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Post by 10goldbees on May 18, 2020 23:18:21 GMT -5
Hey it's worth noting that free journalism isn't completely out of the question. Wealth hoarding media owners, private equity dipshits, and tech platforms diverting traffic from actual journalism outlets are to blame for much of the industry instability. If we had limits on CEO pay, congressional enforcement on antitrust laws, free college, universal healthcare, etc. it's completely likely that ad sales alone could keep a media outlet in business.
Until then, yea, we gotta pay for some journalism here and there.
i've paid for the NYT for years. hate to say i'm thinking of cancelling because of the recent price jump, and i find myself more often at Vox for my news/explainers, which I recently starting doing a monthly love offering to. also subscribe to the New Yorker because it makes me look smart. i also do monthly love offerings for a few podcasts i love.
ironically copied and pasted below for those who don't subscribe, but the gist is for a competent authoritarian this would be the perfect opportunity to de-democratize the country and consolidate power, as Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done in Hungary, but Trump didn't do any of that shit because he just wants to play golf and yell at people.
For the last four years two Western political figures have loomed particularly large in the imaginations of anxious liberals. The first is Donald Trump, notionally the West’s most powerful populist simply by virtue of the office that he occupies. The second is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, probably the West’s most effective populist in terms of the powers he’s consolidated, the opponents he’s routed and the influence he’s claimed over his nation’s political life.
There are good reasons to consider Trump and Orban as parallel figures. They have similar political bases, similar enemies and similar support from the “nationalist international” that has rallied online support for populists the world over. Both are sharp critics of international institutions and liberal politesse, both have cronyist tendencies and insalubrious associations and both have benefited immensely from the failures of the genteel center, the respectable elite.
But there has always been an essential difference between the two men, palpable from the first days of Trump’s administration but thrown into sharp relief by the crisis of the last few months.
Orban is not exactly the autocrat of liberal caricature, but he is a politician profoundly interested in political power and its uses, and he has consolidated enough power for his circle and his party that the liberal alarm around his rule is understandable.
Whereas real political authority, the power to rule and not just to survive, is something that Donald Trump conspicuously does not seem to want.
Consider their differing responses to the coronavirus. In Hungary, its arrival prompted a swift push for a declaration of emergency, passed by a supermajority in Hungary’s Parliament, that gave the prime minister extraordinary powers for the duration of the crisis — and left that duration open-ended, a state of exception without a formal end.
What this meant was instantly disputed: Orban’s critics charged that Hungary had crossed the Rubicon into dictatorship; the European Union hemmed and hedged; Orban himself has let be known that he may return the powers to the legislature this month and give “everyone a chance to apologize to Hungary for the unfair charges.” (Hungary, like most of Eastern Europe, has successfully contained the coronavirus for now.)
But one need not resolve this argument and decide whether Orban is closer to a Vladimir Putin or a Charles de Gaulle to recognize that he was behaving the way aggressive leaders generally behave in times of crisis — seeking more authority, more space to act against the danger — and then to note the stark contrast with the Trump White House’s response to the same challenge.
The appearance of Covid-19 afforded roughly the same opportunity to Trump that it did to Hungary’s leader: Here was a foreign threat, an invisible enemy that required a robust government response, a danger that arguably vindicated certain nationalist and populist ideas, a situation in which the normal rules of politics could be suspended for public safety’s sake.
For good or ill, in the past such crises have generally led to surges of presidential popularity and consolidations of presidential power, under Democrats and Republicans alike. And the idea that such an emergency would come along during Trump’s administration was exactly the scenario that people alarmed by his ascent most feared — a case of History granting a president temperamentally inclined to authoritarianism a genuine state of exception in which to enact his fantasies of one-man rule.
But Trump didn’t want the gift. It’s not just that our president was too ineffective to consolidate power, that any potential authoritarianism was undermined by his administration’s incompetence. Incompetent he surely is, but in areas that involve his self-preservation (like the firing of inconvenient inspectors general) he still finds a way to wield his powers even when norms stand in his way.
But once you leave the sphere of petty corruption for the sphere of policymaking, Trump clearly lacks both the facility and the interest level required to find opportunity in crisis. In this case, confronted with the same basic facts as Orban, he showed no sense of the pandemic as anything save an inconvenience to be ignored, a problem to be wished away, an impediment to his lifestyle of golf and tweets and occasional stream-of-consciousness stemwinders. And when reality made ignoring it impossible, his only genuinely political impulse — the only impulse that related to real power and its uses — was to push the crucial forms of responsibility down a level, to the nation’s governors, and wash his presidential hands.
In this the coronavirus has clarified, once and for all, the distinctiveness of Trump’s demagogy. Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power, but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention. Which is why, tellingly, his most important virus-related power grab to date has been the airtime grab of his daily news conferences — a temporary coup against the cable television schedule, a ruthless imposition (at least until the reviews turned bad) of presidential reality TV.
In the arguments over the true nature of Trump’s presidency, this column has long emphasized the fundamentally ridiculous elements of Trumpism — against my fervently anti-Trump friends, who have cast the president as a Mussolini in the making, and my cautiously pro-Trump friends, who have portrayed him as a man who understands something about hardball politics that more decent Mitt Romney-style Republicans did not.
There is obviously some truth to both their emphases: Trump does have authoritarian instincts, and he does have an intuitive grasp of certain crucial dynamics of American politics that his party’s establishment long lacked. And in a different leader these qualities could lead to dangerous ambition, ruthless effectiveness or both — with Viktor Orban as a case study however you ultimately judge him.
But in Trump both qualities are swamped by the far more important aspects of his character — a chancer’s fear of claiming any power that might lead to responsibility and someday blame, a showman’s preference for performance over rule, a media addict’s preference for bluster over deeds.
So while both his critics and his allies imagined him, in different ways, as an American Orban — a subverter of democracy or a tough guy for tough times — the great crisis of his presidency has revealed the vast gulf that separates him not only from Hungary’s leader but from almost every statesman ever considered uniquely dangerous or uniquely skilled.
In the fourth year of this presidency the black comedy has finally given way to tragedy. But not because Trump suddenly discovered how to use his authority for dictatorial or democracy-defying purpose. Rather, because in this dark spring America needed a president capable of exercising power and found that it had only a television star, a shirker and a clown.
i've paid for the NYT for years. hate to say i'm thinking of cancelling because of the recent price jump
How much was the jump? At the risk of being a terrible person who doesn’t pay what her news is worth, I’ll suggest telling them you’re going to cancel because it’s too expensive. I was doing the coooking, digital subscription, and crossword separately. I never use the cooking and only sometimes read the articles, so I told them I wanted to cancel the cooking and subscription and just keep the crossword. They offered me all access (which includes all three) for a year at $10 a month. After the year was up, I again said I was going to cancel and they gave me the same price for another year.
i've paid for the NYT for years. hate to say i'm thinking of cancelling because of the recent price jump
How much was the jump? At the risk of being a terrible person who doesn’t pay what her news is worth, I’ll suggest telling them you’re going to cancel because it’s too expensive. I was doing the coooking, digital subscription, and crossword separately. I never use the cooking and only sometimes read the articles, so I told them I wanted to cancel the cooking and subscription and just keep the crossword. They offered me all access (which includes all three) for a year at $10 a month. After the year was up, I again said I was going to cancel and they gave me the same price for another year.
increase of $8/month ($20 -> $28). Thanks for the tip, when I call to cancel maybe I can negotiate something.
Jane Roe Said She Was Paid To Become An Anti-Abortion Crusader Norma McCorvey, the woman known as Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, made the shocking confession in an upcoming documentary about her life.
Post by 10goldbees on May 19, 2020 21:10:28 GMT -5
If you are in the mood to pay for some journalism might I recommend the LA Times? They do some excellent reporting but they’re in serious danger of slashing a huge portion of the newsroom. First month is a dollar then $8/month after that.
If you are in the mood to pay for some journalism might I recommend the LA Times? They do some excellent reporting but they’re in serious danger of slashing a huge portion of the newsroom. First month is a dollar then $8/month after that.
And the only reason they haven't already is because of the paper's union.
The fact that the Los Angeles Times has a union is nothing short of a miracle.
But I also cosign the LAT suggestion. Been a subscriber for a few years now.
This is why I didn't bother saying anything before.. NYT especially has had a bad time with identifying their own biases. You can say it isn't their job to, but in the climate of information we live in - it's incredibly relevant to people's willingness to purchase journalism right now. I think it's relevant to talk about this as a distribution of information issue and not just, "THIS IS WHAT MAKES JOURNALISM WORK" argument. Is Slack correct that the model of up front paying for journalism is a better business model, yes? Is it stupid to realize that the distribution of said materials isn't just by what the market will bear. If the market doesn't see your work, you aren't getting anywhere and will collapse too.
We are living in a new age, we don't have the answers, and greed from the top-down has been rampant and left most outlets to be bought out by larger corporations or struggling to make ends meet. Telling them to take a stark model of pay only, only works when they can lose money for a couple years without return or attention. Which may lead them to not get ad revenue and honestly the market isn't very open to new media sources. Which leads us to only buying into NYT, LAT, WaPo.. which a lot of us have issues with and don't really want to drop a monthly subscription for.
I mean shit, I'm loaded up with almost 100/mos in monthly subscription services for work related stuff that I don't even use every month. For some people dropping another 10-20 each month on an outlet is just not cognitively feasible. Don't call people stupid for that. It's hard out here.
This is why I didn't bother saying anything before.. NYT especially has had a bad time with identifying their own biases. You can say it isn't their job to, but in the climate of information we live in - it's incredibly relevant to people's willingness to purchase journalism right now. I think it's relevant to talk about this as a distribution of information issue and not just, "THIS IS WHAT MAKES JOURNALISM WORK" argument. Is Slack correct that the model of up front paying for journalism is a better business model, yes? Is it stupid to realize that the distribution of said materials isn't just by what the market will bear. If the market doesn't see your work, you aren't getting anywhere and will collapse too.
We are living in a new age, we don't have the answers, and greed from the top-down has been rampant and left most outlets to be bought out by larger corporations or struggling to make ends meet. Telling them to take a stark model of pay only, only works when they can lose money for a couple years without return or attention. Which may lead them to not get ad revenue and honestly the market isn't very open to new media sources. Which leads us to only buying into NYT, LAT, WaPo.. which a lot of us have issues with and don't really want to drop a monthly subscription for.
I mean shit, I'm loaded up with almost 100/mos in monthly subscription services for work related stuff that I don't even use every month. For some people dropping another 10-20 each month on an outlet is just not cognitively feasible. Don't call people stupid for that. It's hard out here.
That has nothing to do with what I talked about?
I called Todd stupid because *I've worked on this shit.* My internship at the Kansas City Star literally revolved around the question "how do we get people to sub to the paper?"
What he was trying to do is akin to me telling Druid how pharmacies work because I take prescription drugs.
I never said every paper should go behind a paywall. That ship, for the most part, has sailed.
What we can do is get Google et al. to kick back some ad revenue...like I already posted.
This is why I didn't bother saying anything before.. NYT especially has had a bad time with identifying their own biases. You can say it isn't their job to, but in the climate of information we live in - it's incredibly relevant to people's willingness to purchase journalism right now. I think it's relevant to talk about this as a distribution of information issue and not just, "THIS IS WHAT MAKES JOURNALISM WORK" argument. Is Slack correct that the model of up front paying for journalism is a better business model, yes? Is it stupid to realize that the distribution of said materials isn't just by what the market will bear. If the market doesn't see your work, you aren't getting anywhere and will collapse too.
We are living in a new age, we don't have the answers, and greed from the top-down has been rampant and left most outlets to be bought out by larger corporations or struggling to make ends meet. Telling them to take a stark model of pay only, only works when they can lose money for a couple years without return or attention. Which may lead them to not get ad revenue and honestly the market isn't very open to new media sources. Which leads us to only buying into NYT, LAT, WaPo.. which a lot of us have issues with and don't really want to drop a monthly subscription for.
I mean shit, I'm loaded up with almost 100/mos in monthly subscription services for work related stuff that I don't even use every month. For some people dropping another 10-20 each month on an outlet is just not cognitively feasible. Don't call people stupid for that. It's hard out here.
That has nothing to do with what I talked about?
I called Todd stupid because *I've worked on this shit.* My internship at the Kansas City Star literally revolved around the question "how do we get people to sub to the paper?"
What he was trying to do is akin to me telling Druid how pharmacies work because I take prescription drugs.
I never said every paper should go behind a paywall. That ship, for the most part, has sailed.
What we can do is get Google et al. to kick back some ad revenue...like I already posted.
Quit cherry picking.
Quit telling me I'm cherry picking. I don't agree with you. Period. stop being an asshole
I called Todd stupid because *I've worked on this shit.* My internship at the Kansas City Star literally revolved around the question "how do we get people to sub to the paper?"
What he was trying to do is akin to me telling Druid how pharmacies work because I take prescription drugs.
I never said every paper should go behind a paywall. That ship, for the most part, has sailed.
What we can do is get Google et al. to kick back some ad revenue...like I already posted.
Quit cherry picking.
Quit telling me I'm cherry picking. I don't agree with you. Period. stop being an asshole
You are tho
Strict pay walls are infeasible at this point. I never said anything to the contrary.
actually @fortyfive33 now I literally agreed with you on the premise that up front paying for journalism is the best means, but distribution is not as easy as you calling someone an idiot for not agreeing with you. So call me an asshole for calling you an asshole. I'm here for it.
What a goddamn joke. The Democrats are truly fucking useless.
It's like the primary as a whole. So many qualified candidates and we end up with one where the best you can say is, "Well, it's not the absolute worst choice that could be made."