[jjmarr]

It costs money to pay journalists.

You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue.

Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper.

Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling.

> It never occurred to me we’d get here.

My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.

[nozzlegear]

> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.

What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?

Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.

[jjmarr]

A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.

They would only assign journalists for important or local content.

The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.

It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.

They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.

Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.

The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.

[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.

[goosejuice]

> Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock.

Not even remotely. Meta made $200 billion in ad revenue last year. NYT ad revenue increasing 25% yoy and they show ads to subscribers.

[master-lincoln]

Those poor souls who don't have an adblocker keep the wheel spinning. I imagine it to be terrible to see the internet like they do...

[TheDong]

Not mentioned is taxes.

A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.

Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.

[jjmarr]

We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.

The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!

News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.

The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e Big Tech) that link to news must pay.

Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...

[raw_anon_1111]

And in Australia most of that money went to Murdoch controlled media.

[raw_anon_1111]

I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.

This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.

Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?

[metabagel]

Republicans have been trying to cut funding for PBS.

[raw_anon_1111]

What’s your point? A press funded by the government is not going to go out of its way to bite the hand that feeds it.

[microtonal]

It functions fine in many countries though. E.g. a lot of European countries have public broadcasters paid by tax money and they sure do criticize and mock government.

Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.

It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.

[master-lincoln]

Huh? You mentioned yourself that PBS and NPR did. So that proves your point invalid.

[raw_anon_1111]

So my point is invalid that you shouldn’t depend on government funding of media because if the government doesn’t like what you say they will remove funding when that’s exactly what they did?

But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.

Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…