The Correspondent

I don`t have specific favorite writers, but I have favorite sites: https://ivypanda.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/

This article was published by The Correspondent, a new media startup funded by members – if you'd like to read more by the journalists you can become a member (pay-what-you-like)https://thecorrespondent.com/ | or follow us on Twitter --> @The_Corres, @jessefrederik, @mauritsmartijn

I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription. I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model. Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in. I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space. I think https://thecorrespondent.com/ is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle. That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

I've stopped follwing the news cycle 4 years ago. I realized it wasn't a proper source of information. News needs to be published fast, so there is no time to do a proper source check. It it short, so there is no room for other views. It needs to be simple, easily understood, so it uses the dominant world view as a frame. News needs to get attention/clicks, so it is focussed on negative events, creating a skewed view of the world. I only read analysis, long reads, investigative articles and news sites that do not focus on news, but on (global) developments. A good example is https://thecorrespondent.com (english version not active yet), I'm a member of the dutch version and I really enjoy reading investigative pieces about our tax system, healthcare, forgotten dutch histories and so on. All in all I can say that when I stopped following the news cycle, the mental clutter really reduced and it made me feel better.

The Freakonomics podcast goes into events that happened before 2020. It mentions the following article, for example. https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca…

> Any thoughts on Netflix's degradation over time? Netflix both got better and worse at the same time. With wider audiences and more content, there is both more content for you in absolute terms, and less in proportion to the total amount. So while there's more stuff you will like to see, it gets drowned out. https://thecorrespondent.com/104/the-great-paradox-of-our-time-everyth…

I thought at that time the main reason the nation backed out of the universal income was not racism, but a statistical error: > Even former Nixon advisor Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in basic income, following a fatal discovery upon publication of the final results of the Seattle experiment. One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health. > Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all. From https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-…

Read an interesting article that stated that crypto is not private enough to enable good money transfer for criminals. Cash is still the best. In general it stated that crypto currencies are rather useless. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-f… And a couple notes about blockchain https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-a… Personally I have not dig deeper into the pros and cons of crypto but my gut feeling is that it’s pretty useless. Would be better to improve existing structures.

This related article is excellent – "The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising" by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca… > Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing.

Bear in mind that there is a vast amount of clicking on "wasted" adverts, i.e. paid adverts which would have been the top result of an organic search anyway, e.g. eBay spending $20M a year on ads targeting the keyword "eBay", which they thought was great because it appeared to give a $245.6m return on investment, until they switched it off for a bit and realised they got pretty much the same traffic and conversion rate without the massive advertising spend[0]. [0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca…

> Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue. That caught my eye too. Your second sentence is why I put a good chunk of change into https://thecorrespondent.com/, and now send them $5/month. I'd be willing to chip in a couple of bucks per month for ad-free local news, otherwise I'm not interested.

Don't know about investigative journalism, but https://thecorrespondent.com/ claim they're only supported through their reader's subscriptions.

https://thecorrespondent.com/ The Correspondent is an online platform for unbreaking news, committed to collaborative, constructive, ad-free journalism. Together with our members, we want to change what news is about, how it’s made and how it’s funded.

This article poses some interesting thoughts. It is quite long, but I think worth a read if you are interested in this [0]. I think a way to frame the question is: "Will the coming decline in ad-spend result in proportional decrease in sales (while factoring in crisis driven declines)" I suspect that this forced experiment will result in identifying that 20% of ad-spenders were getting 80% of the value, while the rest were either not technically capable or just trying to keep up with trends, thus bidding up the ad prices. The result being huge profit for Google/Facebook as the market maker. [0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca…

No, that's how they are _served_. It is _not_ how they work. This is how they work: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca… TL;DR. Read it anyway, it's great. But executive summary: they don't, and nobody cares.

Just want to quickly namedrop https://thecorrespondent.com/ who are setting out to do exactly this (and have been doing it for some years already in the Netherlands). If you're interested in slower, less emotionally charged news, consider signing up.

Somewhat surprised that there is no mention of The Correspondent yet. The Dutch version has been quite successful for quite a few years now, and they're launching an international version later this year[0][1]. (Having said that, the authors of De Correspondent sometimes come across as oblivious to how their world views are shaped by living in the cultural bubble that is the Randstad[2]. There is a certain arrogance to the writing style that just makes it feel like the kind of thing that people living in Amsterdam would write, and it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. I guess that makes it the Dutch equivalent to the New Yorker.) [0] https://thecorrespondent.com/ [1] https://decorrespondent.nl/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad

Perhaps this will be of interest: https://thecorrespondent.com/ I donated to them on the weekend, after watching The Daily Show interview with a founder.

This may be what you want on many fronts: https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/principles * The Correspondent is openly subjective * The Correspondent is an antidote to the daily news grind * The Correspondent is entirely free of ads * The Correspondent does not strive to maximize profits Example Article: https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decis…

This is also an excellent story about it: https://thecorrespondent.com/3789/operation-easy-chair-or-how-a-little…

They are also working on an international version of their platform: https://thecorrespondent.com/

Historically, gas tax and vehicle registration fees (particularly for commercial trucking) tried to account for the infrastructure cost in a somewhat variable manner. EVs complicate this approach some since electricity is used by more than EVs. Ultimately though vehicle related deaths per mile and per person followed the opposite trend so there hasn't been a huge motivator for people to suddenly feel pressure to have safety regulations which require them to give up the vehicles they like. Climate related requirements needs (such as efficiency) seem to have an ever bigger role in reviewing what sizes make sense lately though. Rather than outright say weight is the thing that needs to be regulated I'd rather see it be directly about efficiency requirements or safety requirements and let manufacturers figure out the best balance to achieve the goals with. Interestingly, Europe seems to have been adding mass at the same rate (higher in terms of percentage growth, actually) but they just started off smaller. https://thecorrespondent.com/310/your-car-has-a-weight-problem-and-we-…

I wish advertising didn’t exist. Not just on the internet, but everywhere else too. Ads encourage people to buy stuff they probably don’t need. They incentivize clickbait and tracking. And most online advertising is probably a waste of money anyways. [1] How then, you might ask, will content and services be paid for? Sponsorships are not a solution for the same reasons. The Brave browser is not a solution. [2] I think the solution is to pay for everything with donations and crowdfunding. This model incentivizes doing what’s beat for the end-user. Great examples of this include Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. If ads were banned, many websites would die, and I would be ok with that. Only the ones that are the best for users would survive. [1] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca… [2] https://rudism.com/the-brave-browser-is-brilliant/

That’s good news! https://thecorrespondent.com/228/podcast-can-you-quit-the-news-and-sti…

Don't forget that the third world has 2x better outcomes with regards to schizophrenia. Probably due to the fact that they have more familial support and/or less reliant on meds. https://thecorrespondent.com/407/people-not-pills-what-the-west-can-le…

Conservatism is also constantly evolving in practice - it just labels whatever its current dogma as "traditional values" regardless of historicity. The political history of abortion in US, and especially and attitudes towards it by the Republicans, is one spectacular example. Welfare is another - e.g. how many people are aware that Nixon of all people tried to pass UBI? (https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-…

This reminds me of the seminal article by The Correspondent about online advertising: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca… Relying on your data science or marketing department to tell you how good your data science or marketing department is doing, with their own metrics and their own evaluation methods that you don't understand, can only really lead to one outcome.

Richard Nixon had a plan for dealing with this, but changed his mind at the last second. [1] 1 - https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-…

This article argues that it doesn't work: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca… Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria." From https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-ca…