I think you're misunderstanding. You're getting less from your scattered reading than he is from investing in a few, well-packaged publications, assuming you spend the same amount of effort reading. A regular reader of a publication gains an expertise that saves a lot of time and allows for much more reading between the lines. That's a big part of what people are paying for. It wouldn't make sense to pay for more publications than you can master, even if they cost what you'd consider a fair per-article rate. It's not really about minimizing cost per article by buying articles in bulk, especially in the digital age, as you previously noted.
I am not misunderstanding, I am telling you the reality of the situation: People don't do that. That is literally what this report is about, that "a third of new subscribers to news publications cancel in the first 24 hours". They read articles sparingly across many different sources, and they will not pay for a recurring subscription across them all. Newspapers can either ignore that and slowly die out, or find more effective business models that match how people actually consume content now.
This mindset of "no, it is the people who are wrong" is completely backwards, and no amount of lecturing will make it true.
Sorry, I knew I should've headed off a tangential response about the people who don't read news. Most of them shouldn't start doing that. My comment was in response to you saying that you read 1-2 articles from a wide variety of sources and seemingly not understanding the value of concentrating that same volume of reading into fewer sources. As for newspapers in particular, the mid market is giving way to fewer paywalled papers of record, and a wider variety of periodicals.
I don't think you're listening, because the point is that these people do read the news. That's what this report is about: they read the news, but they're not willing to pay for a recurring subscription. Lecturing one person (me) about the value of subscriptions is not going to change anything. I do pay for a few subscriptions. There's just far more that I can't read because it's just not worth the monthly cost. And that's the reality of the newspaper business.
I have been reading closely. We're on a subthread started by you saying you thought it was audacious to charge a subscription for news and microtransactions are more appropriate. Now you've said you do pay for news subscriptions, which I think someone wouldn't do if they didn't understand the value, so I think we've gotten to the bottom of this.
You're missing the forest for a single tree (me). Again, the point is that there are way more publications that I want to read but I can't due to those monthly subscriptions. It is audacious for newspapers to demand recurring subscriptions, but I have no other choice, so I've picked two. This model is not sustainable, as the report demonstrates. There is a huge market that is willing to pay less than a monthly recurring subscription that is totally unaddressed.
Yes, there is also a market for paid aggregated news. Apple News+ (acquisition of Texture) is probably best known. Some obvious limitations, of course.
