One of my favorite apps on my phone is the news aggregator News 360. You pick as many categories of news as you want and the app collects hundreds of up-to-date articles as it can for your reading pleasure. How much more digital and progressive can you get with this? There are only a few publications that I read on a regular basis, so this app introduces me to a lot of different new outlets and writing styles.
But as I was writing my 10 ways to save journalism I realized that my favorite app might be one of the reasons newspapers are dying. My first idea to save journalism was to have all news outlets establish paywalls on their websites, that way people would have to pay for their news. But news aggregators like News 360 are only encouraging the idea of free news. I know that in this era it seems ridiculous to have news that isn't free, but that's how it used to be.
When you look at it from this angle, News 360 seems pretty bad for journalism. It's great that I have access to all these articles, but is it worth it at the expense of newspapers losing money? Probably not. But regardless of how bad it is I still love News 360; I don't want to see it disappear. So how do we solve this problem?
Paid subscriptions, that's how! Readers are stuck in this mind set that news is free, and we have to break that. I want news aggregators to stay around because they are extremely useful applications, but users should have to pay for them. One of my other ideas for saving journalism was to have different level of subscription plans for news outlets; why not have that for aggregators? You can pay for a certain amount of articles per week/month. I don't aggregator developers can use this plan yet, though. For this to happen, news outlets have to establish a paywall system for online readers, otherwise we'd be seeing riots in the streets.
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