It is bizarre that we don't have any consumer protection law around requiring an option for online cancellation for subscriptions that offer online purchases.
> Exempt Organizations include charities or certain non-profit organizations, organizations engaged in political solicitations or surveys, or Sellers or Telemarketers that call ONLY consumers with whom they have an established business relationship or from whom they have obtained the express written agreement to call.
> You have to sit through an online chat session which takes longer than it should. Apparently you’re not allowed to cancel your subscription until you answer the question, how is your day going?
This right here is why PayPal won online payments. They're extremely consumer friendly. One button cancellation, no fucking around. I don't even bother going to sites any more, I just open PayPal and hit cancel.
I basically won't work with anything that's not PayPal or Bitcoin these days due to hassles like this.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have any experience getting their credit card company to cancel all future payments to a company? Is this easy to do?
Required a phone call with a little repetition of my request to 2 people, as well as explanation of the reason for canceling... but not that hard. (Chase Bank)
Definitely. I had already commented on final, that a payment system that is US-only is not "the new payment system for the new century", but a "slightly improved 40-years old payment system". Things like PayPal are way better than it.
Great service, but be careful simply cancelling payment and assuming the problem will solve itself. That's how people wind up being sent to collections with huge fees tacked on.
For example, people regularly cancel cards or move and assume "the gym will figure it out" only to discover two years later that that $20/month bill is now a $600+ bill and they're being hounded by a collections agency.
Credit scores make this even more risky (if you care about such things).
Agreed. Just cancelling your payment is the same as not paying as far as the company is concerned. You have to notify them that you wish to cancel your account otherwise they literally can't tell the difference.
I've done this hundreds of times via PayPal and never had an issue. Maybe CCs come with different expectations or Internet companies just understand what not paying anymore means, but no issues so far.
The difference with PayPal is that they manage the subscription, and you're saying "stop my subscription", credit/debit cards have no concept of a subscription, so when you stop paying someone with one there is no communication of that to the seller.
Example: if you stop your gym membership with PayPal, the gym's membership system will either be notified that your membership has been cancelled, or they will do some periodic check to see who has an active membership and update from that.
If you stop your payments going through on a credit/debit card, it's essentially the same as having no money in your account, or your card being stopped because it's stolen. There's no communication back down the channel, you just can't bill it. As a result your membership starts to go into the red, which is usually allowed for a period because of payment issues. When they contact you with a bill months later they have every right to claim that money because you never ended the membership and could have been using the gym during that time. It is usually only through wanting good customer satisfaction that they might waive the fees for that period.
Be careful of strategic ignorance on this, too. I once had an ISP who charged me for months after I quit. I had quit, via their web form, but apparently they needed to call me after that and they never did.
The only time it worked was when I was on the phone with the lady telling me that my card had expired. They wanted lots of proof I had cancelled (which was impossible, because their damned site didn't work, and it only worked the one time I was on the phone with the person... funny that).
If anyone is wondering, that company was Megapath, which bought out Speakeasy, a once-good ISP. I would never do business with them again. Ever.
Is there anyone at all who provides this service on a debit basis? I deliberately don't carry revolving credit lines, and do not wish to start, but it seems like the only option if I also want virtual cards.
If you go through a newspaper's companion app on iOS, you can subscribe using Apple's mechanism. It's usually a few dollars more each month, but you can turn it off through iTunes without any phone calls.
You may find that this cuts out a large number of companies.
Bitcoin is still at the point where having it in your checkout process will confuse most people for most consumer sites, which means decreased conversion, and lack of take-up.
PayPal require large amounts of capital to be held as collateral, which has a significant impact on the cash flow of a business, and can make it essentially a non-starter to work with them.
By all means limit to those if you value the UX highly enough, and I agree that they have a great UX in some ways for consumers. But do realise that it cuts out entire categories of companies.
I actually find it cuts out extremely few companies.
Even Google I now pay via PayPal - a few businesses who can't for legal reasons do business with PayPal or for trust reasons (ie: chargebacks cost them big as their side of the deal is irrevetsible) like game key sites I do via Bitcoin.
I loved the content in the Journal but unfortunately I was put off by their sneaky behaviour when they charged my card for the next month's subscription after the free month. Granted I should've set an alert but, they could've at least informed me once before it expired.
To then cancel it, I had to make a call and stay on it for half hour. I still can't figure out who's coming with these hackneyed marketing "solutions" at media houses.
Unfortunately this is an extremely common practice. Usually what I do to avoid such things is to immediately cancel once they give me the free one as with most services you'll get to keep your subscription to the end of the month anyways.
With all the talk of these businesses struggling, and their supposed focus on moving into the future, I would be a pretty upset shareholder to find out that they have the user experience this...wrong?!
The user experience is the ad sales department and they're usually very nice folks. The experience in the linked article is the experience of being the product sold. Its like the difference between working in marketing at KFC which is probably entertaining, vs being a factory farmed bird which probably isn't as much fun.
You assume this isn't all on purpose as part of their "retention strategy." Pretty sure this is now taught in MBA farms to the latest batch of grads as everyone does it...
Nobody measures the lost repeat business due to these retention strategies because most people don't look beyond the current fiscal year.
Another likely reality here is that there are A/B/C tests running, and this person just fell into a cohort where 12 month options were unavailable by chance.
Either way, i'm just a pessimist, going digital isn't easy for any legacy company and it's clear they're all struggling.
> The Journal’s opinion pages have been a showcase for the intra-right divide over Trump, featuring Trump-sympathetic writers like Bill McGurn alongside anti-Trump columnists such as Bret Stephens. Lasswell appears to be a casualty of that divide, and his dismissal a victory for the pro-Trump faction on the editorial staff.
How is the US coverage from the FT? The best parts about the WSJ (and NYT) is the timely breaking news, the live-video and live-audio feeds of various proceedings (E.g. both had a live broadcast of the cabinet confirmations, along with real-time input from on-hand journalists, giving generally good insight).
I actually vastly prefer the FT website to NYT/WP/WSJ, but would very much appreciate the prompt US-centric news feeds. I know it's Euro-centric and Britain-based, so I wanted to ask.
I subscribe to the Financial Times weekly and find it highly valuable. It's enough to keep me up to date, and covers a broad area of topics and regions.
This guy's approach reminds me of why I ended up with Dish instead of DirecTV. Dish was the one that lets me DOWNGRADE my service without forcing me to pick up the phone. Cancel HBO? Just click!
odd... we had directv, and the last year, we'd downgraded to the most basic service. we'd 'upgrade' for 3 hours to watch a sports game 2x per month - were prorated for those days - and would 'downgrade' right after the game. So... basic service for 28 days, prorated 'higher package' price for 3 days. worked fine all done from their website. Usually needed to do it at least 5 minutes before the game.
Best line: "First, I’ll note that I have a pretty much unlimited media budget. If I can afford to spend a hundred dollars per month poisoning myself with tequila, I can spend that much on information."
Yes. Stated humorously, but presumably meant seriously.
I've concluded the same about informational media such as books, magazines, music. If I'm paying attention to it and getting value, it's generally worth paying for and not agonizing about the price.
In all seriousness kudos to you for subscribing to physical news papers -- I find it highly cathartic to sit down and read a newspaper. I think it reminds me of my dad and granddad reading the paper, so brings back good times. That and you get info without all the radiation of a monitor.
Okay, this is a good look into the payment systems of all three, but I feel like judging them solely by that and not by the content of the actual paper is probably not the right metric to use here.
Yet, its strangely fair, in that regardless of the content of the Times, billing in that industry is so bad, and billing at the Times is so unusually awful within industry standards, that he couldn't give them money to subscribe.
By analogy I trade money for code, and I won't sell code to you (nothing personal, just can't), so you can wonder how good my code is, but it doesn't really matter because I won't sell you my code regardless of its quality level.
I replaced my fairly curated (/r/neutralpolitics, /r/neutralnews etc) Reddit morning news with NYT about a month ago. It's completely changed my morning routine. I feel much more "holistically" informed, and I feel calmer since the news are significantly more nuanced than what makes it to the top of organic news sites.
The "morning briefing", which gives me a brief summary of key news items to go with my morning coffee, alone would have been worth the $3.75 a week.
Had none of the issues OP notes on getting an annual subscription - and at the NYT price point, I'm ashamed it took me this long to pay for good journalism.
Independent of what rag you support, if you don't currently pay for journalistic work, please consider doing so. The dollar figures are minimal and constitute a tremendous boost for the Fourth Estate.
I don't think it's possible to find one single organisation that has an entirely neutral perspective. By and large I find NYT reporting to be very accurate, but it's only healthy to seek out other publications from time to time. That's where the "10 free articles" model comes in useful - the bulk of my reading is through NYT, but I can "lightly graze" on other sources throughout the month.
Another option is Blendle, which lets you pay per article. I don't know how many news orgs they have so far, though.
Yeah, I like the idea of services like Blendle that will give you a mix of content providers for $0.25/article, but that's just too steep for me. If they could get that down to the subpenny level I might go for it.
I could probably afford it too, but I guess the reality is I just won't pay for journalism. The value proposition is just too low given how easy it is to find this stuff around already.
Google News might be my solution here. Maybe that means I read Telegraph for one thing and NPR for the next, but that's not a big deal - they're decent enough to do the job and you can pretty much get any PoV you want using reddit comments these days.
blendle is $0.15-0.49 per article. Maybe i just don't read much news, but i don't find it all that expensive. i get the headlines from their morning briefing and end up spending about $5 per month.
So long as you avoid the opinion articles like the plague, WSJ is my personal pick for closest-to-neutral. Their event coverage tends to be more neutral than NYT and WaPo (or the guardian, but i can't remember why I didn't look at BBC). Supplement WSJ with al jazeera for an alternate viewpoint on international events.
I was told once that the WSJ has the best reporting because it's the newspaper of Wall Street and other powerful businessmen: they're going to demand accuracy and neutrality because their understanding of the market (and thus their livelihoods) depend on it. Other groups have less actual need for facts, so are more likely to be satisfied with fewer of them (e.g. politically biased coverage).
This seems like an incredibly optimistic perspective on Wall Street. Is there any basis for thinking that Wall Street success correlates to fact availability?
I once heard the same about the FT and tried it. In general, it was a pleasant experience and they not only covered topics in a neutral way but also allowed commentaries from different viewpoints. However, I didn't extend my subscription, because I didn't use it on a daily basis. Pay per article would have fitted me much better.
I've been using blendle for a year or so and I'm happy with it. The only thing is that there is a disconnect between surfing the web, hitting the paywall, and then finding that article on blendle. There's no "buy now with blendle" button, unfortunately. Kind of obvious, because they actually all want to sell me their subscription, but annoying nonetheless. Not harder than the "search title with google to get free article" routine, though.
That's right. There is one, but apparently only in Dutch. I'll probably try it out anyway, not sure if for normal activity the language actually matters.
You will be extremely hard pressed to find anything without some sort of slant, though the AP is probably the closest thing to it.
The Times is still among the most trusted sources for in-depth coverage; their perceived slant might be due to the topics they choose to put more focus on.
When HN readers; particularly those that can be reasonably assumed to be American, say 'The Times' - do you refer to The Times [0], or to The New York Times?
I'd have assumed the latter, if The Guardian weren't mentioned (or posted) here so frequently. (And I'm not aware of any other Guardians.)
Definitely the New York Times. While The Guardian has some readership in the US, I don't think The Times (London) has much -- perhaps unfairly, it is seen as a rather provincial newspaper rather than a "world" newspaper.
It used to be the Empire's paper of record, and one of the most prestigious in the world (if fairly stuffy, conservative and Conservative). Now, sadly, it's a shadow of its former self. The Murdoch years have seen its journalism, and its reputation, slowly fall. It's now positioned somewhere between the Daily Mail and the Telegraph (which itself seems to have lost much of its quality coverage over the past 20 years).
The BBC? No subscription either (ad supported outside of the UK). I'd also throw in Al Jazeera which has a slight slant but that slight slant counteracts the BBC's slight slant giving you a very balanced overview.
AP and Reuters themselves are good too (even if you're typically used to reading about them as a source rather than a direct publication).
PBS and CSpan are good but underfunded. Other US news is too biased and full of pro-US propaganda which gets tiresome in a hurry. Plus if I wanted to read unverified "anonymous's sources" or "report: <some other publication>" I'd just read Reddit comments or Tweets. Unfortunately that's largely what US "news" is these days, unverified facts and others repeating those facts until they're true.
Alas the BBC's bias towards supporting the government's position on various issues (thanks in no small part to staffing the upper echelons of the organisation with Tory party members) has become increasingly pronounced in recent years to the extent that I simply can't trust BBC coverage of important issues anymore.
I consider the New York Times to be fairly balanced in terms of actual reporting (ignoring the opinion columns, but opinion will always have a slant). Washington Post is more liberal, and WSJ is more conservative.
You are implying that it's worth supporting the Fourth Estate. Regardless of what side of the isle you are on, last year's elections have shown the unopposed bias present in the US and UK systems.
I have and will continue consuming my news for free. If an institution like the NYT dies because people don't support it financially then I'm ok with that. Someone else will take their place with a model that works.
You are only making more room for those that appeal to the lowest common denominator, the tabloids (where UK seems to have a worse problem than the US, but from the outside: all of the anglosphere is having trouble.)
I don't look for neutrality, I think it's largely illusory. Everyone has a self-interest. I don't expect them to deny that, I expect them to give me proof of what they say. So I prefer to look at a diverse set of media, avoiding filter bubbles, compare the stories everyone covers, and see what core set of facts (if any) these sources agree on. Then I look at the authors and the sourcing. Where did they get their facts? Can any of these facts be corroborated elsewhere? All anonymous sources are treated as if the author themselves said it and evaluated accordingly. Even the 'stopped clock' outlets might be right twice a day. It's amazing which parts of stories get covered by some outlets and not others.
Can you cite examples of the end result? Cases where you've reached a different conclusion than you would have reached just from reading a mainstream source?
I'm asking because your process could equally be used by someone very well informed, and someone who had managed to misinform themself severely.
The latter being due to cognitive errors where they lacked enough information to form a valid judgment, and Daniel Kahneman's "What You See Is All There Is" process silently filling in the gaps. I see this frequently in people overtly skeptical of the media.
But on the other hand, skeptical people are also often correct, as the media warrants critical reading.
There's always more to learn. There's always more to the story. I don't think anyone has the complete picture and anyone who thinks they do is kidding themselves. Any process could be used by anyone, but I sincerely question just how long someone could remain severely misinformed by reading articles, looking for verifiable factual information, and then attempting to verify it.
Perhaps you think I'm trying to average out what everyone says as if the truth was always in the middle? That could scarcely be further from the truth. Especially in politics, both sides are lying, though perhaps to different degrees and neither side is true. Thus, I separate facts from opinions and look for which items can be corroborated. So if someone is reporting that X said Y, I would look for a video of exactly what X said and see it directly.
One example that comes to mind simply because I did a lot of legwork just to see who was telling the truth is when I was told by CNN that it was illegal to read Wikileaks [1] and that there was essentially nothing to see there except some metaphorical sausage being made. Then I find out that this isn't true [2], and that Chris Cuomo is a licensed attorney who one might think would know better. [3]
Then I find out that they were exposed in Wikileaks, cheating on the debates. [4] I also heard claims that the emails were altered. [5] The claims of alteration are later proven false because the email referenced in [4] has a DKIM signature, signed by both 1e100.net (Google) and hillaryclinton.com which provides cryptographic non-repudiation. It also explicitly covers the body of the email--note the 'b' and 'bh' parameters in both DKIM signatures, clearly visible when you 'view source'. It's well known that CNN terminated their relationship with Donna. As far as I know, however, nobody ever figured out who she got the questions from, so presumably they're still there.
What I meant is that people frequently find truth locally, but miss a lot of larger context because of narrow focus.
For instance, those videos and articles are about Clinton's emails. A lot of people analyzing that issue determined, correctly "Clinton made mistakes in email management".
The error there would be to think, without examination "Trump would be better at document security", or to hold the slightly more nefarious belief "therefore, clinton is the worse choice on document security". They're the same statement, of course, but cognitively the second one makes the believer less likely to notice they only examined one half of the equation.
The media more or less ignored Trump's data security practices, so there was no opportunity to raise the question if you only do media analysis. It's a comparison you have to do on your own.
Now, given the revelations about discussing classified documents in the open with u secured cellphones at mar a lago, it seems likely Trump is worse on data security.
This was something I think was possible to figure out before the election.
So, if you held the following belief, congratulations:
"Clinton has made errors in data management, but I have no idea if Trump is better and this has no impact on my comparison" or
"Clinton made errors, but based on other external evidence Trump may well be as bad"
But if you left things unexamined, you may have fallen into a trap. Both youtube channels you linked are Trump supporter channels. Did you analyze them as well? (In that case, the question to ask is not "is this video footage real, but instead "why am I seeing this footage at all? What do they want me to conclude?"
To more concretely state the error I'm worrying about: many people exercise skepticism only with regard to the mainstream media, but then are fairly credulous when dealing with alternative sources.
And for what it's worth, I don't watch CNN. But if you had told me they said if's illegal to read Wikileaks, I would have said "that's absurd, there's no such law".
I have a background of political knowledge and context that lets me make that judgement. My worry when I read people expressing skepticism of mainstream sources is that they frequently lack that context, and are vulnerable to being right on a few details and wrong on the larger picture.
First, good if you don't watch CNN, it's junk food news. But regarding that story, you do LSAT testing, so you have to actually know a thing or two about the law. But how many normal people are in a position to contradict someone who is both a lawyer and an attorney when he tells them that? (Yes, I know enough to know the difference.)
As for who is better on document security, I wouldn't go down that rabbit hole to begin with. Have you read Assange's rationale for creating Wikileaks? The gist of it is that creating a leak culture raises the cost of conspiracies. This means that it's more difficult for any small group in power to plot against the public. So it's not really about document security, but closer to the opposite: to promote leaks so that nobody can control the flow of information.
So it's not about Trump or Clinton or any such short-sighted political machinations, but rather to ensure that nobody can get away with conspiring against the public.
It doesn't matter if the conspirator is Hillary or Flynn or whoever else. The point is to ensure that everyone is accountable. You can see how much this is hated by both sides these days, each calling the other hypocrite when they decry leaks against themselves. You can also see how those in power hate this from the Todd & Claire site, which I've seen very little press regarding.
Speaking of that, it's funny how a bunch of people on different continents coordinate with a sham of a porn site / UN "partner" to frame someone as a pedophile, but it barely warrants any mention, no? You read a lot of news, no? How much coverage have you seen? How much do you know about that? Doesn't it seem like a rather odd thing to ignore?
Yeah, you won't find stories about that one in the news. But assuming it didn't get purged (and these things are wont to vanish), there were plenty of discussions / archives of the site. They used an obscure UN program to claim "partnership" with the UN by agreeing to abide by some set of principles, posted something to a UN website by virtue of that program and later got dumped when they were exposed.
The site itself was fake. The profiles were clones of each other, the images were mirrored images harvested from the web (to hide from reverse image search, but they weren't that clever because the mirroring was obvious).
The whole thing was basically a scam to make out JA as a pedophile, after which they ran off claiming to have been threatened. However, no part of the story held together.
Given how much work went into framing someone as a pedo and it got blown up publicly, it's kind of weird that it never hit the news.
He's lucky he didn't try to subscribe to a local Hearst paper.
I subscribed because I like the paper and the newsstand in my building closed. But the process is bizarre -- They only let you subscribe in weird increments of weeks vs. months. Then you get what they call "bonus" weeks, but the outcome is that the billing system ends up double-billing you for up to one week, and you can't predict when the bills will come.
I get social media is how the results of journalism get distributed, but what funds the journalism itself if traditional news/media companies go out of business? Is twitter or facebook going to fund investigative journalists? What's the business model for a company looking to pay people to research and write about things if 'social media is the new journalism'? Do we rely on non-profits/donations?
Or are you proposing we'll get all our news in a decentralized manner via people posting what's going on around them?
"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall, or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers gather. You don't see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You don't see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.
Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had.
I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes that American monoliths as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs, pursuing the task without compensation, training, or for that matter, sufficient training to make public officials even care who it is they're lying to or who they're withholding information from.
Indeed, the very phrase 'citizen journalist' strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbour who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbour. He is not, in any sense, a 'citizen social worker'. Just as the neighbour with a garden hose and good intentions is not a 'citizen firefighter'. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters."
"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall,
or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers gather..."
But this is 2017, and most cities are one-newspaper towns, generally exhibiting close, mutually-protective relationships between commercial media and government decision-makers. I've seen major papers outright lie about events in city council meetings and legislation (for two examples) when they thought nobody would hold them accountable. I've seen written accounts of speakers and audiences at city council meetings that the reporter didn't even attend. (And if you search online, you may well find independent reporting "gadfly" groups or individuals you didn't know existed -- the local commercial media sure wouldn't tell you. Nextdoor can also be useful, but the signal-to-noise ratio is often low.)
One example process: local governments dish out taxpayer money to pseudo-independent "service organizations". Those organizations use part of these funds to buy advertising in local media and on public transit agencies. Those media, in turn, do flowery reporting on those local governments and soft-pedal police violence and union corruption, resulting in situations like "The Riders" in the Oakland Police Department[0]. This is too often the circle of modern urban "journalism". And that's without even addressing the issue of predatory corporate behavior by publishers themselves[1].
The broader point: modern, for-profit media are exactly that -- for-profit businesses. Their fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value. Objectivity and honesty are orthogonal to short- and medium-term profit.
His town is my town, too. The city council does what it damn well pleases, most of the time, but what check there is on the corruption that pervades our local government comes mostly from the Sun.
On the other hand, despite his cogent comments on the value of professional reporting, he now occupies himself as a television writer and producer. Make of that what you will.
> the neighbour with a garden hose and good intentions is not a 'citizen firefighter'. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters
There's no reason to thing a firefighter would do anything other than their job, there's no obvious reason for a bias.
A uneducated social worker, much like other medical/psychological workers, is a dangerous thing, so many require licences.
What licence requirements are there for professional journalists? I see plenty bad stats/reporting in journalism, so nothing that prevents that.
Read a science blog (almost any one made by an actual academic), and then read a journalist science column. Tell me which one displays "daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out". Then go read about tech for example, and see if it's any different.
Indeed, if you ignore economic news, political journalism seems to be better done by biggish professional entities. But they don't seem to have any other niche remaining.
Also, the GP claim about "social media", well, if you listen to it and hear "Facebook", it's certainly wrong. We badly need a better platform. But that does not open the niche to journalists.
Social media completely fails at factual reporting. It would be futile to point out falsehoods on, say, the frontpage of Reddit, because the lsit would grow too fast. Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr are no better, just people reposting what they agree with and nobody to hold responsible.
Large newspapers still do a lot of valuable journalism that no-one else is doing. For example, the recent controversy over General Flynn was driven heavily by dogged Washington Post reporting, backed up by details fleshed out by the New York Times. You can't really do this kind of journalism without it being your full time job, and few organisations can afford to pay the number of full time journalists needed.
I'm all for supporting alternative means of journalism, but there will be a huge, huge vacuum if these large newspapers fail.
> What stops any such institution fleshing out the details, then only showing those that support their narrative?
Nothing. I certainly wasn't suggesting that these large newspapers are infallible or immune from bias. That doesn't alter the fact that the reporting they do is important, though.
Who has the connections, the bureaus, the manpower, and the money to provide quality journalism across a wide array of fields and cover it but depth besides mega newspapers?
I'm all for supporting local news but if I want quality journalism on a nationwide / global topic I'm not heading to my local paper.
We had some lawsuits about that in Germany (having to be able to cancel the same way you subscribed) where common sense won. Not sure how far implementation has gone though.
Neither of those things inspire confidence in their business model. Also Blendle has been in beta for 11 months. Maybe longer? The exact opposite of "internet years".
The first thing I do whenever I subscribe to a service these days is research how difficult it is to unsubscribe from it. I was tempted to get Sunday delivery for some of those newspapers in the article but realized that it would be tough to get out of them.
I think this type of interaction might make sense for a different type of customer. I imagine people who are getting the physical version of a newspaper might be older or less tech-savvy so the "bad old way" of waiting in a call center queue on hold might be what they are expecting instead of a fancy complicated web interface.
Ted and jakewins both advocate subscribing to support newspapers and journalism.
I absolutely agree that quality journalism is essential and should be paid for. But aim higher: In addition to subscribing, try to find a funding method that actually will work in the long run. Specifications, in no order:
A) Journalists have sufficient funds to do quality work, earn a decent living, and attract talented, dedicated people to the profession.
B) Journalists can speak truth to power and to an angry Internet mob. They are free from influence by their funders, to a great degree.
C) The quality work is as widely distributed as possible. This is essential: If only subscribers can read it, then only tiny portion of the online world can benefit and it's not part of the public conversation. Instead of the Internet dream (very achievable) of distributing valuable content effortlessly, we're back to the old days of it being available only to a few subscribers and everyone else subsists on 'fake news'.
It's a question that's been asked many times, but so far nobody has solved it (and specification C is usually ignored).
I believe this is essentially what The Guardian is set up to do, being owned by the Scott Trust [1][2] rather than normal shareholders. Assuming you agree with their politics, it is possible to support them by becoming a member [3] with a monthly subscription of GBP 5.00
> The Scott Trust was originally created in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference.
edit: spelling ;-)
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