I don’t know whether this is true of all the countries that MPU contributors live in, but as far as I know public libraries in the UK allow you to read more newspapers and magazines than you’d ever have time - or possibly the language skills - to read. It’s all free. You just need to join your local library and download the app they prefer.
I live in Wales, very close to the English border, and and am a member of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire library services. The former uses PressReader and the latter uses Libby.
Personally, I detest Libby because it’s so difficult to do simple things, but PressReader is a doddle.
Neither app allows access to paywalled newspapers like the Times, nor does it cover every magazine in a given category. It does various literary magazines, including the NYRB, but not the obvious British ones like the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books. They both cover all the Mac magazines I’ve ever heard of.
It’s all free. I’m sure that these are US apps, so maybe you have a similar thing in the States?
Spaniard here: and that’s because that law was lobbied by publishers themselves, trying to get a piece of Google’s cake although it affected some other local aggregators (the Reddit-like Meneame.net comes to mind). After they suffered an online traffic disaster publishers tried to save face by making some arrangements with Google while they scrambled to prepare their paywalls.
Situation now: Not sure how it is in other countries, but Google News in Spain is just a news aggregator with Material UI Design where you can select your sources and see the headlines, main image and little else. Each other click will drive you to the publishers site. Apple news was supposed to arrive soon but it’s not there.
Regarding publishers, El País, the biggest news outlet here claims huge paying readers but in reality they are basically desperate to get subscriber, and they price it like they were selling toilet paper packs:
Yes, I do find amusing their promotional pricings and collect them in a specific Gmail label.
IMHO, people who would pay to read news are a declining bunch for basic demography reasons and that’s the drama of the traditional publishers, they missed their opportunity window a decade ago. Now it’s all reels and stories.
I have faith that the new AI generation of tools will nuke everything unleashing a wave of fake news, deep fakes, that people will consider the “I was there and this is what I saw” classic journo work valuable again. But things have to get worse before they get better.
Given the number of people who already complain about paying for software, etc. my guess is you are correct. Newspapers and magazines have been dying by the thousands for years and for or a time major publications in the U.S. made unsubscribing difficult in an effort to hang on to customers. It only took a few clicks to subscribe but you had to call a toll free number to stop. That’s starting to change but it’s still happening at some of the largest.
Years ago I learned that the U.S. news media loves to “shape” the news, especially when it comes to domestic stories. Since then I’ve made it a habit to check with the foreign press on major stories to see if there were any facts that were accidentally left out. I’m going to miss that when our AI overlords put the few remaining journalists out of work.
US libraries have something similar. Amount of magazine coverage varies. My library, for example, is mid-market and has access to about 120 digital titles across two services. One service has less appealing titles but more archival issues. The other has more popular titles but only provides the most recent 1-2 issues. The library also maintains 40 or so physical subscriptions which are all popular/quality titles but hard to get shortly after they come out, and they weed or store issues after a year or two.
By comparison, Apple News+ has about 300 magazine titles with archives. The magazine section at a bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble has 600-1,000 titles. The UK magazine industry is about 2500 titles total. The US is larger but (half the magazines we want to read are UK publications since your magazine industry is so much healthier for historic and geographic reasons.)
You’d think the hundred magazines at a library would be plenty, but because they have to appeal to so many interests and readership levels, most of the magazines don’t appeal to most people. You have to have either a well curated list that omits the middling stuff to make room, or be well into the few hundreds of titles before there’s enough that’s strongly interesting for a lot of the users.
That’s part of what’s caused Apple News+ to struggle to gain readers and subscribers–it’s fine if a free library curation isn’t interesting half the time, but it feels bad to pay for a subscription and not be interested even a quarter of the time, speaking generally.
My wife and I decided that we would rather pay for our news and it be the product than not pay for it and be the product ourselves. I deleted Apple News from devices and replaced it with apps for the news services to which we subscribe. One is a national level news source for our country — okay, it’s the NYT — and the other is a non-American news source. (To be honest, I prefer the non-American source for American news.)
Second reason for going with a new sources and not a news aggregator, apart from also putting dollars into the hands of the people who do the work, is that I want the “slant” of the content to be clear by the choices of the stories that the editors put on in various sections. I do not want an algorithm decided news stories it thinks I want to read. (Especially when that algorithm has to, by design, also keep me reading and clicking from item to item in order to maximize my time “on platform” and the number of ads to which I am exposed.)
Other people can make other decisions. I’m not throwing shade at people who don’t want to pay for the news. (Though, honestly, the American addiction to advertising-supported free shit is a bit disconcerting when you think about it.)
My wife and I don’t follow any news sources on a regular basis and haven’t for the last 25 years.
Too much negativity, exaggerated headlines, political bias, and telling us what we should think about news, and did I mention all of the horrible negative things that get readers’ attention? And the inclination for online “news” to deliberately provoke strong emotions, outrage, etc. about stories that are incomplete, inaccurate, or drawing unfounded conclusions before all the evidence is in.
No thank you. When something important happens, we always find out about it and go online to get more information if desired.
I tried using Apple News a bit and immediately deleted it.
There are quite a few long form articles I find in Apple News that I would love to save to read later but trying to remember to do this along with finding the save later link in Apple News causes me to never go back and read those articles. I wish Apple would allow News articles to at least be saved into Safari Reading list or some place where I could find them easily. Putting them inside the app is so cumbersome and keeps me from embracing the app further.
Exactly. And it’s why I decided to stop using the app. I can’t build 90% of my workflow around reading/read later apps when one of my sources doesn’t function with said read it later apps.
I did see that thank you. Does the original source link work given that the article won’t be opened in Apple News? I’m wondering if it’ll ask me to log in as a subscriber ?
That I’m not sure about. I’m not a subscriber to Apple News Plusso I only ever view articles that can be found on the www. For publications for which I don’t have a subscription I get a standard link to the article on the web. That’s a downside as often times RSS provides a better experience to articles behind paywalls when viewed via many RSS apps.
