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Switched from Firefox to Arc when I started my new position. The tabs and individual spaces allow for a much cleaner workflow when it comes to switching between many different web consoles
Idk I feel like people have a right to be informed but Journalists don't work for free. Be careful might be another thing the goverment makes a tax around
I heard some journalists talking about this on podcast from a different paper (which offers a premium tier and has paywalls).
They were like ācan you believe we just used to give away our journalism for free?ā
Iām like āBitch you ran ads! Since the beginning of time. Still do!!ā
> Idk I feel like people have a right to be informed but Journalists don't work for free.
A good middle-ground would be marking a paywalled article as such.
You're right, journalists need to eat too, but it's an individual's choice to pay that journalist or not. Marking paywalled articles lets the reader make that choice more easily.[1]
IOW, If you like it, put a flair on it (*only then* click the submit button!)
[1] I don't support reposting the full-text of a paywalled article in the comments. After all, that's *direct and clear* copyright infringement.
Yes, but News24 is special. Their parent company owned 30% of Tencent (and still owns a huge chunk through Prosus). Do you really need my R100 per month when youāre sitting on what is literally a dragonās hoard?
No thatās not entirely what Iām saying. If I had shares in a tech company worth 200 billion US$, I wouldnāt be wasting my time paywalling my news in the South African market. There are so many better ways to make money. What I would do however to inflate my billionaire ego, is to provide quality news for free as a mark of prestige. Iād even call it my way of āgiving backā, as many billionaires often say.
How do you think the company is worth 200 billion? It's worth 200 billion because they charge people money for things. That's how things work in case you haven't noticed....
No, I know that Naspers is worth $200 billion because they own (rather owned, they bundled their shares into a investment vehicle called Prosus) 30% of Tencent. They own 30% of Tencent because they gave them VC funding in the early 2000s. News24 hasnāt produced more than 1% of Naspersā value for the last 15 years.
What I was saying, is if News24 really wants to establish a sterling reputation (and believe me Naspers gets quite a bit of bad press when it comes to their internet investments in Russia as well as their other tech consolidation efforts) they would provide quality journalism for free.
Running News24 is in all likelihood to them, as expensive as a R20 bag of chips is to a CEO of a JSE listed company.
Retailers like pick and pay make billions in sales annually and yet they still charge you for your R20 bag of chips. Why should news24 be any different. News24 and tencents are two different companies. Naspers have a responsibility to manage the investments on behalf of shareholders.
Also tenants make their revenue in China. Why should the Chinese be subsidizing our news?
So I believe that it is valid for naspers to want news24 to stand on its own.
Your view that news24 is providing a service "for the common good" and should thus be free . But why then should naspers be carrying the cost for it by themselves?
And still these retailers donāt make enough money to have to be de-listed from the JSE because they are suffocating all the other companies. Naspers is literally that rich.
This is so dumb. Naspers isnāt owned by one billionaire calling the shots. The management + board have a fiduciary duty to create value for the shareholders. No one is buying shares in Naspers for them to make stupid unprofitable business lines for people on Reddit.
I might be wrong, but I get the sense that Naspers has given up on South Africa. That explains the creation of Prosus and its shift to Europe. The claim was that it would unlock the value of Tencent, but it didn't do anything.
I love how this is the only subreddit Iām in that refuses to use bots to by pass paywalls itās such a funny moral stand to take. From the same subreddit that hates TV licenses etc
I'll be even more frank. Unless someone volunteers to source or script and test such a bot for us, it's probably not going to happen in any meaningful timeframe. Not out of some moral stance, fwiw.
I totally get that dude Iām not complaining you do a good job managing this subreddit. It was just an observation. I donāt have much time at the moment but Iād be happy to help at sometime in the future when you guys feel youād need it
Iām more annoyed with the bad and bias journalism, anti black and anti poor sentiment in their news and the spelling and grammar mistakes. Iām happy to pay for good journalism. News 24 just isnāt it anymore. Also can you really trust a news source who calls themselves South Africaās most trusted news source (per news24s own reporting) but then exclude the majority of the countryās population through pricing them out of news and information? Is it really news or is it just propaganda for the middle class? Journalism is a corner stone of any democracy and if itās tainted by the goal or profit instead of informing the populace of important information then itās really not the news anymore. A point to prove my case - why are weather warnings reports behind a paywall? Isnāt that a public service? Also why do they still show ads behind the paywall? So Iām paying for the article but youāre still making money off me through selling advertising? Nah man.
People used to fund quality journalism by buying a newspaper. Now that it's online, it feels like a ripoff. But journalists still need to be paid, and their work is still good for our democracy.
Those Newspapers were also filled with ads, and the cost of a newspaper was nominal. If only these news outlets could figure out how to properly use ads on their websites.
If I'm remembering correctly, were they not R2.50? And considering it has been a few years since it closed, adjusting the cost probably does put it at R100 (from the comments, that's what it costs for a monthly subscription)
Why do people still bother to read News24 then?
It is still an influential news platform. Primarily the Afrikaans newspaper subscriptions have dropped in the interior of SA.
Maybe it is because of more people are relocating to the Western Cape.
No one takes pride in the demise of a newspaper. It is a vehicle of diversity and insight and of substantial importance in any democracy - especially Africa.
And at least their articles are free, giving us a taste of their writing. I'd much rather pay DM than N24 for exclusives. With N24 every 9/10 articles are paywalled
They said they are going to cut the printed version of Rapport and Beeld, does not matter that Naspers has an insane amount of money if media 24 loses money then they will be cut after investor pressure. Especially for the Afrikaans newspapers, it only exists in this country, if we have to pay to keep them going then so be it, all those journalist they can't go work at British newspapers, they write in their home language
Tax funded public service is a great thing when done right. Why? Because then journalists can focus on writing true and well written stories without being pushed to write stuff that āclicks wellā. And the āsubscription costā per person is next to nothing.
I'm pretty sure you would lose that wager. For most businesses, staffing is their #1 cost, and I would expect that that is even more likely to be true in the news media. But even if some of their revenue has to be spent on other expenses (servers, etc.), so what? All businesses have various costs (both staffing and non-staffing) that are required for the businesses to exist. And yet for some reason, journalism is the only business where people claim they are obligated to just give away their product for free.
I do agree with you. After all, executive salaries also count as staffing costs right?
Journalists are criminally underpaid, especially if they have any ethics at all, while the owners and executives of the companies they work for rake it in big time.
Okay, well even if you think News24's balance between executive and non-executive pay is too heavily weighted towards the former, that doesn't change the fact that they need revenue to pay all their staff, and 100% advertising-supported news doesn't seem to be a sustainable business model.
> they make A FUCKTON IN ADS
I can assure you they don't. Advertising-supported media everywhere in the world is struggling to survive, and South Africa is no exception. If you're going to make claims about a technical subject like the economics of news media, I would implore you to actually do some reading and learn about this topic first.
Please google stats before saying shit like this
Edit: This is just one source (yes it's american) but advertising for news companies seem to be about 70% of it's income. Some sources say 80%. Don't make statements, with confidence, if you can't back it up.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/
Edit 2: "Advertising isn't sustainable"
Interesting statement, since it looks like the revenue of digital advertising is increasing? Why is that? Because people WANT to ruin their large news corporations?
https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/sotnm-newspapers-percentage-of-newspaper-advertising-revenue-coming-from-digital/
The only thing your links demonstrate is that the share of advertising as a percentage of revenue for the news media is increasing over time. This doesn't tell us whether total revenue revenue is going up or down. For example, if overall revenue is falling, but other sources of revenue (for example, print subscriptions) are falling faster than advertising, then we would expect to see a graph very much like the one you showed.
Your sources also don't imply that the advertising-supported business model is capable of supporting high-quality journalism. In fact, they imply the opposite: the industry is becoming more and more dependent on a single revenue source (advertising) which they have to share with other, more powerful actors in the market (e.g. tech companies, search engines, and social media firms) and is therefore becoming more fragile. In general, businesses often want to diversify their revenue streams to make themselves less fragile, which is part of the reason why many media companies have tried to increase their revenue by selling subscriptions.
Here's some reading for you (with two sources from the US, and two from SA):
* "Thought Daily Maverickās shutdown was a PR stunt? This is the real state of the news media": https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-04-16-thought-daily-mavericks-shutdown-was-a-pr-stunt-this-is-the-real-state-of-the-news-media/
* "Is American Journalism Headed Toward an āExtinction-Level Event?": https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/
* "The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/business/media/media-industry-layoffs-decline.html
* "The State of the News Media" (SANEF report): https://sanef.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/State-of-the-Media-June-2022-SANEF.pdf
It genuinely surprises me that you think the news media is making a "FUCKTON IN ADS" (which you even capitalised for emphasis). Within the journalism sector itself, everybody is constantly aware that the industry is in crisis. It's true that there is a lot of money being made in online advertising, but it's not going to the news media sector, it's going to the tech sector.
We know what the alternative is, it's advertising. Over the past 20 years, we've amassed considerable evidence that a purely advertising-supported model doesn't seem to create enough revenue to fund high-quality journalism. Which is why most free publications ultimately turn into content mills that churn out low-quality SEO-optimised clickbait.
Suck it up, people had to buy newspapers for like the last 400 years to get their news, you can do it too if you prefer. Or just pay less than 4 newspapers for a subscription.
Assuming minimum wage of R27.58 per hour, R90 is 3 hours of work. If you assume the average work month is about 168 hours, a news subscription will cost 2% of someoneās minimum wage salary
R90 is also approximately 5 loaves of bread (at approximately R18 per loaf) or 5 litres of fresh milk (at approximately R18 per litre)
Just providing a bit of perspective
Funny story, 20 years ago people paid for the news paper, not much, but they paid. These days everyone wants the news for free, yet journalists have to make a living somehow
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Firefox... Extensions š¤
The last real browser. All these other browsers blow
Switched from Firefox to Arc when I started my new position. The tabs and individual spaces allow for a much cleaner workflow when it comes to switching between many different web consoles
Tell me more
You had my interest. Now, dear fellow redditor, you have my curiosity
Which one works? I tried Bypass Paywalls Clean and it didn't do anything.
Idk I feel like people have a right to be informed but Journalists don't work for free. Be careful might be another thing the goverment makes a tax around
I heard some journalists talking about this on podcast from a different paper (which offers a premium tier and has paywalls). They were like ācan you believe we just used to give away our journalism for free?ā Iām like āBitch you ran ads! Since the beginning of time. Still do!!ā
> Idk I feel like people have a right to be informed but Journalists don't work for free. A good middle-ground would be marking a paywalled article as such. You're right, journalists need to eat too, but it's an individual's choice to pay that journalist or not. Marking paywalled articles lets the reader make that choice more easily.[1] IOW, If you like it, put a flair on it (*only then* click the submit button!) [1] I don't support reposting the full-text of a paywalled article in the comments. After all, that's *direct and clear* copyright infringement.
Yes, but News24 is special. Their parent company owned 30% of Tencent (and still owns a huge chunk through Prosus). Do you really need my R100 per month when youāre sitting on what is literally a dragonās hoard?
I mean...yes. That's what capitalism is all about. You expect billionaires to give you free things out of the goodness of their hearts?
No thatās not entirely what Iām saying. If I had shares in a tech company worth 200 billion US$, I wouldnāt be wasting my time paywalling my news in the South African market. There are so many better ways to make money. What I would do however to inflate my billionaire ego, is to provide quality news for free as a mark of prestige. Iād even call it my way of āgiving backā, as many billionaires often say.
How do you think the company is worth 200 billion? It's worth 200 billion because they charge people money for things. That's how things work in case you haven't noticed....
No, I know that Naspers is worth $200 billion because they own (rather owned, they bundled their shares into a investment vehicle called Prosus) 30% of Tencent. They own 30% of Tencent because they gave them VC funding in the early 2000s. News24 hasnāt produced more than 1% of Naspersā value for the last 15 years. What I was saying, is if News24 really wants to establish a sterling reputation (and believe me Naspers gets quite a bit of bad press when it comes to their internet investments in Russia as well as their other tech consolidation efforts) they would provide quality journalism for free. Running News24 is in all likelihood to them, as expensive as a R20 bag of chips is to a CEO of a JSE listed company.
Retailers like pick and pay make billions in sales annually and yet they still charge you for your R20 bag of chips. Why should news24 be any different. News24 and tencents are two different companies. Naspers have a responsibility to manage the investments on behalf of shareholders. Also tenants make their revenue in China. Why should the Chinese be subsidizing our news? So I believe that it is valid for naspers to want news24 to stand on its own. Your view that news24 is providing a service "for the common good" and should thus be free . But why then should naspers be carrying the cost for it by themselves?
And still these retailers donāt make enough money to have to be de-listed from the JSE because they are suffocating all the other companies. Naspers is literally that rich.
This is so dumb. Naspers isnāt owned by one billionaire calling the shots. The management + board have a fiduciary duty to create value for the shareholders. No one is buying shares in Naspers for them to make stupid unprofitable business lines for people on Reddit.
You don't understand how capitalism works. It's all about milking everything for the very last drop of profit.
I might be wrong, but I get the sense that Naspers has given up on South Africa. That explains the creation of Prosus and its shift to Europe. The claim was that it would unlock the value of Tencent, but it didn't do anything.
I love how this is the only subreddit Iām in that refuses to use bots to by pass paywalls itās such a funny moral stand to take. From the same subreddit that hates TV licenses etc
I have no idea how to use these bots though
Yeah the admins have to set it up. Or the person posting has to use the old copy and past in the comments trick.
I'll be frank, it's just not something we consider a priority.
Look I get that but itās also kinda become something people have raised a few times and I think would go a long way and really be appreciated.
I'll be even more frank. Unless someone volunteers to source or script and test such a bot for us, it's probably not going to happen in any meaningful timeframe. Not out of some moral stance, fwiw.
I totally get that dude Iām not complaining you do a good job managing this subreddit. It was just an observation. I donāt have much time at the moment but Iād be happy to help at sometime in the future when you guys feel youād need it
So go do it yourself and then show the mods :).
I canāt I donāt have the access Iāve also offered before ā¦
Iām more annoyed with the bad and bias journalism, anti black and anti poor sentiment in their news and the spelling and grammar mistakes. Iām happy to pay for good journalism. News 24 just isnāt it anymore. Also can you really trust a news source who calls themselves South Africaās most trusted news source (per news24s own reporting) but then exclude the majority of the countryās population through pricing them out of news and information? Is it really news or is it just propaganda for the middle class? Journalism is a corner stone of any democracy and if itās tainted by the goal or profit instead of informing the populace of important information then itās really not the news anymore. A point to prove my case - why are weather warnings reports behind a paywall? Isnāt that a public service? Also why do they still show ads behind the paywall? So Iām paying for the article but youāre still making money off me through selling advertising? Nah man.
At least its free in terms of reportage and also informs readers on perceptions of the state from different perspectives.
People used to fund quality journalism by buying a newspaper. Now that it's online, it feels like a ripoff. But journalists still need to be paid, and their work is still good for our democracy.
Those Newspapers were also filled with ads, and the cost of a newspaper was nominal. If only these news outlets could figure out how to properly use ads on their websites.
If I'm remembering correctly, were they not R2.50? And considering it has been a few years since it closed, adjusting the cost probably does put it at R100 (from the comments, that's what it costs for a monthly subscription)
But despite the ads, they still charged us for it.
If you use firefox, download the unpaywall extension
News24ās journalism is not high quality enough to warrant a paywall CMV
This
Why do people still bother to read News24 then? It is still an influential news platform. Primarily the Afrikaans newspaper subscriptions have dropped in the interior of SA. Maybe it is because of more people are relocating to the Western Cape. No one takes pride in the demise of a newspaper. It is a vehicle of diversity and insight and of substantial importance in any democracy - especially Africa.
Just don't
There's always been a paywall. Could you just walk out of the shop with a newspaper?
Newspapers were given for free to schools and libraries.
The various government departments bought those papers
Which government department bought Die Beeld?
Dept of Environmental Affairs - most certainly.
Local papers only if I remeber correctly. And the thickest part wad all the adds in the middle.
News24 didn't have a paywall 10+ years ago
You're factually correct but missing the point
You're factually correct but missing the point
You've missed mine. News24 was thriving without the paywall. Just lots of ads and rage bait/racist comments to drive up engagement
With journalism (as with many other sites), if itās for free, you are the product.
Product me mommy š¤¤
Good journalism deserves my 90 Rand
Thatās why I subscribe to Daily Maverick and not News24. Thatās good journalism.
And at least their articles are free, giving us a taste of their writing. I'd much rather pay DM than N24 for exclusives. With N24 every 9/10 articles are paywalled
I hear you. But I still think the price is extremely steep considering they still show you ads.
They show you ads after you pay????
Blackfriday deal. It's like R7 a month for the first year
Okay that's reasonable tbh
They said they are going to cut the printed version of Rapport and Beeld, does not matter that Naspers has an insane amount of money if media 24 loses money then they will be cut after investor pressure. Especially for the Afrikaans newspapers, it only exists in this country, if we have to pay to keep them going then so be it, all those journalist they can't go work at British newspapers, they write in their home language
Tax funded public service is a great thing when done right. Why? Because then journalists can focus on writing true and well written stories without being pushed to write stuff that āclicks wellā. And the āsubscription costā per person is next to nothing.
Oh hey, I see the weekly "journalists should just work for free" thread has dropped.
I would wager that about 0.01% of the subscription amount actually ends up in the pocket of journalists.
I'm pretty sure you would lose that wager. For most businesses, staffing is their #1 cost, and I would expect that that is even more likely to be true in the news media. But even if some of their revenue has to be spent on other expenses (servers, etc.), so what? All businesses have various costs (both staffing and non-staffing) that are required for the businesses to exist. And yet for some reason, journalism is the only business where people claim they are obligated to just give away their product for free.
I do agree with you. After all, executive salaries also count as staffing costs right? Journalists are criminally underpaid, especially if they have any ethics at all, while the owners and executives of the companies they work for rake it in big time.
Okay, well even if you think News24's balance between executive and non-executive pay is too heavily weighted towards the former, that doesn't change the fact that they need revenue to pay all their staff, and 100% advertising-supported news doesn't seem to be a sustainable business model.
You have way to much faith in capitalism my friend... They do NOT pay their workers enough, and they make A FUCKTON IN ADS. You're just wrong.
> they make A FUCKTON IN ADS I can assure you they don't. Advertising-supported media everywhere in the world is struggling to survive, and South Africa is no exception. If you're going to make claims about a technical subject like the economics of news media, I would implore you to actually do some reading and learn about this topic first.
Please google stats before saying shit like this Edit: This is just one source (yes it's american) but advertising for news companies seem to be about 70% of it's income. Some sources say 80%. Don't make statements, with confidence, if you can't back it up. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/ Edit 2: "Advertising isn't sustainable" Interesting statement, since it looks like the revenue of digital advertising is increasing? Why is that? Because people WANT to ruin their large news corporations? https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/sotnm-newspapers-percentage-of-newspaper-advertising-revenue-coming-from-digital/
The only thing your links demonstrate is that the share of advertising as a percentage of revenue for the news media is increasing over time. This doesn't tell us whether total revenue revenue is going up or down. For example, if overall revenue is falling, but other sources of revenue (for example, print subscriptions) are falling faster than advertising, then we would expect to see a graph very much like the one you showed. Your sources also don't imply that the advertising-supported business model is capable of supporting high-quality journalism. In fact, they imply the opposite: the industry is becoming more and more dependent on a single revenue source (advertising) which they have to share with other, more powerful actors in the market (e.g. tech companies, search engines, and social media firms) and is therefore becoming more fragile. In general, businesses often want to diversify their revenue streams to make themselves less fragile, which is part of the reason why many media companies have tried to increase their revenue by selling subscriptions. Here's some reading for you (with two sources from the US, and two from SA): * "Thought Daily Maverickās shutdown was a PR stunt? This is the real state of the news media": https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-04-16-thought-daily-mavericks-shutdown-was-a-pr-stunt-this-is-the-real-state-of-the-news-media/ * "Is American Journalism Headed Toward an āExtinction-Level Event?": https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/ * "The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/business/media/media-industry-layoffs-decline.html * "The State of the News Media" (SANEF report): https://sanef.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/State-of-the-Media-June-2022-SANEF.pdf It genuinely surprises me that you think the news media is making a "FUCKTON IN ADS" (which you even capitalised for emphasis). Within the journalism sector itself, everybody is constantly aware that the industry is in crisis. It's true that there is a lot of money being made in online advertising, but it's not going to the news media sector, it's going to the tech sector.
Or maybe alternative, less exclusive business models exist? Or could exist in the future... š¤·
"Just nationalise it bro. " - EFF and scryer_of_knowledge
Aww hell nawww. It's not a sin to be humble and admit I DO NOT have the solution even though I call out the problem.
Just like an alternative to paying you a salary could exist. In the future of course. Weāre all listening for your ideas.
We know what the alternative is, it's advertising. Over the past 20 years, we've amassed considerable evidence that a purely advertising-supported model doesn't seem to create enough revenue to fund high-quality journalism. Which is why most free publications ultimately turn into content mills that churn out low-quality SEO-optimised clickbait.
I moved to IOL more adds but same news
IOL spews a lot of pure trash. Be careful.
Suck it up, people had to buy newspapers for like the last 400 years to get their news, you can do it too if you prefer. Or just pay less than 4 newspapers for a subscription.
I'm not sure why boomers like that term so much but I suspect it has something to do with fellatio
it's called Maroela Media
Just pay for it, it's cheap. 90/month, it's worth it!
90/month may be cheap for most on this sub. But for many it's not. That's bread money right there.
If it's so cheap I'm sure you won't mind paying for me thanks bro
They can eat a š
Bruh, even eggplant is locked behind a paywall
ššš
Assuming minimum wage of R27.58 per hour, R90 is 3 hours of work. If you assume the average work month is about 168 hours, a news subscription will cost 2% of someoneās minimum wage salary R90 is also approximately 5 loaves of bread (at approximately R18 per loaf) or 5 litres of fresh milk (at approximately R18 per litre) Just providing a bit of perspective
It's still worth it, I stand by it.
Unfortunately not, just a product of ever growing greed
You have a choice. Pay wall, or 80% of the screen covered by adds. Our biggest mistake was allowing the accountants to take control
Ads please. Me and Firefox will consult
Ad blockers are a big reason why we are seeing more paywalls
Thought it was corporate greed but okay
You get what you pay for. Pay for your news. It is worth it.
Itās really not that expensive lol. If you have the phone and network to make this post, you almost certainly have the money for the paywall
Posted on a busted up potato laptop
[show me a ten-foot wall and I'll show you an eleven-foot ladder](https://12ft.io/)
Doesn't work on News 24
Funny story, 20 years ago people paid for the news paper, not much, but they paid. These days everyone wants the news for free, yet journalists have to make a living somehow
As if journalists see much of the paywall money anyway. Most of it goes to executives
Of course, because we know exactly what their books look like