I come from an era when free news was the BBC news broadcast on the radio. Some had TVs but the same applied more or less. Otherwise you bought a newspaper.
I am also getting Samuel Pepys diary from 1660 in my daily feed, who had news only through his contacts.[1]
If free news is a right, it is new thing, and maybe not a permanent thing.
BBC news is free worldwide on-line[1]. It's usually the first news site I go to in the morning (from the US). Obviously, elsewhere for my local news, but it gives me a good overview of what is going on big picture.
It's not a good sign that capitalism is creeping into journalism.
When the flow of money gets to decide what your ink writes, the doom is already upon you. Now, there are those who proclaim that they get funding through crowdsourcing and don't accept money from corporate or politicians. But eventually, even they will be forced to bow down before the "path of least resistance" narrative for going against the populist opinion will bring down their revenues which they highly depend on.
Why? I would see the humour as lower value than understanding their line of reasoning. Sight unseen I would hazard you fall into the hands of bias, beyond Elvis on the moon bad.
I went to archive.is and yes.. my line of reasoning is in there with other stuff I hadn't thought about.
It bodes ill for our democracy that those who cannot pay — or choose not to — are left with whatever our broken information ecosystem manages to serve up, a crazy quilt that includes television news of diminishing ambition, social media, aggregation sites, partisan news and talk radio. Yes, a few ambitious nonprofit journalism outlets and quality digital news organizations remain, but they are hanging on by their fingernails.
It's worth reading.
Lydia Polgreen has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since 2022. She spent a decade as a correspondent for The Times in Africa and Asia, winning Polk and Livingston Awards for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in Darfur and resource conflicts in West Africa. She also served as editor in chief of HuffPost.
I am also getting Samuel Pepys diary from 1660 in my daily feed, who had news only through his contacts.[1]
If free news is a right, it is new thing, and maybe not a permanent thing.
[1] https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/06/13/