Thoughts:
Today I went through all my informational subscriptions, text, audio, and video. Turns out I have been paying over $130 a month. I ask; Am I getting $130 worth of value? I would like to keep reading, listening, and watching, most of these. Yet this is hard, some of these I support because I know the writer, or want to support their work. But some have slightly increased their price, and put more of their work behind a paywall. So switching to free means missing out on more.
+
.
I am not rich, I live on a fixed income, that is not going increase with inflation. I understand, creators need to get paid. And Ad-tech is killing the open web. Each time I cancel a subscription it saddens me.
I see no solution on the horizon. Is this even fixable?
So I ask; what do we do? Access to good information is going to get harder in the near future. How do we insure it continues?
I wish media outlets would bundle.
I am rarely going to read something from the Orlando Sentinel or the Chicago Tribune, so a paywall would just stop me me from visiting. It's not going to make me cough up money for a subscription.
But if a significant number of newspapers joined into a single subscription service, I would definitely be interested, and they'd get money they wouldn't otherwise.
@EileenKCarpenter
This indeed Might help.
I have a local online news outlet, great reporting, that I would love to support. Yet $10.00 a month for just local news and like 2 articles a day, mostly on stuff that does not matter to me. Is a bit much.
But if it were bundled with other local reporting, from other non-profit orgs. It would be with it.