Any time I complain about paywalls now I get an army of zoomers jumping down my neck about how people need to eat or whatever. They never knew a better time. I guess we’re just going to torch civilization so we can eat for a few more days
Basically ITT
That and life before tipping more than 15% was not the norm.
Sounds like something the government should be doing not some private newspaper regardless of what we think the news should be.
The NYT is a capitalist business. Why would you expect them to give you news for free when this is a perfect opportunity for them to exploit fear to get more subscribers?
Because the first 15 years online it was all for free and we all read much more news on their sites until they put it behind paywalls. Now we all get our news from memes. So that’s why.
Because they had ads to bring in income to pay the bills, which allowed them to give the news for free to the end user.
Then everyone started using ad blockers, killing that revenue stream.
They can’t give things away for free without something else paying the bills. That ends up being the end user with a subscription now.
Not sure if it was all ads. Like how some of the biggest eras of music coincide with pirating music. Maybe you can squeeze some subscriptions by blocking people but over time it isn’t sustainable. When you provide an easily accessible platform that people want to come to, you can leverage that to other sales, not just ads.
If it wasn’t ads then what exactly was it? If free with ads was working, it would still be free.
You claim you can leverage that to other sales but it didn’t happen.
NYT is publicly traded. You can see their revenue, costs and everything. They made 2.5B in 1995 and 2.8B in 2025. Factoring inflation they have lost half their revenue. That means half the reporters lost their jobs.
Forcing people to pay like they used to pay for paper is working:
It worked for NYT because they already built a brand and had established customers. For others it failed. The model failed more than it succeeded aside from some special cases
Ads failed and subscriptions failed too so they went out of business. The free news model was tried for many years and failed.
Someone needs to pay the journalists’ salary.
Yeah it wasn’t entirely ads, but that was the major factor along with the transition from print to digital.
Things do still have to get paid for. High quality journalism means paying high prices for journalists. There’s server costs and other overhead. Early on people were still buying the paper. Ads covered being able to put it online for free and people buying the paper paid the real bills.
As print died, that killed the main revenue stream. That meant more ads to keep the online side free and make money. But more ads meant people get more turned off by them and start using ad blockers. That kills that revenue stream, so you introduce a subscription that gives access to everything ad free.
Eventually, you get to where we are. You want it, you pay for it. Which is really just back to buying the paper, but digitally. Back in the day you bought the paper. Either you yourself did from the paper machine, a street corner paper stand, or you literally had a physical subscription and got it delivered. Or you read it for free when someone else paid for a delivery subscription, like the doctors office, the donut/coffee shop, or your work put it in the break room.
You’re right but damn somehwhere along the way ads got so Intrusive and turned into a privacy nightmare. Also malicious ads that steal your bank info or infect your computer with viruses.
To the point where the FBI (the one from before when actual adults still ran it) even recommends to use an adblocker now.
I would never have cared about ads if they hadn’t started being targeted and the congregate data sold to government agencies so they can sidestep my rights and not need a warrant to track me.
Yup. Blame Google for that one. They built a trillion dollar empire on collecting data better than anyone else, and using that data to sell extremely targeted ads.
The NYT is a business. Why would you expect them to give you anything for free?
I fixed that for you.
Because profits don’t only come from subscriptions.
So is the problem that they are greedy evil capitalist, or that they are stupid people who don’t even know how to run a business to make profit?
I don’t know. But this doesn’t work
Give away for free + ? = profits. Got it, makes sense
NPR Guardian Vox
Vs
Tech crunch Time Atlantic
So much smarm for something you don’t really know.
I bet if you put the same headline into any search engine, it will give you the answer without any pay walls
Use Firefox browser, it has a reader mode button to the right of the URL which strips out paywall and just gives you the readable article. Or grapheneOS Canadium browser has accessibility view pop up when an article has paywall, and does the same thing.
I assume you mean vanadium but have never seen this popup… His do I enable this?
Lol yes. Under setting --> accessibility. Simplified.
Advice right up there with “well if you don’t like it, just don’t buy it” and “why don’t you just ignore it?”
As if it’s not allowed to call out shitty behavior when you see it.
It isn’t shitty behavior to expect people doing work getting paid for the work.
I’d like to know the reasoning behind people downvoting.
You don’t think the lab worker who tested the eggs should work for free. Why should the reporter work for free?
Except this pertains to public health and safety.
Being paid for journalism is one thing, but critical information should always be free and available. While it is available publicly, that isn’t something they inform the reader of.
Given that NYT makes some articles available to readers freely, this should have been one of them.
The information is free to the public on the FDA website. This is an article about that recall. You have no right to demand the labor of others for free, fascist.
You have conflated “free to the public” and working for free into the argument.
Yes it should be free to the public. But that requires a taxpayer funded journalism.
The workers who are already underpaid should not be required to work for free because their work is important. That’s incredibly regressive.
Recalls are public information, journalism costs money.
News costs money to produce. The recall information is freely available on the official site. This looks like someone really wanting to latch onto something to get worked up about.
All news was behind a paywall at one point. If you did not pay for a newspaper, you did not get the news. No matter how important, the news was paywalled. We have the FDA for plain old recall announcements. If you want the news story behind the recall, a journalist has to research and write an article, which isn’t free. It’s also under attack by a certain orange man and his goons, so they need all the support they can get.
Nah everybody who can read has always at least able to see the headlines as they walked by.
Everything old is new again.
Actually newspapers were traditionally pasted to the external wall of the printing facility as soon as they were run. Derivative news agencies and people who wanted first access would wait outside in the wee hours of the morning to read these.
Well, I suppose they could still do that without really hurting business. You have to admit that the money lost from people physically waiting outside the building would be pretty minimal
Living in America 🎵
Why would they sell cases of salmonella alongside eggs?
Bulk discount
Well, one of the key problems is still shown: that farm voluntarily recalls the eggs. If the US still had relevant health and safety agencies, this should have been verified, and the culprit made to recall the eggs. But it looks like the offical powers are way too slow to protect the citizens.
Extremely likely under any administration that this would still have been a voluntary recall. Voluntary recalls aren’t really optional as they will quickly turn into legal proceedings and a court ordered (mandatory) recall. It substaintially reduces the company’s legal risk and monetary risk to comply with a voluntary recall. There’s a lot more nuance but just from the wikipedia for the way different types of FDA recall strategies work:
The manufacturers or distributors of the product carry out most recalls of products regulated by FDA voluntarily. In some instances, a company discovers that one of its products is defective and recalls it entirely on its own. In others, FDA informs a company of findings that one of its products is defective and suggests or requests a recall. Usually, the company will comply.
If the firm does not recall the product, then FDA can seek legal action under the FD&C Act. These include seizure of available product, and/or injunction of the firm, including a court request for recall of the product.
The threat of being made to recall them is one of the safeguards here the second the company is told by their lawyers they will lose a “voluntary recall” becomes inevitable. These companies will only get more… entrepeneurial about food safety the more the threats are taken away and the big one was always food testing.
NYT is not high quality journalism though
If anything it shows for profit monetization eventually destroys every information stream. In NYT case they hired Bari Weiss who has gone on to turn news companies into right wing propaganda outlets. They’ve been a shitshow for a long time.
Its past time that every county in the US had like a gov funded local nonprofit newspaper to report on local events. Or even funnier make it funded by congressional district so gerrymandered areas get some weird ass shit.
So don’t read it. European news are better anyway. American news are nuts.
Go to reuters.com and compare with American news.
The FDA recall notice isn’t paywalled (yet).
Thanks for linking that
He’s going to truth social that and add an “investor early notice subscription” for 100k a year.
if the orange man hears about this…
He’ll probably think it’s the Federal Dureau of Anvestigation and tell Kash to fix it. By the time somebody deciphers his intent, we should be on to president #48.
Unless…
No 3rd-parties, no lazy paywall.
10 celebrities YOU DIDNT KNOW got FAT!?! Is free to view however. Encouraged even. Theyre begging you to find out.
Pertinent information? Fuck you pay me.
