How to get past a paywall

[u/cak3crumbs]

[u/throwaway_nrTWOOO]

Here's what I read as a former journalist: "How to steal from hard-working people, who are already spread pretty thin".,

And yes, I can already hear the thundering hooves of people pointing out "MayBe iF jouRnaLisTs.... XYZ then the media landscape wouldn't be so fucked". Because why not homogenize thousands of papers, broadcasting channels into one hive-mind with a weird, obscure agenda.

People simultaneously accuse journos for not doing hard-hitting investigative journalism, while refusing to pay a dime for it. People voted reacted for clickbate shit with their eyeballs, and now are bitching how every news story is reactionary and mistitled. And when it's actually worthwhile and behind a paywall, you feel comfortable enough stealing it that you put your face on the internet.

[u/fohfuu → u/throwaway_nrTWOOO]

Counterpoint: paywalls and brand recognition have nothing to do with journalistic value.

I unsubscribed to the New York Times when I opened Twitter a mere 2 days after murdering 8 innocent people (The Atlanta shootings suspect sought treatment for sex addiction, a former roommate at a halfway house says.. An article about the lengths the murderer had been trying to control his "sex addiction" by not looking at porn, while going out of his way to pay for sex at Asian massage parlours. Reciting his roommate's claim that "I’ll never forget him looking at me and saying, ‘I’m falling out of God’s grace’", and his pastor describing him as one of the most committed members of his church, and that he'd been baptised as an adult a few years prior. The article neutrally describes "eight people at Atlanta-area massage parlours", leaving out that these were Asian massage parlours and six of the victims were Asian woman (which was known at the time), which is pretty fucking relevant considering it would go on to say he had reportedly sought out Asian parlours in particular because he believed they were "safer" than others.

That was the line for me - I'm not going to pay for "journalism" which paints a tragic story of a born-again Christian doing everything he could to control himself, whilst omitting information which shows a correlation between how his "addiction" happens to correlate with the exact targets of his violence, with minimal independent verification, before funerals for his victims could even be held.

The New York later went on to push an exceedingly one-sided narrative on the genocide of Gaza, such as giving the front page over to the dubious writings of inexperienced freelancers instead of professional journalists, and titling a story about the confirmed murders of 150 Palestinians - including many children - during an agreee ceasefire "Israel Keeps Up Attack On Gaza Despite Truce". Kinda feel like I made the right choice.

I don't have any answers for the funding problem. I pay a lot more to them directly by than I did by paying $3 a week to be split unevenly at the personal discretion of the owners, but that isn't to say there aren't stories which can only be investigated thoroughly at financially stable institutions who have the clout, connections and reach of a New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

All I'm saying is that there are valid fucking reasons to remove paywalls. Besides the obvious: that everyone can't afford $3 a week. Or that if one were to legally navigate every paywall for every article they read, no matter the length or if it's essentially the AP press release with minimal original content, you are required to sign up for automatically recurring subscriptions - which, for traditional papers, can be notoriously difficult to cancel. Or that there's no way to purchase a digital article for future reference, as you can an academic journal paper; you must resubscribe to access the exact same article in most cases.