Publishers, you have a product problem. Some more notes on my experiment of reading only news I pay for:
- Big news is easy to find. When I picked this week to change up my media diet, I knew it was going to be a heavy news week. I had thought that relying on fewer sources might make me feel less informed. But the truth is that it’s a whole lot easier to follow big news stories because largely everyone is covering the same stuff. And, in fact, in the case of yesterday’s Kavanaugh hearing, all I really needed to follow the news was a video stream. (I did find myself on Twitter a bunch, but that was for the live commentary — always Twitter’s strongest suit, imho — not really to find out any new information.) If I felt like I wasn’t seeing anything, it was the many, many takes that big breaking news events will spawn and there are far too many takes, hot or not.
- RSS to the rescue! After day 2, it was clear I needed a better way of reading the news than directly on publisher websites or apps. Using a Feedly account to follow just the outlets I subscribe to has been fantastic. It’s exactly the all-in-one experience I was looking for. Not only do I have that place to go when I’m looking for something to read for the 15 minutes while I’m eating lunch, I also feel like I am reading the publications I pay for far more deeply than if I went to them directly because of how bad they are at showing me the breadth of what they publish.
- I am in login hell. I am so so sick of entering passwords! If not for the auto-fill features on my phone and in my browsers, I would have abandoned this experiment a couple of days ago. I can’t really describe how much friction pay-walled publications create for their paying customers to get what they paid for. I am constantly entering my account credentials and having to click through warnings about reaching metered paywall limits. It’s an atrocious system, one which truly seems to be built more for people who read for free rather than the ones who pay. As long as this is the case, the future of journalism will not be paid.