The simple answer is that the free baseline news is actually pretty decent and individual news outlets tend to overcharge for something that is of marginal value. With very few exceptions (like the NYT), quality is universally very low, journalists are underpaid, etc.
What's missing in the market is a Netflix like subscription model where you don't have to cherry pick one or a handful out of hundreds/thousands of news outlets and instead just get access to everything. That's worth a few dollars per month to me but since nobody seems willing to build that platform, the money stays in my pocket. I haven't bought a news paper in well over a decade. I use an ad blocker. And I'm pretty well informed. Usually, I have no shortage of stuff to read that is interesting and high quality.
And it doesn't help that paywalls are easily bypassed. I sometimes read articles behind paywalls via the usual means of archived web pages. And honestly, mostly I don't feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good content. Mostly that stuff just echos what you can read for free elsewhere or is just stating the bleedingly obvious.
Worse, some of that paid content seems aimed at people that don't have a lot of time or attention span; so we're talking very short articles without a lot of depth or substance. E.g. Bloomberg seems to peddle a lot of that. I appreciate that people exist that need that. But that's not me. The opposite also seems popular: excruciatingly long form articles with a low signal to noise ratio and lengthy descriptions of the journalist's feelings about it all. There's a lot of filler content like that. Not worth paying for either as far as I'm concerned.
The reality is both free and paid news sources tap the same sources of actual news. Competition for bringing actual news is fierce and it's rare for exclusive reporting to stay exclusive for more than a few minutes. The value of paying for early access is minimal.
Most of these paid outlets are of course owned by big media corporations who are more busy creating share holder value than paying their journalists or investing in the quality they pretend to deliver. The irony is that if they had some platform they could share subscription revenue on, they might have something that's worth a lot more than the sum of each of their crumbling little news empires. But greed seems to get in the way for this.
What's missing in the market is a Netflix like subscription model where you don't have to cherry pick one or a handful out of hundreds/thousands of news outlets and instead just get access to everything. That's worth a few dollars per month to me but since nobody seems willing to build that platform, the money stays in my pocket. I haven't bought a news paper in well over a decade. I use an ad blocker. And I'm pretty well informed. Usually, I have no shortage of stuff to read that is interesting and high quality.
And it doesn't help that paywalls are easily bypassed. I sometimes read articles behind paywalls via the usual means of archived web pages. And honestly, mostly I don't feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good content. Mostly that stuff just echos what you can read for free elsewhere or is just stating the bleedingly obvious.
Worse, some of that paid content seems aimed at people that don't have a lot of time or attention span; so we're talking very short articles without a lot of depth or substance. E.g. Bloomberg seems to peddle a lot of that. I appreciate that people exist that need that. But that's not me. The opposite also seems popular: excruciatingly long form articles with a low signal to noise ratio and lengthy descriptions of the journalist's feelings about it all. There's a lot of filler content like that. Not worth paying for either as far as I'm concerned.
The reality is both free and paid news sources tap the same sources of actual news. Competition for bringing actual news is fierce and it's rare for exclusive reporting to stay exclusive for more than a few minutes. The value of paying for early access is minimal.
Most of these paid outlets are of course owned by big media corporations who are more busy creating share holder value than paying their journalists or investing in the quality they pretend to deliver. The irony is that if they had some platform they could share subscription revenue on, they might have something that's worth a lot more than the sum of each of their crumbling little news empires. But greed seems to get in the way for this.