The details of the Facebook changes are telling, hilarious, and dreadful all at once. The best tidbit is the fact checkers (but wait I thought they were no more? ) will be based in Texas rather than California to avoid the appearance of bias.
Yeah, but I probably won't completely dump Facebook because of pictures of the nieces and nephew. I'll just stop checking it more than once a week.
I feel that I should subscribe to a newspaper as a way of doing my part, but I don't know which one.
Right. When I got mad at the NYT I turned to the WaPo, but now that I'm mad at the WaPo I'm not sure what to do.
I do subscribe to TPM, but that's not the same thing.
We added Guardian and Philly Inquirer. (I still have WaPo and NYT theoretically for "research" but I have currently lost the will to dig in*.) Noot sure if they add much, My wife subscribes to a number of things like Democracy Docket and I have TPM.
6*: I spent election day setting up my FTFNYT* website on Ghost as a distraction. But despite my theoretically clear-headed view of the probable results in my heart of hearts I thought Harris would win because in aggregate there was not quite enough stupidity, greediness, ignorance and nastiness in the country to elect him. However. So in my fog of hazy blue persuasion I was preparing to collect and dig into my media critique during a relatively benign Dem administration. Just do not yet have the stomach for it. I even paid for the year as my wife pointedly pointed out to me.
*Fuck the Fucking New York Times.
I'd recommend the Financial Times. Yes, UK title, but as far as I can tell its US coverage is excellent.
The cause is a bit different, but still it's somewhat related: substantial parts of the country now have most porn paywalled.
I've often wondered how that works, but not enough to Google "What porn can you see in Florida?"
Maybe I should have gone presidential for this, but at any rate, here the way the law works is that paid porn is still totally fine (since paying gives proof of age), the major free porn sites are all blocked, sketchier less popular free porn sites just ignore the law, and sites where porn is only a small fraction of what they do (e.g. Reddit) are fine. I haven't decided to pay, it's kinda fun for porn to be rare and illicit anyway, but it does seem like it's more moral to pay for it anyway. Of course you can also just pay for a VPN, but it seems especially immoral to pay for porn but in a way that doesn't go to the workers at all.
I think it's important to remember, at this moment in time, that for most of the MSM in the US, it is a moral imperative to pirate them. Better to avoid them entirely, than pay one red cent, one second of eyeballs-to-ads, for their content. They're actively harming our Republic, and anybody who hurts them in any way is doing a positive good.
I really should cancel my NYT subscription. I hardly ever read their news coverage anymore and I can get that for free through the library anyway. The only thing I go there for is the games and those are free.
Maybe I'll wait until they do something egregious so I can send a specific message by canceling. Shouldn't have to wait long.
Personally, I give to ProPublica. I'd be delighted to venmo/zelle $1 or more for substantive work to a journalist when I read something. I don't care for substack subscriptions, but would be happy to ante up to substack and then pay reasonably per article.
They already charge for the crossword and I don't pay for that tier. I do buy their hard-copy books of crosswords though. Really none of my approach here makes sense.
I have a Wednesday crossword book.
Nonograms are free, and while I don't like the nudie softcore ones, others might consider the titties to be a feature.
I had lots of anxieties about the next four years but they did not include the possibility of wars of territorial expansion with friendly neighbors. WTAF?
Presumably, at a certain point Americans are unable to travel to the EU.
Considering buying some euros in advance of my February trip. If Trump actually tries to enact his blanket tariffs the dollar will probably crash.
Sucks to not have dual citizenship, I say smugly.
29: Or it's one of those weird things where the US does something stupid, causing investors to panic and want safe investments, which means the dollar, and the dollar goes up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
NYTimes is on it: An Emboldened Trump Talks of Taking Greenland and Panama Canal by Force
Emboldened I say! Emboldened!
I mean, in the case of 31, I've still got euros at a rate acceptable to me.
After my local newspaper hit me with surprise extra fees for special editions, doubling my December bill, I canceled. They were swift to send "please don't go; here's a whopping discount" emails. Soon I resubscribed for $47 for the year - where December had been more than $30 with their "special editions" that aren't special in their digital paper.
One of the minor benefits is that once you subscribe to any of the papers, you can read from any of the sister papers in the chain with the same login. So that's my plan for getting a local-ish newspaper look at events elsewhere - though it means that I'll probably have to search for the event once I hit a paywall at whatever is linked to find a close paper. It's also annoying because it's very obvious that they were happy to exorbitantly charge people who leave it on autopay - so they join the "move or threaten to move every few months" class of subscriptions, like cable, to get the regular rate instead of the sucker rate.
I pay for our local newspaper and I still find it impossible to login and read their stupid shit. It's infuriating. And they foist the paper copy on us against our will, which at least is very easy to open.
I just won't give any money to the Blocks, so no Post Gazette.
Sucks to not have dual citizenship, I say smugly.
:|
I subscribe to my local paper, which is pretty good. It's owned by a local family which bought it out of bankruptcy after a flashy billionaire bought it and ran it into the ground. They've actually been able to turn a profit on it, which is impressive these days.
Strange how massive investment in FinTech over the years still hasn't managed to solve the small-town paper firewall micropayment problem. I suppose that the focus instead on selling digital apes made a lot more sense at the time.
I pay for TalkingPointsMemo and AppleNews. Everything else, I hop turnstiles.
The paper in a nearby suburb is owned by a local family - the same one that funds infinite rage lawsuits against building affordable housing in that city's center.
A million years ago when we were all much younger, I think I paid for Salon for a year or two.
" he hasn't heard of any efforts for local outlets to offer that type of plan because readers generally aren't interested in more than one local publication. A pay-per-piece approach would probably have to keep prices quite low to generate interest. "
A Substack-ish that had a whole consortium of small papers in their "if we sell a view of one of your articles you get $1" stable? The browser(s) would have to know to suggest spending a consortium dollar when you met a paywall of someone in the stable. Plus other browser hassle, but none of them seem worse than what we've got.
Getting picked up by AP must have been like this, yes? Did the local paper get a cut when a "goose saves rabbit" story became popular national filler? And the Apple and Google news-fronts *should* have been like it. If they didn't want to kill journalism.
41: Is Apple News actually worth it?! I assumed it was on par with Yahoo News or something.
Years ago when I read it, it was almost entirely other publication's articles, just like the Google News page but more elegantly laid out.
I like paywalls because when I get clickbaited into opening something like a Sex Diaries piece from The Cut the modal blocking the content is like a reminder I should get back to work.
45: You know, it's actually not bad as an aggregator, has a relatively clean interface, and gives access to a bunch of big paywalled sites.
Maciej "Pinboard" Cieglowski pointed out years ago that given how much advertising cruft was loaded on some websites, there already was a highly efficient micropayments system: mobile data billing. Just the telcos were trying to get the media to give them money when it should have been the other way around.
Ironically, being a customer of his business is...not exactly a recommendation for his ideas. That said he did pull his finger out when I sent him more money. (Green: it's the new social network from the Federal Reserve that *really* gets your point across.)
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On my new iphone Safari has decided that it doesn't like unfogged, particularly when I click on the Comments.
Firefox Focus seems fine. I haven't tried regular Firefox. Anyone know why unfogged would be viewed as insecure?
Also NMM Jean Marie Le Pen! Not that anyone ever would.
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Two things that strike me are, first, that part of my objection to paywalls is that they incentivize click-bait style of writing; a site wants to promise that they can provide unique and valuable information behind the paywall and, generally, that isn't the case.
Paywalls tend to discourage clickbait, or at least the most egregious kinds of clickbait. Traditional headline-writing has always been designed to draw you into a story -- but does so by providing information and not concealing it.
Look at the front page of the paywalled NYT and you'll mostly see genuinely informative headlines. And the higher the paywall, the less click-baity the stories. The goal of clickbait, after all, is clicks. The less money that's being made from advertising, the better the writing.
That said, I feel like a dope every time I read Slate, which loves the bait-and-switch tactic so common to clickbait. I sometimes get sucked into those stories, but I'm thinking this is poor writing rather than intelligent strategy. I wonder how they talk about this internally.
Safari iOS now defaults to https and I don't know of a way to turn it off. Since the site doesn't seem to have a certificate it will accept, only option is use another browser.
You can manually change the url to http and it works
That said, I feel like a dope every time I read Slate, which loves the bait-and-switch tactic so common to clickbait. I sometimes get sucked into those stories, but I'm thinking this is poor writing rather than intelligent strategy. I wonder how they talk about this internally.
There's a reason Slatepitch became Slatepitch.
cry cry manually change the url to http cry
Many news sites have been addressing the problem by allowing random users to access a certain number of stories during a set time period. So, if you are just following up on something, it's free. You only hit the paywall if you get hooked. Many also offer guest links, so if someone blogs about an article, they can provide a paywall free link to their readers. They only get so many links per time period, but this really helps.
Apple still offers a multi-source media service. It used to be called Texture, but now it's called Apple News. A subscription gets you lots of articles from a range of news sources and magazines. In some cases, you can access PDF versions of print magazines. It's $12 a month, so a bit pricey, but inflation adjusted it's cheaper than buying a single issue of a newspaper maybe 20 years ago.