How digital paywalls aid the spread of low quality news
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Hey everyone. Some quick programming notes before we jump into the meat of this week’s newsletter. I’m going on a mini vacation from Tuesday through Saturday, so this is the only issue I’m sending out this week.
You may have noticed that over the past month or so I’ve been publishing case study interviews with media entrepreneurs for the paid version of this newsletter. I’ve decided to remove the paywall on a few of these case studies to give you a sense of what subscribers get access to on a weekly basis:
I’m going to write more about this in a few weeks, but over the last several months I’ve had to make some tough decisions about what freelance consulting work I take on. Every time I take on a new client, that means less time spent on this newsletter and my podcast. When I launched the paid version of this newsletter about six months ago, I made a conscious decision to pursue less client work, and my income has taken a pretty sizable hit as a result.
But there’s really only so long I can maintain my current content output without generating more direct income from the newsletter. So if you’ve spent some time thinking about possibly becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a very good time to do so. Not only would you be supporting my work, but you’ll get access to some pretty cool interviews as well. Here’s a link to where you can get 10% off for the first year:
Ok, on to this week’s issue…
News roundup
This article makes some really good points. The news sites with the lowest quality information are often completely free to access, while the sites with the highest quality info lock it behind a paywall. This makes it much easier for false information to spread. [link]
"At 33, [Hajime Isayama has] achieved a level of fame at home that would be unfathomable for a comic book artist in America." [link]
The New York Times has 700 people on its product team. Few other publishers have access to that level of technical resources. [link]
This article claims that Business Insider now employs 500 journalists. If that's true, then that's pretty impressive. [link]
Medium is becoming more like Tumblr. [link]
See you next week!
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