We all read the odd article, some more than others. Initially newspapers thought they could just have a few adverts and rely on physical sales but people quickly switched to online. Their solution was to throw everything behind a subscription, but surely the better solution would be to charge per visitor per article until the article is paid for and then opening it up to all and switching that purchase button out for a donate button? This is such a move elegant solution rather than relying on a subscription and exploiting people hoping they forget to cancel.
I wanted the physical paper. I was thinking that I spend my mornings looking at stuff on Lemmy, and most of it tends to be news since that's the majority of the content here, so I might as well get a physical paper to read at my kitchen table while enjoying my morning coffee. The writing quality would certainly be better and there's something more satisfying about handling the physical paper. But newspaper delivery fees used to be really reasonable, especially since there's a million ads inside of there. The current pricing is more than I consider fair, so I'll just stick to Lemmy and my NYT subscription.
That's not a bad combination to be fair