glad we have the ungated link, given that the article is blocked behind a paywall...
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:59 PM on April 15, 2024 [42 favorites]

Ctrl + F ¡°craigsl¡± = not found

It¡¯s not just that people want news to be free on their phones. It¡¯s also and mainly that the revenue source that made news ¡°free¡± (and in print) for so many people was paid classifieds, which are now gone forever, because of Craigslist.
posted by toodleydoodley at 1:24 PM on April 15, 2024 [21 favorites]

...and then Craig turned around and funded a bunch of journalism schools and nonprofit newsrooms.
posted by entropone at 1:53 PM on April 15, 2024 [13 favorites]

Facebook and Google giving and taking away with advertising also pays a part. Special mention going to Facebook for the whole ¡°pivot to video¡± debacle.
posted by Artw at 2:08 PM on April 15, 2024 [16 favorites]

Someone ought to do an FPP on HunterBrook when it gets going.......
posted by lalochezia at 2:16 PM on April 15, 2024 [4 favorites]

Movie listings were a big earner too, also lost to the internet (remember fandango.com?). Also plain old advertising space on the news pages.

People still buy ads in the print editions of newspapers, but print circulation has declined so much that that space is no longer as valuable. While the revenue is still important, it doesn't sell for the amount that could sustain the paper as of old. And website ads sell for pennies.

But the real problem is that "real" newspapers are trying to sustain themselves as businesses-- some publically traded, some not-- while the right-wing propaganda mills are funded by people with deep pockets.
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:50 PM on April 15, 2024 [51 favorites]

Yep, when lies are free but the truth costs money, it's self evident which one will circulate more readily.
posted by wenestvedt at 2:55 PM on April 15, 2024 [40 favorites]

Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters.

What's beneficial to voters? I generally agree it's good to make sure voters can easily access basic information about who and what is on the ballot, how and when you can vote, etc.

But people vote based on vibes¡ªgeneral feelings about how the country is doing and if they're better off under candidate A or B¡ªand I'm not sure exclusively making content that a harried editor would tag "Election 2024" free and paywalling everything else is the neutral act of informing the public the author thinks it is. The fact that there's a new art show downtown, seniors are looking for a place to play pickleball, and streaming TV prices are going up are all important in some small way to voters who are trying to understand if they broadly like the way The World Is Headed.

Taken to a logical extreme, would anyone really be better off if all news was paywalled unless it contained the names Biden or Trump?
posted by smelendez at 3:19 PM on April 15, 2024 [10 favorites]

If one regards news as a service, and in fact a service that benefits democracy and the world itself not just the individual readers, then a donation/grant model seems better than a transactional subscription model, right?

News subscriptions are dying and might soon be gone forever. That makes me sad. But instead of trying to bring them back perhaps we should support free media supported by donations and grants.

Chances are you already know of at least one such: your local public radio station. Give.

Also: ProPublica.

If you are in Seattle: Publicola, South Seattle Emerald, The Urbanist.

Nonprofit but paid street papers like Real Change don't technically fall into this category but they are well worth supporting anyway.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:34 PM on April 15, 2024 [16 favorites]

Regular people either don't have or want to give enough of their discretionary income to make that a sustainable model, evinced by their not paying for the paper?
posted by Selena777 at 3:37 PM on April 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

It seems at least as sustainable as paywalls.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:45 PM on April 15, 2024 [2 favorites]

From the post title I thought this was going to be about how the press now likes to write "They were not available for immediate comment" or "They did not immediately respond to our queries" rather than actually contacting the subjects of their stories and getting their replies.

Anyway I'd pay for a local newspaper that did good journalism and didn't poison it with toxic editorialists, garbage bothsiderism and copaganda but that's also like saying I'd ride a unicorn to work
posted by srboisvert at 3:47 PM on April 15, 2024 [22 favorites]

the press now likes to write "They were not available for immediate comment" or "They did not immediately respond to our queries" rather than actually contacting the subjects of their stories and getting their replies.

Some people just really don't respond to queries, like Elon Musk and his poop emoji auto-reply. Judging by how often you hear of politicians rushing to reveal and pre-spin something after being contacted by a journalist, I think journalists are in fact still contacting the subjects of their investigations and giving a chance to tell their side, at least at reputable papers.
posted by splitpeasoup at 3:56 PM on April 15, 2024 [14 favorites]

But the real problem is that "real" newspapers are trying to sustain themselves as businesses-- some publically traded, some not-- while the right-wing propaganda mills are funded by people with deep pockets.


Is that right? I mean - Fox News is profitable, no?
posted by ManInSuit at 4:09 PM on April 15, 2024 [3 favorites]

IIRC the Washington Post made all of its reporting on Covid available for free.
posted by bendy at 4:11 PM on April 15, 2024 [19 favorites]

It sure seems like nobody who's commented so far works in journalism.

Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters.

And pay the workers who actually do the reporting and writing behind that information how, exactly?

I work for a paywalled news publication. It ain't a volunteer gig (that would be all the unpaid work I do serving on my union's bargaining committee, to help my colleagues win a better contract).

My job is my paycheck. I have bills to pay. If you think news reporting should be done for free, for the good of the public, try doing it yourself.

Somehow the country survived for over 200 years with newspapers that people paid to read (unless they went to their local library or availed themselves of various other options). Democracy is not going to die behind a paywall. LOL.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:32 PM on April 15, 2024 [21 favorites]

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/08/us-political-ad-market-2024-spending

$16B / 130 million households = $120/yr

so instead of running political ads both parties should fund newspaper subscriptions ?
posted by torokunai at 4:35 PM on April 15, 2024 [7 favorites]

I worked as a reporter and editor for a decade, spanning the before and after of Craigslist. That¡¯s how I know what I know.

What I also know is that our sponsors and block advertisers were a bunch of thin-skinned motherfuckers who would hold the news hostage on the thinnest pretext, no matter how ostentatiously we made sure the ad blocks were blind on the page before the reporters and editors poured in the news.

There is an inherent and almost impossible to avoid conflict of interest between commerce and public interest reporting. I never cared who paid me as long as I could eat and pay the rent, but grants or whatever seems like a better idea than letting paper chasers sponsor news.
posted by toodleydoodley at 4:42 PM on April 15, 2024 [26 favorites]

Unfortunately, if people are never taught to reason or understand that sources might have motives, all the writing in the world won¡¯t help. People are addicted to blind faith¡­mostly in evil.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:48 PM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

The problem is not specifically paywalls, because if all news sources were paywalled, people would choose sources to support. The problem is that journalism is paywalled, and people who want to push a point of view are not.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:49 PM on April 15, 2024 [12 favorites]

A (large) majority of this stuff is readily accessible with a text browser such as lynx. It won't be pretty, but there will also be no ads, no gates, no javascript and no cookies. The article in this post is completely accessible and readable via lynx with no problems. Not for everybody but an option...
posted by jim in austin at 5:15 PM on April 15, 2024 [3 favorites]

There is an inherent and almost impossible to avoid conflict of interest between commerce and public interest reporting. I never cared who paid me as long as I could eat and pay the rent, but grants or whatever seems like a better idea than letting paper chasers sponsor news.

I mean, I do generally like the model of a paper being owned by a nonprofit. One would hope that it would lead to news coverage less influenced by sponsors, and also bypass the ruinous measures taken by many vulture-capitalist newspaper owners of recent years who have slashed staffing levels to the bone in order to squeeze more profits out of their businesses.

But I don't know that it's going to work in every market. Also, I don't know that we can assume that nonprofit-owned and/or grant-funded journalism is automatically more objective or virtuous.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:15 PM on April 15, 2024 [4 favorites]

I worked as a reporter and editor for a decade, spanning the before and after of Craigslist. That¡¯s how I know what I know.

Craigslist was just the first among many. Facebook and Google both came gunning for craigslist, and I think Facebook local might have won in the end? Or maybe everyone won -- eBay, amazon, fandango, Etsy, ubereats, GoComics, instagram, and tinder.

I have to wonder though: why did so few metros have more than one viable paper? In KC we had The Star, and that was basically it. And for my entire lifetime, it was owned and operated by a conglomerate; first Capital Cities (now Disney), then Knight Ridder, and now McClatchy. It seems unlikely that you'd have a natural monopoly considering the AP wire exists, and so very few people actually want to read local news. When I think of what a newspaper contained growing up it was five things:

1. The comics section for the kids
2. Grocery store ads for mom
3. Crossword puzzles for grandma
4. Help wanted classifieds for dad
5. Local news for... the dog?
posted by pwnguin at 5:21 PM on April 15, 2024 [6 favorites]

The problem is that journalism is paywalled, and people who want to push a point of view are not.

Yes, but there have always been people and groups with the money to distribute free-of-charge propaganda to the public. In the days before electronic media, it might have been handbills distributed in the marketplace, or newsletters mailed to people's homes. But it's nothing new.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:21 PM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

Quite a bit of news media is available through the public library with a card.
posted by brujita at 5:32 PM on April 15, 2024 [10 favorites]

The definition of irony.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:35 PM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

The newspapers did this to themselves. They were late in moving to the web, they didn't want to change their existing model, they kept junking up their papers with more and more annoying inserts, they had huge pension obligations, and no plan to grow.

I don't really see a solution that doesn't include running journalism organizations at a loss without bundling it with another service.
posted by bshort at 5:50 PM on April 15, 2024 [6 favorites]

If you paywall something, then it can't be read/shared with others so well. However, now you can't depend on advertising to float the bills because ads are targeted, not really actually selling anything apparently, and that's screwed too. Short of all newspapers becoming nonprofits, and don't ask me how they'd do that, I got nothing.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:52 PM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

The thing that doesn¡¯t work about paywalls is they¡¯re basically a choice between committing to a subscription and not seeing the article, which is pretty easy to make unless you really want a subscription. Finding some kind of model that¡¯s a smaller unite would be an easier sell, but nobody has really made that work.
posted by Artw at 6:05 PM on April 15, 2024 [7 favorites]

The thing that doesn¡¯t work about paywalls is they¡¯re basically a choice between committing to a subscription and not seeing the article, which is pretty easy to make unless you really want a subscription. Finding some kind of model that¡¯s a smaller unite would be an easier sell, but nobody has really made that work.

This is what kills me. I'm happy giving you money for an article I read*, but I'm not going to sign up and subscribe to some random town's newspaper to read their one viral article of the year. Not when BypassPaywallsClean exists.

* But it has to be really frictionless. Or even passive. My dream is to have something where I can allocate X dollars a month and then when I click on an article it's logged via a browser plugin and that site gets a portion of my money at the end of the month.
posted by ropeladder at 6:26 PM on April 15, 2024 [19 favorites]

Civic duty is a thing.
posted by Brian B. at 6:37 PM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]

The problem with the micropayment idea is that I don't think the payments end up being as micro as you want. The third time you end up getting hit up for a buck or two for one article you start to wonder if it's really worth it.

The big sites can obviously continue to play the eyeballs game, but the smaller ones can't do that.
posted by mark k at 7:01 PM on April 15, 2024 [4 favorites]

I got an idea, we set up a newsstand. the newsstand would be two or three maybe five dedicated users to site let's use metafilter as an example and these five people would have access to basically every pay wall site, well, a majority of them let's say. When a member needs a link, they'll go to the newsstand and retrieve one or else have the newstand person post it for them...my God that sounds medieval.
posted by clavdivs at 9:22 PM on April 15, 2024 [2 favorites]

The South African news organisation The Dailly Maverick shut down for 24 hours yesterday to highlight this exact crisis.

Quote from that link:

What else needs to happen to avoid the meltdown you¡¯re describing?
Aside from direct financial support from the public and the business sector, we need to improve the environment in which journalism operates by enacting legislative support and incentives. Journalism is a public good that benefits all of society and should be supported and funded, in part, through subsidies, incentives and rebates.

Legal and tax incentives to bolster journalism, such as VAT exemptions on reader revenue contributions ¡ª be it a paywall or a membership model like ours. Public contributions to news media should be tax deductible.

Advertising rebates to make it more appealing for businesses to advertise on news media sites. Donations to news media could be tax-deductible, regardless of PBO status.

Considering the billions of rands of misappropriated funds the state has recovered through investigative journalism, another approach would be to allocate a percentage of the recovered funds to the whistleblowers and legitimate newsrooms that have worked to ensure this outcome.
Other legislative measures we could take are outlined here.
posted by Zumbador at 9:50 PM on April 15, 2024 [7 favorites]

It¡¯s a tragedy that micropayments never got off the ground. Only a few publications have content that makes me feel a subscription is worthwhile. All the rest¡­ I don¡¯t want two dozen auto-renewing subscriptions that I have to manage, and not just because the cost is prohibitive. But I¡¯d be happy to drop a few bucks to read a good article, especially if the payment method was low-friction. There¡¯s no internet equivalent of dropping some quarters into a newspaper dispenser and buying one day¡¯s paper.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:36 PM on April 15, 2024 [11 favorites]

Thinking of how I used to love The Guardian, and they have this "we're free and independent but we sure could use donations!" popup for the last few years or so, and they have also become so increasingly TERFy that it's rightfully becoming a social faux pas to link them or admit you read them at all, and I no longer read them much and probably wouldn't donate unless they backed off the TERF nonsense, and, well....
posted by verbminx at 11:30 PM on April 15, 2024 [11 favorites]

(My point being, stuff like that is going to be a poison pill for some people who would want to support an outlet's journalism that isn't bigoted propaganda but won't because, you know, they'd also be supporting bigoted propaganda. I could be getting that for free on alt right youtube, if it didn't make me want to throw up.)
posted by verbminx at 11:33 PM on April 15, 2024 [3 favorites]

To that end, news organizations should put their election content in front of their paywall.

What is "election content"? People vote based on politics, on his their officials respond and relate to the world. So that basically means putting everything in front of the paywall. Everything is political.
posted by Dysk at 12:38 AM on April 16, 2024 [7 favorites]

As long as you can always find an easy way to get news without paying for it (for example, archive.ph), people will not pay for news and the news organizations will wither. It's like walking past the newsstand because you know there's always a guy around the corner who will hand you a stolen copy of the newspaper.

To counter that, you would have to twist arms, do something drastic like start a news tax, and then give everyone a voucher you could use to subscribe to approved (non-evil, not affiliated with a political party, etc.) news sites. You could choose to subscribe to nothing, but the money would already be out of your pocket, so you might as well direct the money to something you could support and read without frothing at the mouth.

Unused subscription money could be rolled into a general fund to support journalism, such as assistance to kids who stand on street corners and yell "Extry! Extry! Read all about it!"
posted by pracowity at 1:34 AM on April 16, 2024 [2 favorites]

My household actually did subscribe to a bunch of news sources very deliberately the month that Trump was elected. It seemed an important act of resistance. I guess we¡¯re the 1%? We can¡¯t subscribe to them all, though.
posted by eirias at 1:58 AM on April 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

It's definitely unfortunate what's happened to the press, but let's not forget it has never exactly been a sacrosanct institution. From the lies of "Remember the Maine" to the lies of "WMDs in Iraq", we regard it as bulwark of democracy, but should it be?
posted by Borborygmus at 3:37 AM on April 16, 2024 [7 favorites]

In KC we had The Star, and that was basically it.

pwnguin, the Kansas City Times existed until 1990 and it was the morning paper while The Star was delivered in the afternoons. My father always felt it was the better paper even though I believe both were owned by the same company for a decade or so before the Times ended.
posted by drstrangelove at 4:22 AM on April 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

From the lies of "Remember the Maine" to the lies of "WMDs in Iraq", we regard it as bulwark of democracy, but should it be?

Yes, it should. Complaints you have about the press are probably based on things you learned about through the press. Keep it alive and diverse and free, or lose democracy.
posted by pracowity at 5:34 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

The free press is necessary, but not sufficient, for a functioning democracy, just as democracy is necessary, but not sufficient, for a healthy society. Failures of the press or of democracy are not evidence that those institutions are not important, they are evidence that they still operate within a social system made dysfunctional by lack of justice, oligarchic control over the economy, an insufficiently educated public with poor critical thinking skills making them vulnerable to demagoguery, hegemonic social structures that disempower people based on assigned social identities, etc., etc. As long as all this remains true, liberating systems like the free press and democracy will occasionally fail us. But they are also necessary tools for changing those facts about our society.
posted by biogeo at 6:22 AM on April 16, 2024 [8 favorites]

It sure seems like nobody who's commented so far works in journalism.

Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters.

And pay the workers who actually do the reporting and writing behind that information how, exactly?

I work for a paywalled news publication. It ain't a volunteer gig (that would be all the unpaid work I do serving on my union's bargaining committee, to help my colleagues win a better contract).

My job is my paycheck. I have bills to pay. If you think news reporting should be done for free, for the good of the public, try doing it yourself.

Somehow the country survived for over 200 years with newspapers that people paid to read (unless they went to their local library or availed themselves of various other options). Democracy is not going to die behind a paywall. LOL.

I worked on the production side for a decade. I don¡¯t know how well the paywall is paying your bills.

Newspapers for the longest time were paid for by the advertising, full stop. You hoped that circulation (subscriptions + single copy sales) paid for itself. Classifieds were a quarter to a third of revenue. But display ads were huge, huge money. The amount of online impressions you would need to generate the same revenue as a single day run for a quarter page ad is staggering. I had a front row seat to the collapse of newspapers as we knew them. Craigslist definitely played a part, and the reason it was such a danger to newspapers was that they were not looking to make a ton of money. One day I saw a booklet that was handed out to the classified sales people called ¡°How To Compete With Craigslist¡± and I knew they were screwed. Let¡¯s see, pay $20 for a 3 line ad that¡¯ll be in the paper hopefully in 2-3 days, or post an ad with almost no limit on text, plus photos, all for the price of ¡°free¡± in most cases? Yeah, you aren¡¯t competing with that. The housing market was booming, which kinda held back real estate advertising for a while. After all, if any house under $200k is getting multiple offers within minutes of hitting MLS, why spend money to advertise it? Then in late 2005 investors started selling their houses, which propped up classifeds for a while. Then the 2008 crash pretty much put an end to classifieds. I remember doing a Sunday classifed section after the crash that filled a total of one page with the section masthead. Another issue was ¡°majors.¡± Those are your big national advertisers. Circuit City closed down, as did Mervin¡¯s. Robinsons-May and Macy¡¯s merged. Other big retailers closed down as well. At our paper alone, serving a mid-sized city, those majors closures and that Macy¡¯s merger (which combined two majors into one) resulted in the loss of several million dollars. At one paper. Nationwide it was massive losses. In our case, these losses meant the shareholders of our national publicly traded parent wanted cuts cuts and more cuts. Lots of people lost their jobs and content was cut. This started a vicious circle that continues now, and there¡¯s not much left. A number of papers have been sold to private equity companies who have a track record of even more draconian cuts.

Much has been made of the failure of papers to successfully monetize online content in the 90s. There¡¯s something to that, but at the same time, the profits they were making were so obscene that it really didn¡¯t matter. Why risk losing print revenue to online? Our city was bringing in 8 figures worth of profit yearly. Not revenue, profit, and that¡¯s just one mid-sized metro market. They looked at online through the same lens that they looked at print and prioritized advertising over circulation. Even when it was clear you couldn¡¯t sell enough online ads to replace print revenue, they were still rolling in the print advertising cash. Once the crash happened, it was too late to fix things.
posted by azpenguin at 6:23 AM on April 16, 2024 [14 favorites]

Chances are you already know of at least one such: your local public radio station. Give.

Fuck, no. Every time I'm stuck in traffic and turn on Morning Edition or All Things Considered, the very first thing I'm going to hear is a long article where Israelis are portrayed as full human beings, speaking for themselves in largely unaccented English, with hopes and dreams being crushed by those barbarians at their borders, and Palestinians are portrayed as faceless masses chanting rhyming slogans in a foreign language. I'm not blocking a highway, or voting for some shitbird third party to "teach Biden or the Dems a lesson", but I ain't funding that racist garbage.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:35 AM on April 16, 2024 [12 favorites]

So which news sources are you funding?
posted by pracowity at 6:44 AM on April 16, 2024 [3 favorites]

The problem with establishing ¡°nonprofit¡± news organizations is that nonprofit is not inherently neutral in bias, nor even always not profitable. Our award winning daily is supposedly guided by an award winning nonprofit media organization, which is in turn underwritten by a billionaire real estate developer who owns (among other things) an nhl hockey team, and who likes to put his name on stuff like city parks, boys & girls clubs, and other public good/human infrastructure projects. No way that¡¯s not a recipe for owning the news.
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:46 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

is it safe to say the average MeFite is a little more motivated when it comes to the news media they seek out and consume?

from what I can see, this is one of the many signs of some kind of end. most people I know are not losing sleep over this total collapse of the information ecosystem. it is literally not a thought in their heads, let alone a concern. in the past 15 years I've seen local radio which at least featured local announcers who'd cover local news and sports and interview guests in the morning before flipping a switch to run daytime programming on the canned music from HQ several provinces away.. become, essentially, a full on robot. I have not listened to local radio in several years.

my community saw two local papers become one local paper that is now a regional paper run from the nearby city. and advertising and subscriptions are on the decline, hell I nearly cancelled I was so pissed off with the endless conservative bullshit coming through that rag. but the thing is, it's the only show in town for young reporters who show up, live and work in the community for a couple years (if we are lucky) and actually sit at council meetings and attend events and report that news.

and no-one cares, we are seeing this disappear in our lifetime and no-one cares. I am resigned to the idiocracy we are creating, people are going to be a lot more ignorant, fearful, selfish, gullible, and outraged by (name your thing) until the last semblance of a democracy is blamed for all the latest bullshit that's coming and we're all living under some version of tyranny.. Big Men with Answers. with any luck we don't take too much with us as we go.

and we deserve that. tell me I'm wrong.
posted by elkevelvet at 6:59 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

Jeff Bezos could operate the Washington Post entirely free to the public entirely out of his own pocket in perpetuity, and the total cost would have zero effect on his life. He used to offer free subscriptions to .edu email addresses but stopped even that because he doesn¡¯t have enough billions.

I donate monthly to our local public radio station and a local news website that covers local govt well. I refuse to pay some billionaire for news.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:10 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

I refuse to pay some billionaire for news.

Did you use to subscribe to any newspaper at all? You were paying some rich asshole for news then too. Things have only ever been owned by rich assholes. Newspapers were never nonprofits.

Mostly I am just exhausted of being tapped for money every five minutes by everything. Every ten minutes on any podcast I'm being hit up to join their patreon*. Every link I click online prompts a sign-in or pay-to-read window. Every fucking tv show is on a different fucking service that costs too fucking much, and gets worse every month. The net effect is that I no longer actually bother engaging with much of anything!

*my personal nemesis. Patrons were wealthy, people! Regular ass dipshits with medium jobs and rent to pay were never patrons of the arts.

I don't know what the answer is. I would love to just sign up for a thing, ONE, one single thing, and feel reasonably confident that I would get a comprehensive amount of news and interest. But basically that thing is the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and everyone I know is well on record as finding them unconscionable monsters, so, fuck it dude, I just don't ever know what's going on.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:30 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

2. Grocery store ads for mom

Grocery store COUPONS from the insert in the center of the Sunday paper. When the paper cost a quarter, you could save a LOT more than that at the grocery store if you clipped out all the coupons and were smart about it. Not just "mom", but college kids and all sorts used to benefit from those. I haven't seen a print edition of my hometown paper in a long while but I assume they must be still there in some form.
posted by Pallas Athena at 7:44 AM on April 16, 2024 [6 favorites]

The thread ranges over familiar ground for the topic of TFA. Which I am not reading. Because anyone who can say

But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy.

with a straight face, after the going-on-nine-years-now showing of the Emperor's New Clothes in our national politics, is likely to be wrong about just almost everything else also.

The most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with the kind of disinformation that will make the owners happy with the messaging. You might not like it, but that's today's reality. Really, if TFA were right about the mission of news organizations, the world would be different than it is in some highly noticeable ways.

For example, far and away the most important political story of the 21st century in America is how the R Party has given up on trying to win national elections, knowing that they cannot appeal to a majority of the electorate, and focused instead on trying to redefine "the electorate" to be "people who will likely vote for R candidates," via voter suppression efforts of various kinds. There is the occasional nod in the direction of recognizing this fact, but no recognition whatsoever that the R Party has ceased to be a political Party in the normal American sense, and has instead become a radical reactionary subversive organization dedicated to the perpetuation of minority rule. There can be no real good-faith difference of opinion on this topic between well-informed interlocutors with no axes to grind, but it is utterly absent from our elite political discourse. If TFA were correct about the mission of news organizations, political opinion would be completely consumed with this one thing.

If TFA's notion of the purpose of news organizations were right, the second most important political story of the last 10 years would be how Donald Trump literally stumbled into the R Presidential nomination in 2016, and how he literally "won" the 2016 national election by accident. Right up until election night his crew was so not expecting to win that they had made no preparations at all for taking power in January! And there were stories back in 2017-18 about what a shitshow that caused, but nobody at all was asking how that came to happen, and what the answer to that implied about the US system for selecting Presidents. That would be topic consuming really a lot of pixels and megabytes, if the mission of news organizations were to provide the public with information to allow citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy. Or even in a constitutional republic for that matter.

An issue I did not see mentioned in the thread is the role that concentration of media ownership has played in all of this. News has always been owner-driven (as the thread shows, everyone knows) but the owners of the past were not corporate automata executing programs designed by MBAs to "optimize" for revenue. The owners had human interests, and these included some concern for the kind of public service reporting that TFA asks for. Modern corporate ownership filters out all of the human concerns of the beneficiaries of ownership except greed and a desire for status quo stability.

Micropayments were one of those techbro ideas that sounded great but the reason they never happened (there were technical challenges that were never met, but they would not have been insurmountable) was that people hate unpredictable costs and will choose flat-rate pricing over per-transaction anytime there's unpredictability about the latter. The appeal of micropayments lies in a failure to understand consumer psychology around paying for things.

IDK how the newspapers would have avoided being eaten by the Internet, the way the Internet was rolled out. TFA might be correct on the lede of the lede, that putting out for free at the dawn of the Web was the wrong way to go. Maybe better to have stayed offline. In a different world, where the Internet itself was a public service and not something that owners got to gouge people for as a privilege, there might also have been money to pay the journalists to go online as a public service.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:46 AM on April 16, 2024 [9 favorites]

Only a few publications have content that makes me feel a subscription is worthwhile. All the rest¡­ I don¡¯t want two dozen auto-renewing subscriptions that I have to manage, and not just because the cost is prohibitive.

Another problem with subscribing is that newspapers have a terrible reputation for making it nearly impossible to cancel subscriptions if you decide you don't want them. Knowing that someday I'll have to spend three hours on the phone, escalating through some customer retention nightmare process, has definitely kept my wallet safely in my pocket on more than one occasion.

(In a similar situation with a landline once, I finally gave up and lied that I was leaving the country because nothing else had worked, and I don't care to relive the experience!)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:33 AM on April 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

I think to some extent this is just a consequence of the democratization of information. The threshold for getting information out to the public is very low and so it is impossible to make money gatekeeping access.

That means a lot of things that would have been suppressed or maginalized get through. Sometimes that is fascist conspiracy theory. Sometimes it is reporting on victims of genocide who would have been faceless hordes of terrorists under the old regime.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 9:43 AM on April 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

I think this is a useful counter-balance to my kneejerk cynicism as displayed above

I sure hope this period leads to not terrible changes
posted by elkevelvet at 9:54 AM on April 16, 2024 [2 favorites]

Another problem with subscribing is that newspapers have a terrible reputation for making it nearly impossible to cancel subscriptions if you decide you don't want them.

I think that's a lot of businesses these days. It doesn't give them money to make it easy for you to quit 'em.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:21 AM on April 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

Water flows downhill, and the majority of people gravitate to free sources of information and entertainment when those are available. Of course, most of those are ad-supported. But the world has changed now, and the traditional role of journalism unfortunately has been lost or drowned out in the storm of information people are consuming on social media, usually without paying. There will always be a small percentage willing to pay for higher-quality reporting, but that percentage is a lot less than it used to be. Adapting to the times is the only way.
posted by TreeHugger at 10:30 AM on April 16, 2024 [2 favorites]

journalism should be funded by:

1. parties, always
2. unions, when possible
3. the state, when necessary
4. the universal basic income, in a universe where we wrest nice things from the hands of owners and so journalists don¡¯t require extra money to support themselves

journalistic outlets worth a damn must always be biased — information that¡¯s not deliberate propaganda toward one¡¯s own ends is always accidental propaganda toward the ends of another.

newspapers worth a damn must have exquisitely good coverage of local sports, good movie/tv reviews are also a requirement. good advice columns are such a requirement, possibly as important as good sports coverage. because the things above are why people read newspapers, and so if you¡¯re good at the stuff that attracts people, they will also read your propaganda while they¡¯re there.

also, you should have at least a few columnists who are very very funny.

you know what: upon typing this all out, it strikes me that the media future we must aim toward could be accurately described as ¡°defector uber alles.¡±

also it strikes me that there are episodes of normal gossip i haven¡¯t listened to yet
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:52 AM on April 16, 2024 [4 favorites]

Civic duty is a thing.

Do any Americans under 40 think this way, though? It¡¯s challenging for me to think of many things that have happened in the public sphere in their lifetime that would suggest this is a reasonable way to look at the country.
posted by reedbird_hill at 12:19 PM on April 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

> Civic duty is a thing.

Do any Americans under 40 think this way, though?

Emphasis mine - because when I read this I suddenly heard Adam Savage saying, "well, there's your problem!"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:35 PM on April 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

journalistic outlets worth a damn must always be biased ¡ª information that¡¯s not deliberate propaganda toward one¡¯s own ends is always accidental propaganda toward the ends of another.

if what you want is bad journalism which 50% of people won't read, sure, go ahead
posted by Pallas Athena at 12:45 PM on April 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

I have known a few people who see communication as nothing other than a means of manipulation and control. They are not happy people and have spread their misery to others around them.
posted by biogeo at 1:12 PM on April 16, 2024 [5 favorites]

Not all billionaire owners are the same. Had it just been Jordan Bitove that bought the Toronto Star I probably would have gone "who?" and shrugged. Billionaires aren't the nicest people in the world but I do think it is useful to have press with access to pockets deep enough to defend against libel suits. But the the co-owner was a Maxime Bernier donor and that was beyond the pale for me. And as the Star engaged in the occasional bit of transphobic nonsense even before it was bought I think I'm happier not subscribed.
posted by mscibing at 9:19 PM on April 16, 2024 [2 favorites]