Good journalism isn't free, and nobody is willing to pay. Especially when I can spend a couple minutes on Google and find very obvious misinformation coming from very large publications.
The future is probably what Apple is doing with News+, subscription to access a bunch of news for steady revenue (with ad support), it's pretty clear nobody is gonna subscribe to a generic news service at this point, only niche like finance gets subs, or Substack/blogs if you find a trusted source for certain information.
>Good journalism isn't free, and nobody is willing to pay.
NYT costs costs $4/mo for the first year, then jacks up to a staggering (by subscription standards for 'digital media') $25/mo. They have almost 10M subscribers.
Wallstreet Journal costs $6/mo for the first year then it goes to $12.50. They and have ~4M subscribers.
For both publications the subscriber counts are mostly online-only while print numbers continue to fall.
My point is there seems to be a healthy market for quality national reporting that use pay-walls especially when the organizations have the revenue to afford international bureaus (NPR being an exception that doesn't have a pay-wall). People will pay for a product they feel hits a certain quality/trust threshold.
However, most major US cities have only 1 single newspaper remaining and those print versions get thinner and thinner due to lack of ads. Where I live, the newsrooms have indeed been gutted and/or eliminated entirely. This has been going on since around 2005 or so. Back then, the first wave was due to the dominance of Craigslist and the evaporation of the Classifieds section, which generated a lot of revenue for papers.
A significant percentage of the stories in the Seattle Times (my local paper) have stories reprinted from NY Times, Washington Post and others. Cheaper for them to pay licensing fees than hire professional journalists to write articles.
It's much, much worse than "nobody is willing to pay".
Good journalism must be available to the masses for a minimal cost if we want to maintain a functioning democratic society.
Think about it: if "good journalism" is only available to people who can comfortably afford to pay $10-30/month for a single subscription, that means that the people who are already the worst off have less and less access to the vital information they need to be able to effectively act to change their circumstances. This applies both to political information and business information: the former is necessary for those who want to try to make the lot of the poor better overall, while the latter is necessary for those who want to try to better their own situations.
Word-of-mouth networks in this sort of thing can only get you so far, especially when the free information out there is so heavily skewed to advertising, propaganda, and other forms of manipulative quasi-disinformation.
I don't think it's true that "nobody is willing to pay". As the article points out large outfits like The Washington Post, and smaller ones like Politico and Talking Points Memo, and niche ones like Financial Times, get most of their revenue from subscribers, not ads. What is inarguable is that the old model of ripping off advertisers and misinforming readers is finally dead, but it has taken a long time for the operators of that model to internalize the reality. The death blow was dealt by Craigslist, so we've been waiting quite a while.
Personally, I refuse to listen to pleas to "support local news" coming from outlets that have been trying to destroy everything I value for decades. There may be 1 or 2 worthwhile journalists working at the LA Times, for example, but I will never ever give that organization even one dollar. Those journalists need to leave that paper as far as I am concerned.
Google and Meta have brought more advertisers to the doorsteps of news outfits than they could possibly have imagined, but it has also allowed advertisers to direct their spending to outlets that are actually effective. Google and Meta also absorb all of the costs to host and serve the advertisements, acquire the inventory, and operate the marketplace. Newspapers get everything for free now and they are still whining about it.
Before Craigslist, local newspapers in the USA got the majority of their ad revenues from ripping off the public for classified ads. It used to cost $50 to list your used car, or advertise your garage sale. If you are a fan of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley people are always yakking about, this is the gold standard.
Meh. If a ton of competitors rushed in and drove ad price down to marginal cost, they’d still be screwed. They got all their money from classifieds and eBay and Craigslist are to blame for the death of that business model.
The future is probably what Apple is doing with News+, subscription to access a bunch of news for steady revenue (with ad support), it's pretty clear nobody is gonna subscribe to a generic news service at this point, only niche like finance gets subs, or Substack/blogs if you find a trusted source for certain information.