Screenshot says it. Please recommend alternative Leftist news sources. I am in UK but I read news from anywhere, any language if my browser can access it/translate it.
Here in UK, I have tried The Canary, Novara Media, Byline Times, Morning Star - all have strengths and weaknesses, none are a perfect fit. Still looking for my ‘daily paper’.
Thanks!
What’s bizarre to me is that in the olden days, ie pre-internet, millions of people happily paid up every single day to read the news in a format that was stuffed with adverts. Newspapers, remember them? The ads helped pay production costs. People sometimes bought newspapers FOR the ads - job search, car sales, accomodation, real estate.
I pay the Guardian £75 a year - slightly up from the £60 it was when I first started the online ad-free subscription like ten years ago or whatever. This is because I hate the intrusive nature of online advertising, and I appreciate most of the Guardian’s journalism. It seems like a good deal to me.
Yup, we need to get over the idea that everything should be free.
woe is me, a news source that wants to remain independent of outside interests is taking steps to avoid having to get funded by big businesses or the government who’ll want to set an agenda…
I’d be more concerned about reading something free and not ad-supported (and like it or not, untargeted ads are next to worthless), as the money has to be coming from somewhere
Nope. That is not the issue.
In UK, media is struggling to raise enough revenue from either ads or subscriptions. Many MSM titles have introduced a paywall where users are forced to fund the service by either commiting to a subscription or turning off ad-bkockers and seeing ads. In contrast, Guardian’s ‘unique selling point’ was that it would ‘never’ do this which was why people should prefer it to other news sources. Then, without acknowledging what it was doing, Guardian quietly introduced the same paywall as everyone it had criticised. My complaint is not about funding a service but about the hypocrisy of a service saying ‘I would never do that’ and then quietly doing it.
Moreover, this change is not consistent - you do not always see this paywall when visiting the Guardian. This paywall seems to be in ‘trial’ stage where Guardian is testing to see how much push-back they get from users. We either push-back or Guardian goes same way as rest of British MSM. That would be an irreversible loss. I think what Guardian is doing is not help its own survival long-term.
I see no difference between Guardian strategy and changes in other media (YouTube or Netflix, for example), where the owners are struggling to generate as much revenue as they expect (as they used to do). Instead of asking why their content is not popular, or why users are leaving/using ways to by-pass ads or subscriptions, they just try to squeeze out as much revenue as they can from those still willing to pay subs or see ads, while their once reliable ‘goose who lays golden eggs’ slowly stops laying. I say Guardian deserves to die if it does not keep track of what readers want and it is only ensuring its own death by trying to cash in on the remaining goodwill of a dwindling readership instead of attracting readers back or reaching out to new readers.
They are going up a cul-de-sac and it has no good end for Guardian. I cannot save them from themselves so I just have to find alternatives which are better at this than the parts of the industry that are dying out.
Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:
a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue
b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources
“Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).
As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.
Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.
Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat
Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷
I would argue that everybody has a line in the sand they don’t want to cross.
For most of us, we don’t mind ads as long as we can avoid them with adblock. Which honestly just externalizes the problem onto people without it.
It seems to be a reasonable position to not accept a free site with personalized ads, because of the privacy costs.
It’s also unfortunate, for the newspaper to go this direction.
Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.
Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.
I’m a fan of 404media’s model, which does have ads, but gets most of its funding through subscribers. All their news journalism is free (behind a login page), but they have premium content like behind the scenes blogs and an expanded podcast for subscribers only.
I get that the only reason they can do this is because
- They benefitted from traditional media organizations to grow their skills and contacts before striking out on their own.
- They run a lean organization and have a limited “beat”.
- They encourage a parasocial relationship with their readers through the free podcast, etc. (not necessarily a bad thing).
But it is an interesting model. I’d subscribe if I could afford it. And maybe someday I will.
I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.
Only time will tell, I can see how that would be the risk. I’ve noticed how Sabine Hossenfelter started out with science news and followed her audience right-ward to anti-science crazy town. I have more hope for classically-trained journalists with ethics to follow and reputation to uphold, but you’re right that pressure is real
No but ublock origin would hide that
Ublock Origin does not work on my main browser Librewolf (based on Firefox, runs on linux) - its currently disabled (last time I checked was last week) as are all ad-blockers on Mozilla add-ons page. On android stuff I use Vivaldi browser (based on chromium?). I add vpn, use dns redirects, and similar stuff to anonymise/block ads and trackers. Usually stops this kinda thing but occasionally something gets through like this Guardian pop-up.
Uhh I use Librewolf with UBlock daily and have been for almost 2 years. It still works fine, including for reading Guardian’s website and blocking those annoying elements.
In fact I’m almost certain UBlock Origin is included in a default Librewolf install anymore.
It is.
I’m using waterfox with unblock origin on arch
uBlock Origin on Firefox will help a lot.
Reuters is the closest to an unbiased traditional news source I’ve been able to find.
If the screenshot says it all they don’t want that, they want exciting leftist news
Ground.news is a handy aggregator that will sort an article topic based on a source’s political bias. It’s US based, but includes UK sources.
It’s also a sponsor on many YouTubes which makes me suspicious.
They have a paid tier for more detailed statistics, but I’ve only used the free version.
It advertises on multiple platforms, so it must be evil?
I don’t understand this mentality, just because a youtuber is sponsored by a product, the product must be bad/malicious/acting in bad faith.
There are many channels on youtube that aren’t morally corrupt or soulless. If a company sponsors a channel on yt, it just means more people become aware of the product. which is the whole point of the sponsorships.
Bad by association. If I already know something and hear about it on yt, fine, whatever. But there are so many bad sponsors out there that it immediately makes me suspect a company if they sponsor videos.
Unfortunately this is true for advertisements/sponsorships everywhere. Not sure if there is a true one size fit all solution for fixing these products other than individual channels actually vetting/checking who pays them money.
There are some good channels that unfortunately just take whatever sponsor deal they get. I ended up using sponsorblock for the most part, and then support those channels I care about on patreon/ko-fi
edit: just changed some phrasing to not make my rambling as rambly
They are Canadian based, which is a very important distinction.
I like Aljazera and Christian Science monitor (oddly unbiased and not Christian related)
Aljazeera is good. I once read CSM and thought it surprisingly good, not what I expected from the title, but that was around 1980s - have never seen it in recent years!
The Christian Science Monitor is amazing, and from it’s name you’d never expect it.
My grandmother was a Christian Scientist. I respect her but it’s a baffling cultish offshot.
Its basis, though, was in radiacal feminism in the late 1800s. I used to read the Christian Science Monitor when we would visit her when I was a kid.
A large part of why I defaulted to atheism is from the fact that my Dad’s parents were never openly religious, my Dad is a Buddhist, my mom was nominally Christian, her mom we already discussed, and her Dad was a Congregationalist Minister and organ player.
I figured none of them could be right and it was better to try to be a good person without those structures.
Grandma and I never saw eye to eye, unfortunately.
I agree, it isn’t what I expected at all. I really like how they have a section telling you why they wrote the article. Check out their website. Wonder what it was like in the 80s?
Bypass paywalls
https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
Was on Firefox add on store before it got taken down, then GitHub and Gitlab, so the dev decided to host it here
You can check his X account too
Cheers!
Oh, pathetic. Capitalism… obey… Since when you are a customer? You are just a propaganda victim. And believe me, real customers get what they paid for in full.
