[GTALUG] The truth is paywalled (was Re: Looks like IBM is planning to eliminate RHEL)

[Russell Reiter]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:37 PM Dave Collier-Brown via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> Hmmn, Reuters and Associated Press are middlemen, while NPR, ABC, CBS and
> the Conversation are "leaf" sites, as are the highly opinionated sites like
> NYT, WaPo, G&M, NatPo and Toronto Sta.
>
Reuters and AP (Associated Press), UP (United Press) International, and CP
(Canadian Press), the Canadian AP arm, used to be called wire photo
services, They would aggregate selected stories from local papers around
the world. It was service by subscription. They would license the stories
for use by local news publishers and push them to the locally subscribed
outlets via teletype.

Not sure what a leaf site is but I'd have to filter out the word maple to
even begin to start looking that up on the internet.

> I wonder if there is a relationship to the "paywallness"?
>
Well the Washington Post gives every reader access to 20 articles every
month. Others give a smaller amount of access before the paywall kicks in.
But following the principle of zero convergence which says that as the cost
of delivering media converges with zero, so does the value of the content;
currently the WP only wants 39 CAD for a years subscription, I think that
is quite reasonable. I'd pay it but I never seem to go over the monthly
limit.

For the most part I think Evan hit the nail on the head ...

What is paywalled is elitist analysis, editorials, op-eds and assorted
claptrap.

I find that if it's just the details I am looking for, if I hit a paywall I
just move on till I find them. Funnily enough, NP seems to have reigned in
Conrad Black. His writing voice changed so radically a year or so ago that
I'm pretty sure he's being edited to pair down his ego which shines so
brightly, even after a prison term. In that case 39c is too much for the
subscription.

At least Rex Murphey is funny. But both of them seem to regurgitate multi
syllable dictionary words in order to inflate the perceived value of the
content. Journalistic flair aside, there is the propaganda value of
confusing language, which business and governments so often rely on.

Fun fact ... using Lynx as a text reader, stops the annoying pop ups. So no
advertisement video pops up or audio starts while I'm trying to quietly
read the local news with my morning coffee, like now. Although Evans link
to "The Conversation" returns a bad html notice, other text readers on
Android, parse out all the xml cruft and give me plain text content.

--dave


> On 2020-08-07 12:48 a.m., Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
>
>
> As someone much smarter than me recently wrote, "The Truth is Paywalled
>> but the Lies are Free".
>>
>
> I call absolute bullshit on this assertion, which I have seen in meme form
> at a number of locations.
>
> It's provably wrong.
>
> --
> David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
> System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the restdave.collier-brown at indexexchange.com |              -- Mark Twain
>
>
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-- 
Russell
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