I’m sure Rudy could work up a few toots in place of a band - maybe not 21 though - that’d trip some sort of an alarm.
I’ve never paid for news… until this election. Part of it is that I feel for the journalists. But the other factor is that things have been changing so fast, that there’s ten times as much news. So I’m getting my money’s worth.
Oh, we have a friend who gave gift subscriptions for Christmas presents (to the NYT and Wash. Post).
Yeah. Well played, A_H.
Actually, The New York Times is the only news I pay for and it’s worth every penny.
I’m thirding or fourthing that. Why the resentment, as though actual reporters should work for free? I shudder to envision a future in which the endless stream of shit called social media supplants real journalism. It got us Trump, and it can get us much, much worse.
Not to get too carried away on this digression, but since it started by my mentioning that I saw something on CBC News that was not on CNN even though it was important American political news, let me also say that I, too, don’t expect good reporters to work for free. But the “free to the public” alternative to paid news isn’t the cesspool of social media, it’s responsible impartial journalism supported by public funding in the interests of a well-informed populace. That’s what the CBC is. But then, up here in Canada we are godless socialists with free health care. 
Anyway, I find I get a good deal of mileage out of a simple free registration to the New York Times. I’d be willing to pay for it if necessary, but frankly my priority is naturally Canadian media, especially ensuring the health of the CBC. They don’t ask for money, but I do it by supporting governments that are in favour of funding the CBC and not those right-wing troglodytes who’d like to see it minimized because honest news and investigative reporting doesn’t suit their self-serving agenda.
Agreed, and also from Canada. If there’s a Times article I really want to read and I’ve gone over my 4 free article allotment for the month, I’ll just Google the article title and usually I can find it. I usually alternate between CTV, CBC and Global (local) to get my Canadian facts, and I watch CNN and MSNBC for American news. Newsmax and OA and Fox show up often enough on Facebook for balance if I’m interested. Or maybe I should say imbalance.
They shouldnt. And if you want to read the whole paper, of course you need to buy a sub. But not to read one article.
And in any case, subs dont pay for shit on newspapers, it’s all advertising. I was a Manager for the old LA Herald Examiner, and this was made very very clear at management meetings. My news sources says it is the same now.
You are aware that subscribers to a newspaper see the ads, yes? Your sources are obviously deeply embedded, and taking considerable personal risk passing along such super-sekrit intelligence.
And so so non-subscribers.
It’s common industry knowledge, nothing secret. In fact a newspaper loses money on the price of a sub vs a actual paper copy, it’s the ads that make up the difference.
For me it is because it degrades the goal of finding news. You don’t want just one source of news, so a search engine is still the best way to look for articles about news. And unless you buy a subscription to all of the 10 or so services that are likely at the top of the search results, you’re going to frequently run into paywalled hits on the first page that are at best useless and at worst a complete waste of time and a bait and switch when they purport to offer information but you click on them fruitlessly trying to find that information.
I’m personally not going to subscribe to the New York Times, because they pulled the same shit with their free account. Their internal search has the same issue: useless hyperlinks that claim to be about something but then when you click on them go “PSYCH! You THOUGHT you were going to be reading something, but that’s only for paid subscribers! Don’t you feel stupid now?” I don’t want to reward that behavior, so I unsubscribed my free account because I don’t want to deal with that frustration.
Geez, I can’t even leave you people alone for a few hours, can? 
I pay for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and my hometown paper. I believe in newspapers and I support them. Period. I don’t care how their budgets are calculated. I mostly do not resent being asked to pay for something I use and value.
There are other free sources that I follow regularly, namely,
NPR
Axios
The Hill
The Texas Tribune
Daily Kos
NewsNationNow
Huff Post
Politico
Gannett Syndication Service
and last, but not least, CNN
All of these are on my personal homepage (set up with Protopage.com-- a FREE service) with about 15 headlines from each.
I’d like to ask @Rick_Kitchen1 what sources he follows regularly (and how) because he always has the latest stories from a variety of outlets.
[/back to the regularly scheduled program in progress]
The New York Times has a deal going where you can subscribe and get all the news for a dollar a week. I can afford that and I enjoy it thoroughly. They usually pull in and report on what other papers behind a paywall are covering, like the Wash Post. I live in my state’s capital yet the local paper isn’t worth it-homogenized Rupert Murdoch news is all I would get.
Virtually all the national news in my local paper is something I’ve already read in another source, but I do want to know about local politics, COVID news, school district news, historic preservation, home sales, industrial accidents and crime, local restaurants/recipes, not to mention the obituaries. I never watch any TV news, national or local, so the local paper is the only place I can find out local stuff that might be important for me to know. And I support the institution, dagnabbit. At least with a digital subscription, I don’t have to worry about disposing of the physical paper every day.
My local paper, a homogenized conglomerate version of the same paper in 60 other towns, is $160 a year for digital. Since it doesn’t adequately cover all those things that you mentioned, which I would enjoy if it did, it just isn’t worth it since it’s content is pulled from other news ‘wires’, inevitably more conservative ones than I would chose, read: conservative & status quo. They let all the good local news reporters and editorial writers go years ago. One of my favorite writers I found writes in a blog “5 Strong Women”, so at least I can still capture her stuff.
The death of local newspapers is yet another modern scourge… for small towns that don’t even have TV stations, it’s really bad.
Indeed it is. I watched my two good, competing locals slowly strangle and die and it broke my pea-picking little reading citizen’s heart.
Well, if Trump can order a military flyover the military could comply by using these active military aircraft:
For Marine Band music:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MarineBandC--hohner-marine-band-key-of-c
All that’s left is to round up 21 Super Soakers, paint them in camo, and fill them with Russian hooker pee for the salute…
Sounds similar to my list - I subscribe to the same group you do, with the addition of the New Yorker, and visit the same free sites.
The exception is Daily Kos. I don’t like them, nor do I like Right Wing Watch and TPM and similar sites. I think they traffic in click bait, and while they don’t print straight up fake news like hard right wing sites, I’ve caught them doing things like changing a word in a stupid quote to make the speaker sound even stupider than he was, and it hurts their credibility.
I don’t mind that they exist, because some people need to pay more attention to the news, and people that would never read an NPR or AP story will click on that. But it’s not for me.
And I allow myself a fifth subscription. I’ve changed it a couple of times. I canceled The Economist because the online edition didn’t have the long form stories I expected. My fifth one is currently The Bulwark, which is a never Trump moderate conservative outlet. It gives me perspective and keeps me out of the bubble without feeding me the crazy.
If things ever normalize, they may start pissing me off and I may cancel, but it was pretty cheap and at this point in time it’s giving me some interesting perspective.
ETA -The Hill, which was on Thelma Lou’s list, also offers some conservative perspective but they lost a lot of credibility by running stuff by John Solomon, the Hunter Biden hunter.