This seems like a nice compromise. The news orgs get to keep the initial flurry of page views while the free information/universal library role of the Internet is maintained. But still those magazines will want to control their back catalogues. They currently sell access to libraries/universities. And as many on HN suggest, some of those news orgs would like to change/update stories without a publicly available "revision history".

>about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.

Is the Internet Archive regularly used as a paywall workaround? Generally it's archive.is, which has no connection to the IA.

> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future

In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.

Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.

It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.

The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.

In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.

I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.

I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.

I would be glad if these “news” sites weren’t posted to HN at all. If the article is true and worth discussing, it will be reported by a more reputable organization (e.g. Reuters) or it’s a primary source that should be posted directly (sometimes the source is posted then a news article covering it is posted later, I don’t know why both aren’t merged).

Too often they’ve been caught selectively reporting details and quotes, or reporting facts from an unreliable source that turned out to be outright false. In the latter case they quietly retract the article, so most readers continue believing the lie (maybe that’s why they don’t want to be archived).

Even posting a small blog is better, while it can also be biased and untrustworthy, if it has original thought, supports an individual, and doesn’t have ads. Although the amount of obvious LLM blogs submitted here is another issue.