OT: Detroit News and Free Press Going Behind a Paywall on Aug. 12
Fairly big news for us cheapskates. It says that everything except "breaking news" will be behind the paywall, so that will presumably include most all of their sports content. LINK.
Can't blame any news site that chooses to charge for its content, but I doubt I'll pay for those sites.
MLive and MGoBlog will continue to be FREE.
Don’t they know how many people go to the Freep because of this blog!
Think of all the half pennies they're losing out on!
Not enough clicks to get that ad revenue up. They need to hire more trolls.
News should be supported by subscription more and ads less. Would lead to better content. Will people pay for it is another question. Seems to be kind of working at NYT and Wapo. Hope some (good) local news sites will be able to figure this out.
The most important word in your post is (good).
As much as I'm a proponent of having access to quality local journalism, it doesn't appear to me that either the News or Free Press would, for the most part, qualify as being (good).
The Free Press has won Pulitzers and other awards recently. It's a legitimate, although shrinking, newspaper with several fine and widely respected journalists.
The News has always been dogshit.
Thing is, not everyone is or will be willing to pay for news. So then, you have even more of a mis-informed public. It's a bit of a catch-22.
Yep. Poor people can look at ads. Poor people aren't going to pay for content.
I guess my point is that a lot of real information gets completely hidden behind paywalls. So, ads or no, those poor people just won't have access to certain information. Given the state of the country, that might not be in the interest of the greater good.
Yeah, it's an interesting point. Not sure how to do it better. Ad-driven news is crap news, eventually.
Of course, you could have state-supported news (PBS) but that has limits and is also prone to certain types of problems.
I honestly can't think of a great solution to the news problem we're having.
Print media is historically a thing for which people paid to consume. Its only in the past 15 years or so that the idea of getting your news for free over the internet became a thing. Little did anyone know that the unintended consequence of that trend would be a precipitous decline in the quality of the product.
NYT and WaPo both have long been considered the standard bearers of national news, so it doesn't surprise me they're doing well. They cover national news so much better than any Gannett rag ever will...
Gannett is to news as McDonalds is to restaurants.
Glad it's free to remove bookmarks from my web browser! Certainly not paying for those journalistic sports department hacks.
Who is going to pay for an online subscription to the Freep? They are likely making more on clickbait than they will on subscriptions. Maybe they will give Sabin a podcast, too!
There is no news worth paying for, other than my monthly cable.
I'd be willing to play for BBC news and NPR. That's about it though.
The internet was a mistake.
No bigger insult to one's product than giving it away for free
August 3rd, 2020 at 10:35 PM ^
Facebook is free and yet it’s market cap is nearly $720B.
So is Twitter, and Instagram.
Maybe now they will be forced to actually write something with any value
Buy 2 bottles of Coke and get a FREEP subscription free?
Paywall? Like, the Freep's gonna pay me to read it?
They're going to pay for the wall!
Wait, that's not right, Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall. So....Mexico is going to cover my Freep and/or News subscription fee?
Pretty soon all that will be left for free online will be the russian bots and trolls. And the Official Bureau of (mis)Information.
LOL at the Freep asking for people to pay for the privilege of reading the deep thoughts of Rainer Sabin.
After Seth posted yesterday his META notice banning links to anything written by Sabin, I went to the Freep website to refresh my memory on why I already skipped over columns by Sabin.
It didn't take long to regret my decision: Sabin has less writing ability than most high school freshmen.
I read the Damon Payne Jr column from Sunday's online edition and another recent column and quite frankly, my eyes and brain both hurt from the experience. And this was with me going in with the mindset that I was going to try to ignore, as much as possible, any bias or agenda Sabin might have had behind his columns.
Poor sentence structure, rambling incoherent paragraphs, no flow, just awful writing overall. The entirety of each column easily could have been concisely written in about 3-5 paragraphs.
I left the experience wondering how the Freep could justify hiring and paying for such slop.
TBH, I had never heard of Rainer Sabin before that Damon Payne article, and I completely agree. I was about 1/3 of the way through the article and thought, "Wait...there's more?"
And then he continued to type words without saying anything.
Same. 4-5 times in the article I lost who the hell he was quoting and had to backtrack a paragraph or more to figure out what the hell was going on.
Freep didn't want a good writer. They wanted someone willing to manufacture controversy and scandal to drive clicks.
Well, hopefully my Nigerian investment pays off by then.
Did you hear about the one guy who got duped into paying even more money so they could remove the black ink from the hundred dollar bills?
I’d pay for Crain’s before either of those. I’d tip Angelique and Wojo separately if I could.
Guess I can delete those apps now.
So they think they are competitors with The Athletic now?
BTW, if anyone missed it, TMobile/Sprint are giving away a free yr of The Athletic through their Tuesday app.
I do miss the days when the News and Free Press were delivered to a special box under your actual mailbox. Made it easier to tell what sort of people might be inside that house.
Unless they had both.
True story: my folks refused to get one of those boxes because it looked tacky. I had to drag my ass out to pick the paper out of the snow each winter. It made me the man I am today! (no, no it did not.)
As an 8th grader I paid for a Detroit New paper subscription to be delivered to my house in Lowell. I loved reading the paper.
From the other side, I was a Free Press paper boy when I was 13. That job taught me a lot about people, and most of it wasn't complimentary. Whether it was the fussy guy who had to have his paper placed fold-down inside of his screen door, or the people yelling at you because you hadn't delivered before they left for work (I was up at 6:00 freaking AM, lady!), or the countless cheapskates who constantly tried to stiff you when it was time to collect, it was a nightmare. I only lasted six weeks.
But my first dip into the employment pool taught me a valuable lesson about people: Many are decent. But many will push you around if they think they can get away with it. And who better to push around than a 13-year-old kid?
I watched friends go through the paper boy thing and thought, “what’s wrong with these papers? they think making a 13 y.o. kid hold the bag on the crappiest end of it is a good idea?”
If those paywalls are implemented as poorly as those of many other newspapers, they'll be easy to work around (through selective blocking of scripts).
The decline of newspapers sucks. I think their daily coverage is pretty terrible but newspapers still produce some of the best investigative work out there. But those take lots of time and resources.
I mean I am not saying I would never pay for a news site just definitely not either one of those. Not going to contribute to their anti-Michigan agenda. Still waiting for them to investigate why Max Bullough was suspended or all the sexual assaults that have happened under Izzo’s watch.
Awful choice. They do not have the “quality” (video content, long form writing, extensive use of graphics that NYT and the Post can do) or reach of the big publications that can do this.
Unfortunately, everything is going behind a paywall these days. I’d be all for it, if there weren’t already good sources out there that cater solely to the stuff I care about. They can’t beat the free sites.
Although I think the NYT and WaPo do good reporting I haven't subscribed to them because if either breaks a big story its only a matter of time before CNN/CBS/ABC/NBC/HuffPost/Politico etc. pick it up.
As a former Detroit News paperboy back in the '70's, all I can say is Rest In Peace. The News, Free Press, and most of the other large newspapers in the US (especially the Chicago Tribune) have been on life support for years. I canceled my Tribune subscription years ago because they continually failed to call out the state and city corruption that plagues the formerly great state of Illinois and City of Chicago. If they ever published anything worth reading, I might think of actually paying for on-line access.
August 3rd, 2020 at 11:51 PM ^
? The Trib broke the Blago story and was such a pain in the ass to him that he and Patty were taped talking about holding up a Wrigley project (Trib Corp still owned the Cubs) in retaliation. They’ve been all over Madigan recently. They’re a good watchdog. And yes, I subscribe.
"Print is dead."
- Egon Spengler (1984)
Shall we turn this thread into a posbang or a "What are you drinking?" thread? Let's celebrate the fact that people must pay for the right to troll this fanbase!