I can’t believe this even needs to be stated. People on here complain of clickbait, ads, and the general enshittification of the journalism industry (articles designed with word count first and foremost, etc) then turn around and disparage the one way journalism sites can move away from that.

Free news gets its money from investors that control what is being said, and clickbait titles get designed to drive as much traffic as possible. These sites don’t get all their money from ads alone.

Subscriptions are a way for these sites to minimize the influence of corporate shittery, by making enough money on their own to not resort to base tactics that hold the industry and consumers alike back.

It usually costs you something like a cup of coffee to get everything from that site for free, for articles that are generally freer of shit than their contemporaries. If all of you collectively decide to just bypass it, the news will 100% become worse quality down the line when they see that the subscription model isn’t as profitable.