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What newspapers do you support? What are the criteria you use to judge whether they're worthy of your support?
I'm sold on the idea of supporting good journalism in some way but it's less clear to me what newspapers qualify. I'm curious to hear what other folks here use / monetarily support.
Before spending any money, I suggest pulling some news outlets into an RSS feed and reading some articles each morning at breakfast. It should become clear which outlets produce content you are actually interested in consuming pretty quickly.
I don't recommend supporting any news outlets whose published material you won't actually read.
Edit: Personally, I have moved away from supporting newspapers and instead focus on small niche outlets, and even individuals. I prefer to be able to make an educated guess as to what my support goes to, because I can see the entire scope of operations.
I'll have to quote myself on this:
That is to say, I don't really support any newspaper right now. I recently looked into getting a subscription to a national print newspaper. It was only on Sundays, but the price was prohibitive. In my old neighborhood, there were many newsstands. Where I am now, I've yet to find a single one. And even if I find one, it'll probably only carry the local paper, which doesn't interest me in the slightest. If I wanted to support a digital newspaper, I'd probably choose El País. I really like their coverage of world news.
My grocery store carries most national papers as well as the local.
But I like my digital access. It’s often cheaper and you can guiltlessly block their ads if they don’t remove them with your subscription (double-paying is ridiculous). I can understand not wanting the news to take up all of your attention, to which I’d suggest disabling notifications or not downloading the apps at all.
But the reason I was responding wasn’t to change your mind on newspapers, rather, this comment reminded me of a publication that I’d heard of from here: The Correspondent, an attempt to bring De Correpondente to America. It was like a more relaxed New Yorker. I really loved their articles, but unfortunately their business model didn’t seem to work in the U.S., and was shut down last year. I’ve considered supporting the Dutch original, but I’m not sure how well I trust Translate for full articles.
I’m subscribed to a few publications.
These are the main three, they’ve all had major investigations, and any breaking news will be covered in detail from them:
This is my most used subscription, I couldn’t go without it. They have the highest output and quality newsletters that don’t feel like I’m being spammed. NYT Games and Cooking are great bonuses, and I try to get my use out of those too.
I was hesitant to subscribe after Bezos bought them out, but it doesn’t appear to me that that’s had much of an effect on what they report. They’ve frequently got special events, though I don’t watch in as often as I’d like.
I wanted a wider perspective that I didn’t feel I was getting with “liberal” outlets and WSJ seemed to fill that spot without being a conspiracy mill. (Any respectable conservative outlets anyone would recommend?)
And here are some others:
This has a lot of interesting, well-written articles and opinions. I don’t rely on them for breaking news, but if I want to read something thought-provoking, I’ll turn to them.
This one is a recent addition. I will probably drop it after the pandemic is over. I’ve appreciated their coverage of the coronavirus and the statistic dashboards (NYT is pretty good with these too).
I got these for some local coverage, they keep me better informed on the state politics. I definitely recommend finding a good local publication to support.
I’ve also been considering subscribing to Insider since their rebrand. They seem to be taking a more serious shift, and I appreciate that. I’m going to wait and see what more they break before joining, but they’re on my watchlist.
Let me also plug Axios. Although they don’t have a premium subscription (yet?), they often cover stories right as they break without a paywall. They also have local branches.
Jonah Goldberg’s The Dispatch. Has several contributors besides him, including David French. Formatted as a Substack, with several different newsletters/articles.
So this comment is not a complete hijack, I pay for wapo and the economist espresso.
But I’ll ask here because readers of this post cate about news publishing.
Would it not be profitable to return to having a local
Advertising office, even (especially?) for online presences? If a publication sold ad space itself, directly to advertisers, and served the ads from their own cdn, no adblocker could detect it. And the ads might be more
Interesting and relevant. At least to me, because pretty much the only advertising content that leads me to consumption is for events.
How is Espresso? I’ve wanted to add The Economist to my list, but it’s always seemed a bit pricey.
That wouldn't really change anything, since adblockers include filter lists with domain specific element blocking to cover cases where ads are served from the same domain. E.g. uBlock Origin's default filter list contains tens of thousand of domain specific entries: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/filters.txt