The previous link I read from HN talked about how Pulitzer prize winners left journalism, and people speculating it's due to low revenue in journalism due to....tada, people not paying for quality journalism.
It reminds me how we were told in the 2000' there will soon be no quality music anymore because of bittorrent.
If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).
Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.
Which browser payment API are you referring to? And at least one major browser already autofills your payment info (heuristically identifying form fields; essentially zero sites actually mark up their form fields with identifying attributes) such that I pretty much never type my credit card number these days.
Credit card autofill never really worked for me (either on chrome or firefox). It happens on rare occasion that my credit card is pre-filled, but most of the time, it's not (not sure why). And you still have to get your phone and copy the 3d secure code from it (although, 3d secure is only used in europe, if I got it correctly). So yeah, credit card is good, but not enough, especially if we want to perform a big amount of microtransactions like the "pay to expand" example I was talking about.
Linking non-finance audiences to paywalled WSJ stories is kind of annoying. I might snobbishly say that every intellectually engaged citizen should be subscribed to their city paper, The New York Times, and The Economist, but it's hard to justify WSJ's prices if you're not in the industry and are only going to read casually/intermittently. A-la-carte purchase options would be nice.
I'm waiting for the poster to complain in an interview thread about how take-home problems/on site interviews are free work and the company should compensate candidates for it.
Personal attacks aren't ok on HN, and we ban accounts that post them. Unsubstantive comments aren't good either. Could you please not do those things when posting to HN, even when another comment is annoying?
Also the average salary in [Western European country] is $6,600 a year? I'm not sure I believe you...
Either I did my math wrong or you're looking at the promotional price, only valid for six months. The WSJ costs $37/month, so 37x3x10 = $1110, or about 901€/month. Our average base salary in 2016 was 925€/month.
A digital subscription is half that, and the salary you're quoting is well below the poverty line which makes me suspicious it's not really an average or it's a cherry picked example.
Clearly the WSJ must be A/B testing, because the price I quote is what it shows to me: http://sufi.andreparames.com/wsj.png Are you sure you're not just looking at the promotional time-limited discount? Because yes, that's half that. But it only lasts a few months.
As for the average salary, I do have to say it's after taxes (I didn't write "gross", but "base" might have been misleading, though it's how it's called here). The gross is 1154€/month. Yes, it's fucking low. This is why we emigrate a lot.
