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RE: A day in the life of a newspaper reporter
Yeah, I know a few Canadian magazines tried that and I'm not entirely sure why it failed. I have indeed heard from a lot of young people that they would subscribe if it was a Netflix-like model. Surely someone will figure this out eventually. I'm not too worried because there will ALWAYS be a need for news and professional content creation, it's just a matter of where, when and how.
I don't think a Netflix like model would work well enough. Too much content for too cheap. The reason Netflix works is because movies are actually a LOT cheaper than people realize. At least they are to play. It's only a few cents to play a movie actually. That's how ad based models on TV and the internet work for them so well. Ad based models don't work so well with text based news though, because it's far more expensive. You have to write new news every day.
I was just suggesting a portal of sorts, where you can purchase and access multiple sources, and sections of multiple sources.
Someone like me might like certain computer magazines, Make magazine, New Scientist, etc, but also certain news from certain places. But I also have to see the benefit of subscribing. One such benefit might be using an app that makes it easy to keep up on certain news, without being inundated every time there's a shooting. I personally don't like a dozen or so updates every time there's a shooting. I consider it morbid and grotesque. That kind of personalization and convenience, might be something to pay for.
There are some that are able to get by on the ad based model though. There's even a paper I heard about recently using a blockchain based model. Hopefully it works for them. My overall point though is that I think the major issue is that they just have to rethink how to do things. News is worth paying for...but only if people see the benefit.
We have some pretty great newsletter services at the globe that are topic-specific so you can curate your news intake. flipboard is really well liked for this reason. maybe someone needs to make a for-profit model of flipboard where they kick back the proceeds to the news organizations and take a portion for administering the app.