The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.
The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.
If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.
Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.
This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.
An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.
I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.
The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society.
This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree.
I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding.
And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.
They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.
The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.
If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.
“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of value with customers.
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous.
What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.
And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.
Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.
Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)
The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...
Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)
Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence
My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.
If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.
I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's:
* Only paid subscribers can read
* Subscribers can share an article (= copy a unique share link)
* Shared articles are free for anyone
This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe.
They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads, for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).
As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.
All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had.
The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former.
It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too.
This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.
In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a
nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news
organization, not owned by any person or company.
The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."
The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.
On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
So, you don't think any government program at all will work in this case?
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:
https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...
It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.
The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.
If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.
Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.
[1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/
https://www.therage.co/donate/
https://zola.ink
[2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184
This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.
Again, it’s been tried. Look at Scroll or Blendle. They failed.
An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
There is no micro-payment problem from the perspective of the vast majority of publishers. They simply don't want it. End of story.
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up.
Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
Yes and that affects all existing 'news' channels too. It comes down to general education levels and that has similar bad incentives in play.
Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest.
Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account.
There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist.
This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it.
Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.
I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.
The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society.
This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree.
I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding.
And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.
They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.
The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.
If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.
“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of value with customers.
It's a great indicator.
Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News.
Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous.
What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.
And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?)
Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
> If the people arent interested in paying
They are, according to the OP:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...
Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.
Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.
Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.
Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)
...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push
I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.
The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...
Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)
Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence
My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.
If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
It might also be the case that one single "donor" puts in like 60% of the budget.
But that is also no different from one single client being 60% of your revenue.
In both cases, they'll be calling some shots.
"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.
I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City
Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.
Donors and owners are different.
The Salt Lake Tribune has always promoted the view of the opposition for Salt Lake City (and Utah). It might not be who you think.
I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's:
This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe.They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads, for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).
As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?
'Free' and 'government funded' are not the same thing. The OP doesn't seem to be government funded.
Also, the BBC has no problem criticizing the UK government.
There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.
All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
There is no winning.
My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had.
The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former.
It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too.
CalMatters is a nonprofit and provides quality coverage. Perhaps that's a viable model at the state level. https://calmatters.org/about/funding/
A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.
There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.
It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news.
Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
In the US: NPR, NBC, AP, The Guardian, ...
The Guardian
I use apnews.com, no paywall.
That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already.
Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.
What is that based on?
This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.
The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."