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WSJ vs. Ground News: What Do You Think?
I’m considering dropping my subscription to the Wall Street Journal in favor of Ground News. However, before pulling the trigger, I’d like to know what all y’all think.
Here are the nuts-and-bolts considerations: I’m paying $507 annually for the digital WSJ. (That used to be $607 for the physical print edition, but delivery service became so poor I finally had to give it up.) A premium subscription to Ground News is $100 yearly.
I don’t really care for the digital experience of reading the “paper” online. I’m an old man, and I love the tactile experience of holding the paper in my hands, aligning the pages with a sharp, crisp snap of my wrists, and scanning the whole page at one sweep before choosing what to read first. The digital version is an anemic, half-hearted counterfeit of the original print edition. Also, the news coverage in the WSJ has been trending “center-left” for quite some time, although the editorial policy continues to be “center-right.” If I could get a subscription to the WSJ weekend edition in hard copy that would be delivered to my home reliably, that’s what I’d do. Sadly, that’s not an option. (I’ve asked…)
I learned of Ground News via the Ricochet “Three Martini Lunch” podcast. It is a news aggregator service that features a description of the left-right bias of the source material. I started noodling about on its free homepage, and am considering dropping the WSJ and giving Ground News a try. But I know I’ll really, REALLY miss the WSJ Weekend Review section. (Seriously…it’s the best…that and Dan Neil’s automotive column.)
Mrs. Hoplite was previously only indifferently aware of what the WSJ subscription was costing us. Now she’s keenly tracking it, and a potential savings of $400 has a real attraction to us both.
So…thoughts?
Published in General
Sounds like your mind is made up and you are just asking for permission. Go ahead and try it. It’s only a C note. If you don’t like it, you can migrate back to the WSJ.
The WSJ has become mostly another establishment rag. I also hate the pure online experience.
I’d say make the change.
$500 is too much.
I get the daily 1440 newsletter, and an ad there led me to Tangle, which does the thing of presenting both left and right views of an issue. So far happy with both. I used to have a digital subscription to WSJ back in the James Taranto days but I left not long after he did.
I started to subscribe to the WSJ because I find there is no substitute for in depth long-form reporting from organizations that have significant national and international reach for many issues. I felt that my understanding of most issues was becoming way too superficial due to just browsing headlines and reading short posts on-line. I am trying hard not to lock myself in an echo chamber by only reading sources that are ideologically aligned with me. The WSJ is not as far left as the NY Times or Washington Post so I chose to subscribe and I am not sorry that I have. I’m looking into Ground News based on your post. But I don’t think it replaces the WSJ.
I am currently a subscriber, but I would not pay 500 bucks, especially considering the left-ward tilt in the news section. If you want, give it up for a period of time (I’m not sure how long, 4-6 weeks?) and you will get cheap offers for at least a year. That’s where I’m at now.
The way I figure it the legacy media has gone from selling news to selling outrage. A lot of the new media on the right is also selling outrage. That leaves and opening for folks who are looking to sell information rather than entertainment. I’d say give ’em a try, but as Lauren Bacall would put it “It’s your dime.”
I use the free Ground News, it’s pretty good. The above-it-all, right-and-left aspect is good, but the best thing is that it sends me to read articles in a huge number of papers I’d never look for. The WSJ has a cramped and restricted POV.
Does (a premium subscription to) Ground News replicate the full articles, or only snippets or portions as it tells you the leaning of the source?
I like to take part in the comment sections. If the WSJ continues its policy of keeping comments out of articles on which it doesn’t want to be challenged, I may drop it. Not in favor of any news aggregation service, though.
“Just asking for permission”? Maybe. However…
What I’m hoping to get out of the discussion here is for someone to make an impassioned defense of the WSJ and bring to my attention something I’ve overlooked or hadn’t thought of.
See above for my comment–I can make a defense at a much reduced rate. I’m reaching here, but is there any chance you are in the “Apple universe,” as opposed to Windows. Apple News+, which includes the WSJ, is an interesting deal, but only for Apple tech.
It appears that Ground News uses a LLM-AI program to generate a four to five-bullet summary, followed by links to the various source material and websites. So, the full articles are available, plus the metrics Ground News uses to evaluate the degree of “left-center-right” -ness.
I am a pretty dedicated Apple customer. My phone, tablet, and laptop are all Apple. I don’t use Apple+ or Apple TV, because I’m a grumpy and cranky old man. (“Hey, you kids!”)
It doesn’t solve your preference for hard copy, but, as near as I can tell, Apple News+ includes a full subscription to the WSJ in the Apple News format, along with a whole bunch of other stuff (e.g., National Review). It’s 12.99/month
creek-creek. chirp.
Why reward them for swinging leftward?
Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about it, too.
I see the point, and see it a bit differently. The issue is somewhat similar to the anti-Trump bias in National Review.
If I subscribe, I’m “rewarding” the publication for continuing to provide content that appeals to me (e.g., business news in the case of the WSJ). Eventually, it comes to a matter of balancing the good with the bad, and neither of those pubs has gotten there yet from my perspective.
The thing is, if the news aggregators aren’t paying for what they aggregate, how long can it really last? If people only pay for aggregation, and not for the material being aggregated, that seems like a dead end.
You can also read a lot of WSJ articles for free in their app. I can’t vouch for whether that includes the Weekend Review section or Dan Neil’s automotive column, I mostly just skim the headlines and read some of their business and finance coverage.
Two thoughts…
Well, if they actually get some revenue from clicks, sure. If clicks just are used to calculate how much a paid subscription should be, but few people actually do it, that’s less useful.
I have Ground News, I stopped WSJ at $200/year because the only attraction, the opinion pages, turned into “Unbounded/illegal immigration is good because our editors deem it so.” No facts, no studies, no arguments, just we said so. I called the editor on it in a Ricochet post comment to her face. I ran across this with the NYT early, a lot of “we think this so you should too” content.
Ground News is an aggregator that categorizes according to left/center/right (which is funny and delusional but they seem to be intellectual engaged enough that the categorization might evolve) and I find it useful when I want to find or discover obscure stories, find angles on stories too bent not to ridicule loudly and publicly, and generally see what has been said about what I am writing about. What it obviously does not do is give you access to the full stories if the source is behind a paywall.
I subscribe to different flavors of news because, for example, I like to know what hawks are selling this week, what military professionals are saying about conflicts and politics (not usually hawks, by the way), the better MAGA stuff, traditional Catholic media, and, of course, all things Bee.
Iĺl give you ¨grumpy and cranky¨, but as 18 years my junior, what gives you the right to call yourself ¨old¨?
Fair enough. When I started drawing my military pension at 60 years old, in my mind I passed a frontier from which I can’t retreat back across.
Yer both whippersnappers.
I got a cheapo deal with the WSJ. For something like $52 per year I can read anything online from them. I have an Apple computer but that has nothing to do with the discount. It’s because we used to subscribe to the print paper for a couple of years and gave it up because my wife and I don’t have time to read newspapers. So the WSJ kept sending me offers of deals if I would re-up with them. The same happened with National Review Online when I once quit them, too.
I don’t really get the “leftward bent” that everybody is ascribing to the Wall Street Journal. I don’t read very many articles from them, so I can’t really judge this. I only read selective stuff, just about all of it political. Can anyone give me an example of a left-leaning article from them? I hope it is not simply because they disagree with Trump on some issues. That is often the criterion people use when they use the term “left,” but that is not appropriate since Trump is hardly on the right on many of his issues.
In the case of the WSJ, I think the perception is that their choice of coverage (individual articles) has moved away from its former self in straight-ahead hard news coverage to a lot of “lifestyle” coverage that often tilts left in a sort of touchy-feely way. I assume this is designed to appeal to what they perceive is a broader market.
Regarding Trump, the paper has always been resolutely open borders, so that will produce a divide.
I took mine off of auto-renew. I think the issue that came in yesterday is my last one.