In which I talk about the news.

Was told by WaPo via popup that I’d already viewed my allotment of free stories for the month, and was invited to give them a hundred bucks per year. Instead, I switched to another device and read the story anyway, and they got no money. (I sometimes subscribe for a month or two to a paper I read frequently, out of guilt, but there are so many I visit that it’s a hassle to subscribe and remember to unsubscribe and keep them all straight.)

Same with the NYT. And the local paper from the last town I lived in. It’s only the 10th of the month, so clearly I click on a lot of news links as I scroll down my Twitter and Facebook feeds. But ultimately, there’s no paper I want more than twenty articles, maximum, per month from.

Problem is, I feel bad about it. I want to support journalism. We need newspapers more than ever before, because they do things that nobody else does: they do long, involved, expensive research; they send reporters to sit through meetings at every level of government; they centralize and curate conversations.

And most of them, unlike entities that were never papers but have only ever existed online, still feel the ghosts of journalistic ethics. They went to school for this shit, and they took ethics classes. They care about impartiality, facts, and justice. We may not agree with their various slants, but they’re all we’ve got. And they’re dying. (See: tronc.) Imagine a world with no journalistic exposées: just imagine it. You think it’s bad now?

When real papers, with real traditions and real experience and real journalistic ethics die, what will fill the void?

And not just big papers. In most small towns, once the paper fails there will be nobody to sit in on the budget meetings and report the results to the citizenry. (And, as we know, unobserved people do things they’d never do otherwise. Enter the new age of rampant fucking fraud and embezzlement at the city and county level!) Nobody to cover the town hall meetings, or the police reports, or the local obits.

This stuff is important, and without it we’re at the mercy of… God knows what. No information, bad information, information made up by politicians, corporations, and whackjobs; important information that never sees the light of day because there’s nobody whose job it is to report on it.

I want to pay for the work of journalists and journalistic institutions because I believe it’s valuable.

However, I have no interest in annual subscriptions to a dozen different news entities, because there’s no paper I want to read thoroughly enough to justify the expense. (The last time I subscribed to the NYT, it guilted me that I wasn’t reading enough of the content to make sense of the subscription. Who has time to read the whole paper each day, let alone the Magazine every week?) This is no longer the age where we all subscribe to our local paper, expecting it to cover local events and to buy important national and international news off the wire. That day is done. Nobody wants a full subscription to a non-local paper, or even a local one. We get our news from everywhere.

What I want instead — and I’ve been thinking about this really hard — is the following:

• A widget I can sign up for once, that follows me from paper to paper and lets me pay a dollar with a single click to view a story behind a paywall. (Or two dollars. Maybe five if it’s a massive research-based exposé.)

AND/OR

• A way to buy an annual subscription that is allocated across all the news sites I visit. (For $99 you can access X number of articles across all member news entities for 12 months; if you go over, you can upgrade incrementally or revert to the per-story fee.)

Is it so much to ask? A little button that pops up and says, “You’ve read your free stories. This article is $1,” and which hits my card immediately and grants me access when I click on it, and which is secure and fair and works across all devices and platforms once I login? Why has no one invented this, when papers are starving for money? Maybe a bank could do it, or a credit card company. Bitcoin. Google. I don’t care, just make it happen.

I don’t want to subscribe to WaPo; I read the big stories but I’ll never read the whole paper every day because I don’t live there. Same for the NYT and the Star-Tribune and the L.A. Times and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (as well as magazines: Slate and Mother Jones and Wired and The New Yorker and The Rolling Stone).

Since most U.S. papers have shut down their international bureaus, I go to international papers for international news. I’d like to pay them, too. But I want it to be convenient and I want it to be fair.

I don’t buy print newspapers or magazines, and I don’t want online subscriptions, but I do want to pay for my news.

So, make it easy for me to do so. I beg you. I love you. We need you.