The Houston Chronicle has a similar dual system. The print newspaper is online but paywalled: houstonchronicle.com the "chron.com" version is mostly buzzfeedish fluff that's free.
What you're describing is just an online newspaper. There's a reason most newspapers can't survive this way: people aren't willing to pay a monthly subscription.
I have subscribed to like seven newspapers this year and i have to say their use of technology is awful. They should get a revenue sharing system like ASCAP for music - I pay so much per year and then they distribute it amongst the sites I view. I only want to check Houston papers when they have flooding but I don’t want them to die out. I only want to read Wilmington paper when they get a hurricane or a spike in Covid cases in the nursing homes, but I can’t see paying $1000 per year for all of the places I click in on from time to time.
The problem with newspapers is that if they paywall all of their articles, they won't get any viewers because nobody knows what kind of articles they write without subscribing. A lot of them have an 'X free articles per month' thing, but since I'm on three different machines, I've never hit that limit unless it was like one or two a month.
A lot of posts on here are for the NYTimes or WSJ. These often require a subscription to read. That's fair, they're a business who should get paid.
However I don't see a way to pay for an online subscription that protects my information.
If I buy a WSJ paper from a grocery store, I pay in cash and that's the end of it. But why isn't there an online version of 'pay in cash, here's your paper'?
They had digital subscriptions. In fact, I'd guess that WSJ.com was the first successful paid-online-subscription newspaper that still endures as paid subscription. (The San Jose Mercury was earlier, but they went free later for a number of years.)
Back in the 90s, WSJ Op-Ed content was free, but the rest was paywalled.
Last time I checked it's a staged paywall. You get X articles for free without any action, X+Y articles if you register, there may be another "free" stage, and of course you can start paying and that may have more than one level.
They compete with The Wall Street Journal, which is famously about the only paper that made a success of on-line subscriptions a long time ago.
You might be interested in Blendle [1], a website which offers a variety of publications on a pay-per-article basis where you can charge up a wallet in advance.
They offer publications like Time, the Economist, and the Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately it's somewhat expensive - $0.25-$0.50 per article. And they don't have any sort of automated way to jump from a newspaper's paywall straight to the Blendle article - you've got to find it through Blendle. And there selection of publications is somewhat limited.
But there are companies out there trying to deliver something kind of close to what you're talking about!
I always recommend folks get a library card, as they will generally provide free access to these as well as many other newspapers... However there's often 30-90 day embargo to access current issues/articles online.
I think a big part of the problem with funding the news is the way papers handle online payments. I would happily pay a dollar or two to have online access to the NY Times, WSJ, or even my local town paper for a day. What I absolutely do not want to do is spend $500+ on 3 or more subscriptions that I will not read, or not read much of, on most days. For papers that still have a print edition, you can buy the day's paper. I don't know why you can't do the same thing online.
I'm not sure most people would pay 4 figures, or even 3, for access to quality journalism - even if it didn't have ads. I remember when the Wall Street Journal came out on the Internet in 1997 - it was completely paywalled (no free articles at all), and the early pricing was scorned by critics and the public, even if it wasn't astronomical ($50/year for non-print subscribers, $29/year for print subscribers).
They would pay $1 for a newspaper. On HN, every day you have links for about 10 different publications, each requiring a subscription. That's more like paying hundreds of dollars to read the same number of articles for which you used to pay $1.
Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker, it seems as though you can generally get a pleasant local news experience, while still supporting the publisher.
I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version.
That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
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