My NYTimes subscription is ending next month and I am looking for another news subscription. What news publication is it worthwhile to subscribe to? I’ve read horror stories about dark patterns in cancellation so that should also factor in.
I’m not sure if anyone noticed but NYTimes’ quality has gone downhill for the past 2-3 years and why is there no dark mode on the app? WSJ looks good but there are issues with cancellation.
Edit: I am from Southeast Asia and got lots of family and relatives in the USA, so the obvious interest in Western and EU culture and politics.
I also decided I would never buy another subscription to a news site that also has advertising. In my perception, ads seem to be predictive of low quality journalism.
Most recently I've had an Economist subscription. I like them. They don't make canceling as easy as subscribing, and I do hold that against them, though they aren't as terrible as NYT.
But honestly, I let that subscription lapse and I don't buy any news right now. I actively avoid it, in fact. My sanity and happiness needed a break from the drip-drip-drip of negative stressful world events that I have exactly zero control over.
I had to call someone (offshore) who tried to retain me with months free, and then started trying to push emails (???) which I explicitly said no to... and then they turned them all on anyway when I cancelled. I don't have a way to turn them off so they go straight to spam now ("unsubscribe" doesn't work, and I don't care enough to escalate any further)
Never subscribing for news again - they're killing themselves at this point.
Here's the thing about The Economist: everything they do that is not related to journalism is a complete shitshow. Subscriptions, phone app, spamming, just awful.
I used to be engaged in politics (volunteering at elections, doing administrative parliamentary work, community boards, and having opinions about matters). Becoming apolitical has removed a burden in my life. I don't watch horror movies, and I don't watch the news. I don't subscribe to anxiety and violence, and I just accept and cherish that there is peace in my area of the world.
I followed the Ukraine war out of a sense of necessity; I have friends who went to the border to help refugees cross and prevent human trafficking. If you're not doing something like that, I'm not sure that the combined violence and pain in the world is something we, on average as individuals of our species, are well-equipped to handle.
Perhaps the future of democracy is made of voters who subscribe to institutions of intellectual or moral credibility that tell people directly how to vote (churches, policy groups) rather than a firehose of content where you make up your own mind on how to vote. It sounds more anti-intellectual than it is, but many people are already cognitively and emotionally maxed out.
I am now subscribed via the Google Play store, which means the NYT loses a big chunk of the money, all so I can be guaranteed an easy cancellation button.
There was no way in hell I was going to bother with a call to the newspaper. They'd be confused for the first half of the conversation, then even if they figured it out, they'd spend the second half trying to sell me a subscription, like I wasn't already getting it for free.
My mother eventually divorced him and one day I was visiting and she pointed out that Playboy was still being delivered and that she certainly didn’t have any interest in it. That was 8 years after they were first being sent. Got on the phone and thankfully the unsubscribe process was easy.
The reality is you do NOT need the day-to-day news, anything that's important will still be talked about in a month.
But California baby. You can hate us. But we lead the USA into a better world.
It has to be one of the stupidest features I’ve ever written, but sadly it’s where we are today with the average news website.
Another really stupid feature is simply building a news website that doesn’t blast you in the face with 10Mb of ads. Legible News has a 100 score on Google Page Speed insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flegiblene.... It FULLY loads in about 1s on mobile and desktop.
Compare that to NYTimes that takes about 10s to fully load: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytim.... Pretty much any news website you plug in there will get a score of 25, take 10s to load, and hardcore spy on you. Thanks advertisements!
I wrote more about the many problems of traditional news websites at https://legiblenews.com/about.
Check it out at https://legiblenews.com/ — daily news is free, there’s no third party scripts or tracking, and if you like it the cost is $10/year at https://legiblenews.com/plus (I’m probably going to raise prices soon by a few bucks)
I love The Economist, and their podcasts. I've never had to unsubscribe because I just pre-pay for 1-year subscription offers that I find on Slickdeals.
Their support people could just not even comprehend WHAT I was even talking about - they kept circling back to "pop-up ads" and if I had tried a pop-up blocking extension. It was a never ending circle of confusion :-D
Is this even an option they offer or just one you wished existed?
Then there was a big discount, I bought it again, wasn't reading it again, so cancelled it recently again...
and this time there was actually a button in the UI to do it in a few seconds. Might be related to me being in the EU though.
That may not be enough of an incentive to overcome the immediate benefit, but it's not nothing.
The podcast, Page 94, is also excellent [2] and is sparsely updated, but they do good things when it is. For an example of the "WTFBBQ" stories they cover, have a look at "The Snooty Fox" episode [3], which covers the rather horrid tale of a pub landlord who pissed off a council member by accidentally overcharging her, and ended up punitively investigated by the food standards people, bankrupted and quite literally imprisoned for several years. He finally secured justice after more than 20 years when the council authority ceased to exist (and its successor apologised hugely and unreservedly – his convictions were quashed and later counter-sued for £14m [4]).
One other thing – cancelling the subscription is trivial.
[1] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/ [2] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast [3] https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/68 [4] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1547675/pub-landlord-the-s...
This article has single handedly ignited my interest in arts and paintings. This is just an example but in general what I find great about NYT is the way they do storytelling with mixture of interactive visualization and text-based news and facts.
https://github.com/nytimes
I think the BBC does something similar as well:
https://github.com/bbc/
IMO the NYT really shines with their arts/culture sections! Makes the subscription worth it for me personally.
I do feel like their politics/opinion sections have gone downhill.
But every now and then they do a long-form article which convinces me to re-subscribe for a year. This one was incredible: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/world/asia/the-jungle-pri...
I already subscribe to NYT and this makes me feel good about it.
- When they cover something I’m knowledgeable about, they get the facts right, so I trust them in other areas
- App lets me listen to the weekly edition read by humans
- Only comes out weekly (so no daily bullshit treadmill, and they have time to get things right)
- Genuinely useful and interesting info. Since I switched from NYT to the Economist it’s like I have supernatural powers to see into the future; nothing surprises me anymore. Recent issues where I knew what was coming months to weeks before others: COVID, post-COVID inflation, Ukraine
I listened to the podcasts for months before paying to subscribe, and the podcasts (The Intelligence and Economist Asks are favorites) cover some of the content of the weekly edition. If you like the podcasts, you’ll love the genuine article.
The Guardian is “intelligent” but is way too blatantly leftist, to get any sort of balanced information.
Both FT and Economist are very good at not including any fluff, in the language they use and in the content itself.
I rate it for world affairs and it is a good news source. I just think it gets undue levels of praise.
Really, the big difference between The Economist and other popular "biased" publications is that The Economist has avoided becoming a party mouthpiece. Yes, it's certainly a political publication, but they arrive at that position without having fallen prey to the usual motivated reasoning. I credit this unusual distinction to the international nature of their operation and the focusing effect granted by virtue of hanging everything on a single overarching topic.
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I've also had WP and NYT subscriptions, and I think these are fine choices. One thing, though: I found it quite difficult to cancel my NYT subscription. Subscriptions are like hash functions -- easy in one direction and hard in the other.
Unfortunately, over the past few years, they stopped doing journalism and are just trying to output the same misleading clickbait as everyone else, interspersed with ideology-driven, fact-free propaganda pieces.
I really, really respect that they make their articles available for free though, so I still feel compelled to pay them, it’s just that I don’t want to read their articles any more.
As far as quality of news, I'd echo the sentiment others have given that Wall Street Journal's factual reporting is stellar, but their opinion and editorial pieces leave a lot to be desired. I'd say the same about The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
The Atlantic is decent for thoughtful editorials as can be The New Yorker, but honestly, you're just going to run into some sensationalism and knee-jerk, politically-motivated slant no matter what editorial/opinion sources you choose, so caveat emptor.
It also bombarde me with celebrity gossip I don’t care about. I’ve started hitting the button to hide certain topics, but I’m always hesitant. I don’t need to know every time Will Smith posts a tweet, but if he slaps Chris Rock in the middle of an award show, I’d be interested in that. Apple News seems to have trouble surfacing just the big stuff I might care about.
That being said, I do like they it gives me access to the WSJ.