The sum of annual subscriptions across all newspapers I'm interested in is exorbitant.
What if I could pay on a per-article basis? I wouldn't have a problem paying 50¢ or $1.00 for an article I was interested in. It's not practical for each publisher to set up micro-payments. But, if there were an intermediate agent that accepted and managed payments for individual random articles, the money could be aggregated and remitted in a lump sum to the publishers. Sort of like an old-fashioned news stand.
What the newspaper business needs is a middleman who will collect micro-payments from me and millions of others, aggregate the money, charge my credit card once a month, and pay each publication weekly or monthly for the collective readers who have selected articles.
The middleman could accept PayPal payments, or I could open an account with my credit card, and pay once a month for all the individual articles I have read.
There is a Website called Blendle that proposes to do this. However, only a subset of articles are available. Publishers are reserving the prime content for full subscribers, and leaving Blendle with the crumbs. That's not going to work.
In reality, the reason why these have failed in the past is human psychology. Think about this with something other than news -- we all have $800 smartphones, but stare at the app store thinking, "hmm...do I really want to spend 99 CENTS?"
When you subscribe to a publication, you have to make decision once. You think about the amount of money against all future potential articles you can read, and decide from there. When you're paying for EACH article, all of a sudden you have to make that decision with every click. Is this article REALLY worth 50 cents?
Not to mention, this incentivizes the totally wrong things. People say they hate clickbait, but the aggregators and social networks that now act as gatekeepers force that kind of behavior -- publishers of course only get paid when you click through to their article. And in this case, it's even more profound -- we're no longer talking about a few cents from display ads, but 50 cents to $1.
I wonder how well it would work if it cost $1 to read an article, but there was an easy way to say "this was a bad article and I want my $1 back" some relatively large fraction of the time. I know that if I had already paid $1 for an article, then read and enjoyed it, I would not be inclined to want my $1 back. However, if I'm being asked to pay $1 just based on the headline, and then the article is clickbait and I have no recourse, I'm probably never going to pay $1 for another article from the same source.
Also, in that system, "90% of readers were satisfied enough to let the author keep their dollar" would be a pretty strong signal of quality (especially so if the platform takes more than a 10% cut: this is one of the rare cases where a higher cut to the middleman might actually result in a better product).
Simply habit can keep people paying. Previous to the internet , my routine was to wake up, get dressed and pick up the morning paper to read at the coffee shop.
That was about 50 cents a day.
If the system allows for it, I would probably commit to buying twitter access on a daily basis as I brush my teeth.
It seems like this type of approach would incentivise clickbaity articles even more than the current financing structure does. Subscribing to a newspaper is a long-term arrangement, requiring the publisher to establish and maintain the reader's trust. Articles, on the other hand, are one-time interactions. Once you start seeing enough clickbait from a given source you can avoid the source in the future, but it would be significantly harder for publishers to leverage positive trust and reputation in such a setting.
If I submit a micropayment for an article that turns out to be low effort clickbait, my disappointment will be magnified by the fact that I lost money. I would also expect my satisfaction to be magnified for high quality content. Consequently, my trust in a brand will decrement or increment accordingly. A micropayment service could even track my reactions and maintain a personalized reputation score for a publisher/brand.
Obviously, this happens now, but I don't personally have as visceral as a reaction to losing the few seconds of time as I would to losing money. Putting even a small amount of money on the line clarifies the cost of the transaction.
Long term subscriptions, on the other hand, give the publisher more wiggle room to produce lazy, low effort content. Loss of brand image needs to build up to a critical threshold that motivates me to cancel the subscription.
The pressure's also going to come from the other direction. The content you pay for is also the content that goes in front of your eyeballs - and the value of that may be much more than you're paying.
Here I am, a successful content bundler. Thousands of people pay me a measly sum to see the content I push at them.
A whole bunch of people are going to come to me, with stacks full of cash, saying, Man, I sure would like to show my content to your subscribers. I calculated your profits, 100k annually. I got $1,000,000 in this check. Does that interest you?
The numbers are made up, but with adtech money being real, it won't be long before the content bundlers buckle and become 'ad-supported' or something like that.
Heck, I don't even know if it has to be per-article; I would like the option to pay for this month and only this month, since most subscriptions are ~$5 these days.
US consumer laws don't require good, hassle free ways to end subscriptions and the main reason I haven't subscribed to any is the utter lack of desire to spend hours hashing out a cancellation with a call center employee.
Better would be to pay 10-20$ for an aggregated service, wherein you'll get all articles of to top 100 newspapers. Payment to newspaper will be done based on no. of articles read.
To reduce it being a pure click-bait pool, we can also add some sort of tipping model, wherein part of my money is distributed according to like/rating I have given. So a 5* investigative piece will get more money.
Have any of them gotten WSJ, NYT, and one or more other heavy hitters onboard? If not, I don't think we know whether it'd work or not. If they have, I'd be interested in learning what happened so I can stop wishing for this.
Also, I think pay per article is doomed to failure, the amount of friction it adds would shrink the market by too much. It needs to be a fixed sub with all-you-can-read a la Spotify, with your subscription fee being split between the orgs you actually read.
It seems like it'd need to be a JV between news orgs, and not a third party. No sane news org with any leverage would hand their customer relationships over to a third party over which they have little control.
I think people tend to underestimate how most publishers don't rely on subscription revenue to survive. All the money is in advertising, which is why I think you see less focus on trying alternative subscription models like this. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice probably wouldn't provide enough revenue to be worth it for medium to small publishers.
Also, say this middleman company does exist and is adopted by a large portion of the publishers out there. How would it benefit them to pass along the majority of that $1 per article to publishers? My hunch is that publishers would be the ones that end up getting 'crumbs' and the middleman would keep the bulk.
Publishers have been burned over the years by relying on other companies and middlemen for traffic and revenue (look at the effect Facebook has had on most news organizations, and not in a good way). Putting all their chips in one basket with a company like this would be a non-starter for most companies. They don't want to get burned again.
Ad pricing has been plummeting ever since the web allowed performance metrics to be strictly tracked, and optimized the ability to advertise in hundreds of places simultaneously.
At some point it becomes more profitable to just use subscriptions.
A similar argument could be made for a whole host of subscription services (gyms, television, etc.) but I think they all keep the subscription model because the mental transaction cost of buying a small amount of the product creates a huge barrier to use. Mental transaction cost is the stress that the buying decision places on the buyer. Someone once said that the only two prices on the internet are free and infinity, so any incremental cost is stressful. Additionally the prices needed to sustain a per-unit sales model are so high that nobody wants to buy. A great recent example is ski resorts. Before the Epic and Ikon passes, day passes were expensive but not insane. With these passes, however, the ski companies have decided to dramatically increase the daily cost and lower the subscription cost to maximize revenue.
A gym isnt something where I want to consume the service of 10+ companies in a day. More traditional television subscriptions (even streaming) are still bundle based sets of channels from multiple providers.
My biggest resistance to subscribing to some publications is the cognitive load of managing more subscriptions. Adding payment info, keeping it updated, remembering to remove it if I'm not using it... That "feels" very expensive to me. Especially with the "we'll automatically renew your subscription" tactic that is so popular now.
I really like Patreon for supporting YouTube content. I think my YouTube subscription is supposed to fund that too, but there are 5ish that I add in Patreon. The down side is that the Patreon-only content is kind of annoying to find, so mostly I just use Patreon to support the content they make on YouTube.
I can't speak for the Netherlands but in the US most publications are just glorified tabloids. Not enough people appreciate quality journalism to pay for it, at least not enough to cover the operational costs of our bloated news outlets. So they turn to publishing "anonymous sources", hearsay, and outright lies that will be quietly retracted because it pays more than the truth. Spreading FUD has always been the MO of the news, I won't be upset if all these companies go belly up. Make way for a new generation of grass roots journalism.
Micro-payments can be done quite easily via Bitcoin's second layer network Lightning Network. There has been a functional demo of this technology for articles, check out yalls dot org.
If you are selling directly to the readers, you potentially have to deal with sales tax or VAT in every jurisdiction in which you have a paying reader.
Many jurisdictions do have thresholds that you have to cross before they want you to collect tax, but those are often of the form ">= N transactions OR >= $S sales". N = 100 or 200 is pretty common for US states. It would be pretty easy to get a situation where you have enough transactions to have to collect, file, and remit tax, but not enough revenue from those to cover the costs of doing so.
Stick a middleman in there and you can avoid all that.
Arrange things so that all your sales are to the middleman who then resells to the readers, and then you only have to worry about whether or not your sales to the middleman are subject to sales tax or VAT in wherever the middleman is located. Any sales tax or VAT in the reader's jurisdictions will be on their purchases from the middleman, and dealing with them is the middleman's problem.
At the middleman level, the tax problem is much much much less bothersome. That's because the middleman can be dealing with other publishers besides you. The middleman might even be selling things that have nothing to do with news or magazines. That gets the middleman's revenue up enough in each jurisdiction that the costs of dealing with taxes there is just a tiny fraction of revenue.
You would probably fall into the trap of picking and choosing (and paying for) the articles that say what you want, and so they would pander, and here we are.
We need people to carefully choose a lower number of sources, that they believe are of high quality and who they will try to hold to that standard, and then read their articles even when they don't pander.
I had a similar thought and then realized that this describes Apple News Plus. It’s one place you can pay for articles and I assume there are licensing or per-article agreements just like a streaming service would have. Granted this is more geared toward Apple users but nonetheless, this is an existing manifestation of the idea you can pay for and use today.
It's already super easy to charge for single articles. They just need to throw a stripe or paypal instant payment button on there.
The problem is there's no real money in the a la carte model. If a startup wants to be a middleman for online news, they'd have to be some sort of subscription aggregator.
>> The problem is there's no real money in the a la carte model.
True, but sometimes these things are true until they are false.
I'm not saying there is definitely or obviously a workable business model using pay-per-article... but I wouldn't write it off as impossible, or even very unlikely.
Theoretically, the financial fundamentals aren't too bad. Really good writers often struggle to reliably get $500 for an article. Say $1000 + editing is a more sustainable rate. Say an average ppv reader reads 3 article at a go @ 10c each...
If articles can get 10,000 paying (10c each) readers, it is, broadly, viable... at least at this unit level. To be actually good, the business model would have to crossfund (or somehow fund) harder journalism. Hard journalism costs.
Anyway, I'm not saying I have a solution. Just saying nothing seems improbable about ppv articles. Tens of thousands of readers willing to pay pennies to directly fund (and access) journalism on any given day. Doesn't seem like that big an ask.
This more or less exists already in https://scroll.com/ that charges a flat fee and distributes it to publishers based on your reading behaviour. In return, you get reduced adverts on sites that support it.
> Between the lines: The Atlantic's new majority ownership stake from Emerson Collective, the impact investment vehicle owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, has allowed the company to accelerate its growth in recent years, including a major staff increase and expansion that began in 2018.
"Emerson Collective is a social change organization that uses a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing, and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities."
Laurene Powell Jobs has ~$22 billion. She could pay the salaries of these 68 employees for the next 10 years if she felt like it without noticing a change in her bank account.
Obviously she is not obligated to do anything, but if employees of my "social change organization" that were hired under my watch, with my encouragement, were impacted by a possibly temporary economic downturn in the middle of a global pandemic and I could help them without sacrificing anything, I hope I would.
She does not have $22B in cash. You pay employees in cash. Impact investing is just as brutal as any other investment fund. Dollars can be deployed more impactfully elsewhere. The goal is investments that create long term structural change and subsidizing employees of a declining business doesn’t move them towards that goal.
The point is the business wasn't declining until she changed the mission.. In addition to her Apple wealth, she owns roughly 100 million shares of Disney. 68 staff cuts at $150k/year all-in cost mean she'll save roughly $10M/year.
So she could sell 0.08% of her shares in Disney at today's price and these people would be employed for another year to work on the mission that she / the collective chose.
I know she doesn't literally have $22 billion in a bank account, but she could obviously scrounge up enough cash to pay these people if she wanted to.
The Atlantic is not a "declining business". It was profitable for a long time before she bought it, it expanded because she wanted it to, and the decline in revenue is likely temporary. They aren't losing subscribers and they aren't in danger of failing anytime soon.
If she invested in The Atlantic to create long term change, and its subscriber base and reach is growing (which it is), then she shouldn't care about a short term decline in ad revenue. Dollars can certainly be deployed more profitably elsewhere, but you're not gonna accomplish any social change if you base your investments on quarterly profits.
People who have control over $22 billion have the ability to get a large sum of physical cash very quickly.
The problem is who gets to choose what is "more impactful". Maybe some of those staff were getting ready to shatter the world with an insane revelation that instigates "long-term structural change" and makes life better for everyone. Then Jobs would have invested her money improperly. But because she gets to almost unilaterally decide what happens under her purview, those former employees never get a chance.
The idea that someone worth $22B can't snap their fingers and have a few million dollars cash available is ridiculous. Do you think there are no buyers for Apple or Disney stock?
One plausible explanation is that management wants these employees out, so they're taking advantage of a once-in-a-decade opportunity to trim headcount without PR consequences.
I'd rather the world not turn into Youtube News coming out of some basement with no staff that actually goes out and investigates. Instead he is able to carve a bubble to share what he/she thinks as news.
Of course. It’s the same reason “think tanks” are established.
You could always argue it’s good to get people to think and bring workable ideas to life... but of course the employees at these think tanks know who pays their salaries and what the expectations are.
Do you think that an informed population is a net positive or a net negative? I personally think the former, and I had a pool of spare cash lying around I might try to put money towards that effort.
Several established, profitable businesses have been repurposed for social change.
ESPN, The Atlantic, etc.
As a conservative, I find it a little unfair. The institutions typically have built up a legacy of middle-of-the-road communications, then they are repurposed with a decidedly leftward tilt.
Still, The Atlantic provides enjoyable to read articles, even if I don't agree with everything they say. I'm not happy that they undergo this loss.
The “billions of dollars” these people have can’t be used, at scale, to pay the salaries of workers during the economic shutdown. Almost all of that wealth is paper money—the promise to receive a share of future profits from operating companies. If the economy is shut down and those companies aren’t making profits, that equity isn’t worth anything.
As noted in the Vice layoffs thread a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193140), these industry layoffs are a function of revenue pipelines, and it is 100% not related to the type of content or political leanings.
100% not related is probably too strong, but reports say they've broken readership records and have added ~90,000 subscribers since March. It seems much more plausible that the collapse of the events and ad businesses due to current economic conditions are the driver.
This sucks. The Atlantic was doing great reporting in the beginning of corona, pointing out how few tests were.being done. It was necessary work that reminded me how important real journalism is.
The Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg (now the editor-in-chief) laid the ideological groundwork for the US to invade Iraq, one of - if not the biggest crimes of the 21st century. [1] The Atlantic sold the Iraq War with reporting that relied heavily on war hawks, neocons in the Bush administration, and at times complete fabrications. It it is hard to shed a tear for an organization which helped create a conflict resulting in the deaths of 1.2 million Iraqis.
Their subscription model is strange—it’s $49 per year, which isn’t a lot, but it FEELS like a lot because there is no monthly option like most publications.
But events are a huge portion of business for pubs like The Atlantic. It is sad to see these cuts though because they are really putting out some of the most important thinking around this crisis right now, cutting stuff that digs beneath the surface and highlights the broader trends at play.
I fear the day when all the financially viable "news" is some YouTube channel with no investigative staff powering it, but caters to a niche that doesn't care about accuracy or integrity to sustain itself.
I don't know - I would argue that Scott Manley and Tim Dodd do a better job then any mainstream media on reporting on Space news, and the tech youtube community is better then almost anyone save maybe Ars Technica.
They host the Aspen Ideas festival which I'm guessing is often a big revenue driver. Many publications (the New Yorker for instance) have moved to hosting these events to diversify their revenue streams. Whoops.
A number of organizations that make a chunk of their operating income off events and have made them virtual still seem to be trying to collect possibly reduced but still hefty ticket prices. There's one event I was planning to attend in June that's now virtual and the $650 registration is a bar that I'm having a bit of trouble getting over.
And, yes, a number of magazines in recent years have added premium events to their revenue streams.
Readit News
"The 68 staff cuts are mostly attributable to the collapse of the company's events business."
Reporters aren't losing their jobs here. Events staff with no events to run are.
"sales, editorial and events staff are all impacted".
So not just event staff.
There will more than likely be events to run in the near future.
What if I could pay on a per-article basis? I wouldn't have a problem paying 50¢ or $1.00 for an article I was interested in. It's not practical for each publisher to set up micro-payments. But, if there were an intermediate agent that accepted and managed payments for individual random articles, the money could be aggregated and remitted in a lump sum to the publishers. Sort of like an old-fashioned news stand.
What the newspaper business needs is a middleman who will collect micro-payments from me and millions of others, aggregate the money, charge my credit card once a month, and pay each publication weekly or monthly for the collective readers who have selected articles.
The middleman could accept PayPal payments, or I could open an account with my credit card, and pay once a month for all the individual articles I have read.
There is a Website called Blendle that proposes to do this. However, only a subset of articles are available. Publishers are reserving the prime content for full subscribers, and leaving Blendle with the crumbs. That's not going to work.
When you subscribe to a publication, you have to make decision once. You think about the amount of money against all future potential articles you can read, and decide from there. When you're paying for EACH article, all of a sudden you have to make that decision with every click. Is this article REALLY worth 50 cents?
Not to mention, this incentivizes the totally wrong things. People say they hate clickbait, but the aggregators and social networks that now act as gatekeepers force that kind of behavior -- publishers of course only get paid when you click through to their article. And in this case, it's even more profound -- we're no longer talking about a few cents from display ads, but 50 cents to $1.
For what its worth, we're trying a different tack -- especially when it comes to local news: https://blog.nillium.com/what-can-napster-teach-local-news/
Also, in that system, "90% of readers were satisfied enough to let the author keep their dollar" would be a pretty strong signal of quality (especially so if the platform takes more than a 10% cut: this is one of the rare cases where a higher cut to the middleman might actually result in a better product).
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That was about 50 cents a day.
If the system allows for it, I would probably commit to buying twitter access on a daily basis as I brush my teeth.
worthwhile content gets surfaced on aggregators like hn, reddit, via recommendation, etc. and there has to be some "sampler".
this would also motivate defense against clickbait, e.g. reputation management and visibility systems for authors and publishers.
If I submit a micropayment for an article that turns out to be low effort clickbait, my disappointment will be magnified by the fact that I lost money. I would also expect my satisfaction to be magnified for high quality content. Consequently, my trust in a brand will decrement or increment accordingly. A micropayment service could even track my reactions and maintain a personalized reputation score for a publisher/brand.
Obviously, this happens now, but I don't personally have as visceral as a reaction to losing the few seconds of time as I would to losing money. Putting even a small amount of money on the line clarifies the cost of the transaction.
Long term subscriptions, on the other hand, give the publisher more wiggle room to produce lazy, low effort content. Loss of brand image needs to build up to a critical threshold that motivates me to cancel the subscription.
Here I am, a successful content bundler. Thousands of people pay me a measly sum to see the content I push at them.
A whole bunch of people are going to come to me, with stacks full of cash, saying, Man, I sure would like to show my content to your subscribers. I calculated your profits, 100k annually. I got $1,000,000 in this check. Does that interest you?
The numbers are made up, but with adtech money being real, it won't be long before the content bundlers buckle and become 'ad-supported' or something like that.
US consumer laws don't require good, hassle free ways to end subscriptions and the main reason I haven't subscribed to any is the utter lack of desire to spend hours hashing out a cancellation with a call center employee.
Pressreader is also pretty good, but web-based. https://www.pressreader.com/
The Toronto Public Library even offers free subscriptions to it with a library card—so I'd check into your local library.
To reduce it being a pure click-bait pool, we can also add some sort of tipping model, wherein part of my money is distributed according to like/rating I have given. So a 5* investigative piece will get more money.
Been tried. Many times. By numerous entities, and some media orgs themselves. It doesn't really work. The issue is people.
Also, I think pay per article is doomed to failure, the amount of friction it adds would shrink the market by too much. It needs to be a fixed sub with all-you-can-read a la Spotify, with your subscription fee being split between the orgs you actually read.
It seems like it'd need to be a JV between news orgs, and not a third party. No sane news org with any leverage would hand their customer relationships over to a third party over which they have little control.
Also, say this middleman company does exist and is adopted by a large portion of the publishers out there. How would it benefit them to pass along the majority of that $1 per article to publishers? My hunch is that publishers would be the ones that end up getting 'crumbs' and the middleman would keep the bulk.
Publishers have been burned over the years by relying on other companies and middlemen for traffic and revenue (look at the effect Facebook has had on most news organizations, and not in a good way). Putting all their chips in one basket with a company like this would be a non-starter for most companies. They don't want to get burned again.
Interestingly enough, NYT now gets 2 times the money from subscription as it gets from advertising. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...
At some point it becomes more profitable to just use subscriptions.
I really like Patreon for supporting YouTube content. I think my YouTube subscription is supposed to fund that too, but there are 5ish that I add in Patreon. The down side is that the Patreon-only content is kind of annoying to find, so mostly I just use Patreon to support the content they make on YouTube.
Also it was not profitable; most people read a few articles a month, netting them €1 or €2.
Now they only have a €10 a month subscription, giving unlimited access to a “selection of the best articles”.
I guess it’s better to have 5 customers paying you €10 every month, than 20 customers who might give you €1 or €2.
Also, no middleman needed, you can host your own server to make the invoices and accept payments using BTCPay Server https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver.
If you are selling directly to the readers, you potentially have to deal with sales tax or VAT in every jurisdiction in which you have a paying reader.
Many jurisdictions do have thresholds that you have to cross before they want you to collect tax, but those are often of the form ">= N transactions OR >= $S sales". N = 100 or 200 is pretty common for US states. It would be pretty easy to get a situation where you have enough transactions to have to collect, file, and remit tax, but not enough revenue from those to cover the costs of doing so.
Stick a middleman in there and you can avoid all that.
Arrange things so that all your sales are to the middleman who then resells to the readers, and then you only have to worry about whether or not your sales to the middleman are subject to sales tax or VAT in wherever the middleman is located. Any sales tax or VAT in the reader's jurisdictions will be on their purchases from the middleman, and dealing with them is the middleman's problem.
At the middleman level, the tax problem is much much much less bothersome. That's because the middleman can be dealing with other publishers besides you. The middleman might even be selling things that have nothing to do with news or magazines. That gets the middleman's revenue up enough in each jurisdiction that the costs of dealing with taxes there is just a tiny fraction of revenue.
You would probably fall into the trap of picking and choosing (and paying for) the articles that say what you want, and so they would pander, and here we are.
We need people to carefully choose a lower number of sources, that they believe are of high quality and who they will try to hold to that standard, and then read their articles even when they don't pander.
The problem is there's no real money in the a la carte model. If a startup wants to be a middleman for online news, they'd have to be some sort of subscription aggregator.
True, but sometimes these things are true until they are false.
I'm not saying there is definitely or obviously a workable business model using pay-per-article... but I wouldn't write it off as impossible, or even very unlikely.
Theoretically, the financial fundamentals aren't too bad. Really good writers often struggle to reliably get $500 for an article. Say $1000 + editing is a more sustainable rate. Say an average ppv reader reads 3 article at a go @ 10c each...
If articles can get 10,000 paying (10c each) readers, it is, broadly, viable... at least at this unit level. To be actually good, the business model would have to crossfund (or somehow fund) harder journalism. Hard journalism costs.
Anyway, I'm not saying I have a solution. Just saying nothing seems improbable about ppv articles. Tens of thousands of readers willing to pay pennies to directly fund (and access) journalism on any given day. Doesn't seem like that big an ask.
https://piszek.com/2020/05/19/micropayments/
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"Emerson Collective is a social change organization that uses a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing, and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities."
- https://www.emersoncollective.com/about-us/
Laurene Powell Jobs has ~$22 billion. She could pay the salaries of these 68 employees for the next 10 years if she felt like it without noticing a change in her bank account.
Obviously she is not obligated to do anything, but if employees of my "social change organization" that were hired under my watch, with my encouragement, were impacted by a possibly temporary economic downturn in the middle of a global pandemic and I could help them without sacrificing anything, I hope I would.
So she could sell 0.08% of her shares in Disney at today's price and these people would be employed for another year to work on the mission that she / the collective chose.
The Atlantic is not a "declining business". It was profitable for a long time before she bought it, it expanded because she wanted it to, and the decline in revenue is likely temporary. They aren't losing subscribers and they aren't in danger of failing anytime soon.
If she invested in The Atlantic to create long term change, and its subscriber base and reach is growing (which it is), then she shouldn't care about a short term decline in ad revenue. Dollars can certainly be deployed more profitably elsewhere, but you're not gonna accomplish any social change if you base your investments on quarterly profits.
The problem is who gets to choose what is "more impactful". Maybe some of those staff were getting ready to shatter the world with an insane revelation that instigates "long-term structural change" and makes life better for everyone. Then Jobs would have invested her money improperly. But because she gets to almost unilaterally decide what happens under her purview, those former employees never get a chance.
The idea that someone worth $22B can't snap their fingers and have a few million dollars cash available is ridiculous. Do you think there are no buyers for Apple or Disney stock?
This lockdown has devastated media advertising across the board. Events require in-person experiences which are just not possible in the near-term.
What “impact” could one expect to have by investing in a media organization, other than pushing an agenda?
I'd rather the world not turn into Youtube News coming out of some basement with no staff that actually goes out and investigates. Instead he is able to carve a bubble to share what he/she thinks as news.
You could always argue it’s good to get people to think and bring workable ideas to life... but of course the employees at these think tanks know who pays their salaries and what the expectations are.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
ESPN, The Atlantic, etc.
As a conservative, I find it a little unfair. The institutions typically have built up a legacy of middle-of-the-road communications, then they are repurposed with a decidedly leftward tilt.
Still, The Atlantic provides enjoyable to read articles, even if I don't agree with everything they say. I'm not happy that they undergo this loss.
Dead Comment
Don't think you can make a statement like "100% not related".
That's likely true. Would be interesting to see ad revenue figures for a good cross section of the industry.
Dead Comment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Goldberg#Views_on_Iraq
But events are a huge portion of business for pubs like The Atlantic. It is sad to see these cuts though because they are really putting out some of the most important thinking around this crisis right now, cutting stuff that digs beneath the surface and highlights the broader trends at play.
I fear the day when all the financially viable "news" is some YouTube channel with no investigative staff powering it, but caters to a niche that doesn't care about accuracy or integrity to sustain itself.
There are some worthwhile youtubers, but the vast majority create useless content to keep you watching.
>Scott Manley and Tim Dodd
Space is very very niche. But The Economist and Nature have provide some pretty good space content in recent memory.
And, yes, a number of magazines in recent years have added premium events to their revenue streams.
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