention of how (much) the publications get paid. I don't want to support this if they take say 30%. I might as well pay with a credit card.
There doesn't seem to be any backlink from the publications to the inkl service, which makes me a bit suspicious.
The fact that they filter stories is weird too.
Overall, I'd prefer sort of an embedded platform where I can visit any news service and pay for an article there. Ideally it wouldn't be tied to news at all.
The current cat-and-mouse of paywalls but with exemptions for facebook, search links, n-visits... it's an inevitable mess trying to do both wide distributions and access restriction.
A paywalled article can't be discussed on HN, retweeted and such. This isolates it from the wider conversation. That doesn't work with what media is today.
You can use it to pay 10c per article, or get unlimited access for $15/month.
'The Guardian has halved its operating losses compared to two years ago, now looking at breaking even by 2019.'
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
>>The Trust was established in 1936 by John Scott, owner of the Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and the Manchester Evening News. After the deaths in quick succession of his father C. P. Scott and brother Edward, and consequent threat of death duties, John Scott wished to prevent future death duties forcing the closure or sale of the newspapers...
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2008/mar/06/...
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/22/...
You're right, of course, but the Scott Trust is not philanthropic in itself. It only exists to keep the Guardian and Observer going as they are. As such when finances become tight there are undoubtedly tensions between the overall philanthropic aims of the Scott family and the brute need for the trust to survive so the papers survive.
The intentions of the Trust were explicitly carried over to limited company in its constitution. Whether that's sufficient to protect it, well we'll see.
What I did was to divide the total revenue by the number of employees. Then if we make a reasonable guess for average loaded labour rate, say 70K GBP (which I think is probably generous for London) that still leaves us 70K per employee for external costs and various operating costs that are not included in the loaded labour rate. That seems quite high to me. Like I said, I'm not in the publishing business, but even when I worked on shrink wrapped software, I would consider that level to be bleeding money. I could easily be wrong. It would be interesting to hear from someone in publishing.
It’s funny because if you take an objective look at the Graun - based in a tax haven, all its writers seem to have double-barrelled names and went to Oxbridge from an exclusive boarding school - it’s clear that their left-wing schtick is just an act, a product they sell to a gullible audience. They’re as establishment as it gets.
I don’t buy any Murdoch products either but don’t kid yourself that the Graun is any different
It's left wing, not working class. The sun is working class, tits and all.
The Sun targets the working class, it doesn't necessarily represent it. Like the Daily Mail, they lie and spread hate in a more accessible language.
Your root cause argument I suspect is true: because I value the editorial message I overlook the flaws. In this regard, the News Ltd and Guardian are the same thing: they are newspapers. But, my root position also remains. I chose to give one money and not the other. I should just be more open to the reality behind that decision. The only person I am fooling, is probably myself.
It’s one particularly egregious example but there are plenty more: education is another, why are state comps good enough for The Workers while Graun types go private? Or housing.
Oxford is biassed to private school entry because its competitive. But it is emphatically not closed to state school pupils, and never has been. But in any case, whilst a lot of guardian journalists and columnists went there, I doubt all did by any stretch.
It depends on your definition of "establishment". The Guardian writers tend to represent middle- and upper-middle-class istances, which are not the same as working-class ones but can also be pretty divergent from proper upper-class objectives.
I disagree on that. Some of them do, some of them don't. The work they've done on Panama Papers and other stuff was pretty good, and overall unmatched in the UK. I have my complaints with the Guardian, but I wouldn't brand them with a scarlet letter.
The Guardian benefited from two very politically-charged years where left-leaning groups were dramatically beaten. This sort of event traditionally results in increased attention for left-leaning media in the aftermath. They've also reigned in their all-out campaign against the current UK Labour leader, under pressure from their own readership.
These factors are pretty big on their own. I'm sure the internal reorganisations and wikipedia-style appeals helped, but going where the readers actually want to go likely helped as well.