this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Yes, this is what I’m saying. Distribution is essentially free now (not entirely, but it’s absurdly cheap). As long as you can fund the work it’s only a win if more people can have access to it. Of course this falls apart if people can’t make a living doing good journalism. Does this mean paywalls / ads are the only / best solutions? Maybe! But I think it’s fair to dream of other systems which could allow this to function and allow for broader access. Maybe we use libraries as a crutch, maybe some form of universal basic income could allow people to do this work and provide it for free, maybe there could be grants, or donations, or whatever. Of course people need to be able to make a living off of this work, and there’s obviously going to be issues with every way we could approach this… but that doesn’t mean it’s not a shame when people who want to read it can’t access it (or can’t access it at a price they’re willing to pay).
The thing is that economies of scale do not really work with (good) journalism. You'll never get a ton of clicks on an in-depth, nuanced and well-researched story, because it's not really "sexy". That's why even serious publications need to put out clickbait content, as it essentially funds the actual serious journalistic work. The problem here is that clickbait articles cause a reputational damage to publications.
A paywall makes it possible to avoid all of this, but then you run into the problem that fewer people have access to your content, rendering what you do less impactful.
As a journalist, let me tell you something: the reality is that news is an awful business. It's hugely useful for public discourse, but it does not make any money. It's essentially a public service, like roads or public transportation or schools: they are essential parts of society and they don't work as a business.
Some countries realized that, and they have public-funded or state-funded media, like the BBC (on NPR, in a different way). While this poses huge problems with regards to conflicts of interest and freedom of the press, that's the only economic model that actually works.
Yeah, I think publicly funded news is an important model to consider because in many ways it seems like the only good way to do it… but obviously people have concerns about conflicts of interest, which is fair, but you’re going to have them no matter what, so maybe we need a mix of differently funded news sources… or maybe we just need other systems in place that decrease the conflict of interest and make it unlikely for the public funding to be manipulated in order to control the news or whatever. This is one reason that some system of universal basic income seems like an appealing solution to me. If everybody is just guaranteed a livable wage, then it’s not really a source of income that could be altered just to manipulate journalists (ideally anyway). Though, obviously there’s potentially problems with that too, and journalists may have additional expenses which would not be covered, so it could limit what they can actually do.
Publicly funded media is also under constant attack by populist parties (NPR, the BBC, the Italian broadcasting company, the Swiss one, etc). They are being accused of being leftist, irrelevant, too big, or too expensive. Which are all excuses to destroy them and to be able to free up the market for huge private conglomerates that have an agenda