The answer is: less and less people will.
50% off their price is pretty desperate. But, desperate times when your Times can only get 28 retweets. I’m not a king of Twitter by any means, took me a long time to figure out what it was and how to use it, but I had a post get more retweets than that just the other day, and I don’t have a bagillion followers like a brand everyone knows, the New York Times.
The only reason anyone would pay for something like this anymore is the legacy brand name, which, thankfully such things are going down the toilet faster than the last time you ate a Chipotle burrito. I get the argument to me all the time “well, they’re a respected name with sources…”
Let me give you a little clue about sources. I wrote about this all the way back in 2014, and the best part is I don’t even have to get political to talk about it. I’ll let you read the whole story if you’d like but here’s the gist:
The scary part is that all of these mainstream media websites jumped to the “scoop” based on one post on the internet from some guy who has a picture of a female superhero as his avatar.
I could have completely made it up, and it would have been all over the world within hours. How creepy is that?
So next time you read the news, look at the sources. I’ve seen people demonized and lives destroyed in the public arena based on allegations, and when the follow up stories are done later, they’re buried. I proved myself that it just takes a post on a forum somewhere to spark a media craze if the topic sounds legitimate enough. Definitely makes me wary of our current society.
It’s like I completely predicted how bad things would get in 2016-2017 with fake news. There aren’t better sources for these websites. Most aren’t better researched. Some are better connected and get fed information by people with ulterior motives, that’s about the only difference. I’ve done better journalism on this blog that doesn’t even have any ads than a lot of news sites could ever hope for. It’s not just the paid media, but it does beg the question that when you can get the exact same content unpaid, who would bother subscribing to the failed New York Times?
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