The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.
It's not like the one comment is the only newsworthy thing that day. It's a big complicated world with so many important things happening that we can't possibly keep up. It'd be easy to fill up the news with a tiny fraction of them, instead of picking one or two facts and spouting lots of opinions about them. Doing the latter is just a choice they've made.
What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.
We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.
I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that?
Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.
This often happens when the news source is not honest about their biases, or if they don't make their biases clear. Fox News is the classic example: Their tagline is "fair and balanced," but their clear objective is to present the Republican/Conservative side of the story. This dishonesty about their bias is at the core of their credibility problems, though, to be clear, it does work in terms of effectively deceiving many people.
the bias is extremely thick but more subtle on NPR, This American Life, Radiolab, Science Friday, etc. Sometimes they claim to cover both sides of an issue but their belief / agenda is clear in how they frame and respond to one side the other and how much time they give
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now.
I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.
Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.
To be fair, my assumption on that line was always that they were saying they're balancing out the overall news world. Still dirty, of course. Regardless, everyone knows how they lean.
What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.
Respectable journalism calls this an "editorial stance".
The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.
Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.
The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.
If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.
Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.
This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.
I never saw either as a purchase option on any major newspaper or site. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You need to be large enough to be able to get big name partners on board to seed the network.
Edit: in reality this already exists. Amazon/Apple Pay/Google Play already have reloadable gift cards/accounts. Just like using it on the web, click yes to pay ten cents with whatever. The accounts can still be used to buy whatever. Done. Just have to gate it to gift cards accounts.
Blendle was largely targeted in the Netherlands and Germany so if you’re in the US it isn’t surprising that you didn’t see it. But it had major publishers on board and it failed.
But you’re right, it’s a chicken and egg problem that won’t get resolved. If an org is already making money via subscription they have no incentive to do micropayments.
An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
See this sounds excellent to me. In order to make it work for the boardroom though, it'd be more like $0.50/article or $0.99 for "breaking news".
I can imagine the math being roughly "Divide the monthly cost by the amount of articles an average user reads per month. Now slide it up to look round"
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?
The problem has been differing narratives from different sources with different biases, motives, and objectives. The solution is a thorough interrogation of different sources, cross-checking and validating novel claims, using a Bayesian approach to maintaining a model of the world. Not rigid, but roughly scientific.
Most people can't afford to do that, so they pick a proxy from among the many individuals that do the work of sorting and filtering and comparing and validating news from a wide spectrum.
Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew.
The solution is high intelligence local AI that maintains a world model for you, providing you with updates based on your interests and cross-validated world events, with a rigorous record of sources and reliability. Anything short of that is just repackaged proxy games.
On the plus side, Asmongold or Hasan Piker are the low bar to beat. Haha. People are so well informed and educated now that they have access to the interwebs.
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
Easy. One of the primary reason that I don't subscribe to any kind of news anymore is exactly because of all the advertising and the being owned by giant money and power concerns.
I would happily subscribe at a quite a bit higher rate for news orgs that go non-profit/co-op and nuke the ads, and I don't think I'm in the minority here.
Keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you know the rest of the story. I applaud this step and hope they push their differentiation as a people-aligned source of Utah news even further.
With how connected we are these days, what I'd really like to see is for them to make crowd-sourcing and discussion a systemic part of their processes and site/app. They can't be everywhere where news that's important to some is happening, but all of us together can.
Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform.
We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.
I'm not saying that media should be used to influence instead of inform.
Rather, I'm saying you should acknowledge that you are influenced and will influence, and be explicit about what those influences are. This is the only way to actually combat bias; not by eliminating bias, but by making it visible, so it can be accounted for with everyone's thinking.
I think if you e.g. added "Disclaimer: this is super left-wing biased" (or equivalently "Disclaimer: this is super right-wing biased") to the top of a heavily biased article, you are not appreciably combating bias.
If you say "Our goal is to represent the views of the right wing", then you're making it clear that you are being honest about your perspective. This then encourages both you and your readers to be aware of the bias, which does combat hidden influence of bias, making it more likely to be a choice.
You can't be impartial; everyone has their own sets of biases that they can't get around. These are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but they're always there. It's not necessarily intentionally dishonest to say you're impartial, but it fundamentally is dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.
You seem to be conflating "try" with "being" (and possibly also "a little biased" with "a lot biased"). If I currently have a 12 minute mile and I try to get it down to 6 minutes, but only mange to get it down to 8 minutes I have both:
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.
I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.
The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society.
This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree.
I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding.
And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
It’s hilarious that you think the issue was funding and not the fact that NPR was and is a voice for the left and the opposition thought it was unfair for the government to be paying for one side’s propaganda.
If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.
The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.
If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.
“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers.
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.
They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous.
What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.
And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.
Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0:
"You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is not about to stand idly by and let you steal all the attention. They will respond in kind. The result is a classic race to the bottom, where the level of rudeness gets steadily ratcheted up over time."
Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.
Noah Smith:
"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.
Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)
The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...
Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)
Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence
My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.
If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
Better that than a press that won't say anything that will upset entire industries because they're afraid that ads will get withdrawn. It's been postulated that the only reason for pharmaceutical ads is to suppress critical reporting on the industry; the amount of spending on them is preposterous, while the amount of sales that TV and news ads pushes is likely tiny. Which is probably why all the "reporting" we get now is rewritten press releases about what a miracle the new drug is - the endless breathless stories push more sales than the actual ads.
Even if your 60% guy owns a pharmaceutical company, he might even be happier to push reporting on the problems with other pharmaceutical companies.
Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.
As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them.
People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all.
In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly.
I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this.
For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.
All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.
My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had.
The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former.
It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too.
I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's:
* Only paid subscribers can read
* Subscribers can share an article (= copy a unique share link)
* Shared articles are free for anyone
This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe.
They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads (and I believe also zero government support but not sure), for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).
Even though I like this and support that news should be free but it falls into the same internet trap. The cost to exist successfully on the internet is going up and with AI, it's going to be even more difficult for news orgs to justify this model. I hope people donate with all their heart.
Hmmmm, the sentiment is nice but it coming from the Salt Lake Tribune is pretty rich...
As someone living in SLC I've seen the "quality" of their journalism firsthand, even helped write a piece about it back in 2023:
The old saying is that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product[0]. The argument is usually that when you're getting things for free, you're being sold to advertisers in some sense. But it could just as well be that if you're getting things for free, the ability to influence you is being sold to those who want to influence you. In fact, with sufficient cynicism, all sorts of such theories can be considered plausible. Your experience seems to indicate that perhaps one does not need that much cynicism.
0: I've never thought much of the saying because I think you can have multiple people participate in an economic interaction.
This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.
In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a
nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news
organization, not owned by any person or company.
The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."
The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.
It's not like the one comment is the only newsworthy thing that day. It's a big complicated world with so many important things happening that we can't possibly keep up. It'd be easy to fill up the news with a tiny fraction of them, instead of picking one or two facts and spouting lots of opinions about them. Doing the latter is just a choice they've made.
> Many people think you should avoid having bias.
What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.
We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.
> What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers.
The news is exactly what the public demands: garbage.
If we really wanted good journalism we'd have it.
On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.
I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that? Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.
This often happens when the news source is not honest about their biases, or if they don't make their biases clear. Fox News is the classic example: Their tagline is "fair and balanced," but their clear objective is to present the Republican/Conservative side of the story. This dishonesty about their bias is at the core of their credibility problems, though, to be clear, it does work in terms of effectively deceiving many people.
the bias is extremely thick but more subtle on NPR, This American Life, Radiolab, Science Friday, etc. Sometimes they claim to cover both sides of an issue but their belief / agenda is clear in how they frame and respond to one side the other and how much time they give
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now.
I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.
Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.
To be fair, my assumption on that line was always that they were saying they're balancing out the overall news world. Still dirty, of course. Regardless, everyone knows how they lean.
What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.
Respectable journalism calls this an "editorial stance".
The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.
Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
What a shill comment :D.
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
The Salt Lake Tribune (as in the article above) CAN afford salaries.
> If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
People ARE paying. I'm a subscriber to the Tribune and a donor.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
So, you don't think any government program at all will work in this case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
When I lived there (late 90s) you weren't obligated to pay that tax if you declared that you were an atheist.
They're funded by patronage. It's the most ancient economical model.
Isn't it equally important to ask the question:how exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you can afford the salaries?
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:
https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...
It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.
The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.
If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.
Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.
[1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/
https://www.therage.co/donate/
https://zola.ink
[2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184
Acquiring and managing crypto is its own form of friction though.
This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.
Again, it’s been tried. Look at Scroll or Blendle. They failed.
I never saw either as a purchase option on any major newspaper or site. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You need to be large enough to be able to get big name partners on board to seed the network.
Edit: in reality this already exists. Amazon/Apple Pay/Google Play already have reloadable gift cards/accounts. Just like using it on the web, click yes to pay ten cents with whatever. The accounts can still be used to buy whatever. Done. Just have to gate it to gift cards accounts.
Blendle was largely targeted in the Netherlands and Germany so if you’re in the US it isn’t surprising that you didn’t see it. But it had major publishers on board and it failed.
But you’re right, it’s a chicken and egg problem that won’t get resolved. If an org is already making money via subscription they have no incentive to do micropayments.
Patreon is probably the closest successful model of this. A indie newspaper could maybe launch via it. That’s basically newsletters today in a way.
An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
> This article costs $0.02. Read it?
See this sounds excellent to me. In order to make it work for the boardroom though, it'd be more like $0.50/article or $0.99 for "breaking news".
I can imagine the math being roughly "Divide the monthly cost by the amount of articles an average user reads per month. Now slide it up to look round"
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?
There is no micro-payment problem from the perspective of the vast majority of publishers. They simply don't want it. End of story.
The problem has been differing narratives from different sources with different biases, motives, and objectives. The solution is a thorough interrogation of different sources, cross-checking and validating novel claims, using a Bayesian approach to maintaining a model of the world. Not rigid, but roughly scientific.
Most people can't afford to do that, so they pick a proxy from among the many individuals that do the work of sorting and filtering and comparing and validating news from a wide spectrum.
Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew.
The solution is high intelligence local AI that maintains a world model for you, providing you with updates based on your interests and cross-validated world events, with a rigorous record of sources and reliability. Anything short of that is just repackaged proxy games.
On the plus side, Asmongold or Hasan Piker are the low bar to beat. Haha. People are so well informed and educated now that they have access to the interwebs.
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.
Easy. One of the primary reason that I don't subscribe to any kind of news anymore is exactly because of all the advertising and the being owned by giant money and power concerns.
I would happily subscribe at a quite a bit higher rate for news orgs that go non-profit/co-op and nuke the ads, and I don't think I'm in the minority here.
Keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you know the rest of the story. I applaud this step and hope they push their differentiation as a people-aligned source of Utah news even further.
With how connected we are these days, what I'd really like to see is for them to make crowd-sourcing and discussion a systemic part of their processes and site/app. They can't be everywhere where news that's important to some is happening, but all of us together can.
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up.
Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
Yes and that affects all existing 'news' channels too. It comes down to general education levels and that has similar bad incentives in play.
Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.
Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest.
Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account.
There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist.
This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it.
Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform.
We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.
I'm not saying that media should be used to influence instead of inform.
Rather, I'm saying you should acknowledge that you are influenced and will influence, and be explicit about what those influences are. This is the only way to actually combat bias; not by eliminating bias, but by making it visible, so it can be accounted for with everyone's thinking.
I think if you e.g. added "Disclaimer: this is super left-wing biased" (or equivalently "Disclaimer: this is super right-wing biased") to the top of a heavily biased article, you are not appreciably combating bias.
If you say "Our goal is to represent the views of the right wing", then you're making it clear that you are being honest about your perspective. This then encourages both you and your readers to be aware of the bias, which does combat hidden influence of bias, making it more likely to be a choice.
I agree that it is more honest. I disagree that it has a significant impact on the readers' awareness of the bias.
Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?
You can't be impartial; everyone has their own sets of biases that they can't get around. These are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but they're always there. It's not necessarily intentionally dishonest to say you're impartial, but it fundamentally is dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.
You seem to be conflating "try" with "being" (and possibly also "a little biased" with "a lot biased"). If I currently have a 12 minute mile and I try to get it down to 6 minutes, but only mange to get it down to 8 minutes I have both:
1. Not lied about my goal
2. Accomplished something similar to my goal.
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.
I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.
The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society.
This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree.
I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding.
And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
It’s hilarious that you think the issue was funding and not the fact that NPR was and is a voice for the left and the opposition thought it was unfair for the government to be paying for one side’s propaganda.
If you can’t hear it you aren’t listening
Make all the surveillance cameras and satellites public access.
A culture of analysis and commenting will develop.
We'd check the cultural effluent against the original stuff to keep it honest.
If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.
The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.
If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.
“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers.
For-profit free news is the problem.
It's a great indicator.
Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News.
Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.
They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous.
What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.
And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
A intrepid reporter with a reputation is less likely to upload doctored footage for propaganda purposes.
Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?)
Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
> If the people arent interested in paying
They are, according to the OP:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...
Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.
Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.
Very true
Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0: "You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is not about to stand idly by and let you steal all the attention. They will respond in kind. The result is a classic race to the bottom, where the level of rudeness gets steadily ratcheted up over time."
Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.
Noah Smith:
"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.
> Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.
The Tribune will still have advertising.
Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)
...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push
I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.
The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...
Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)
Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence
My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.
If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
It might also be the case that one single "donor" puts in like 60% of the budget.
But that is also no different from one single client being 60% of your revenue.
In both cases, they'll be calling some shots.
Better that than a press that won't say anything that will upset entire industries because they're afraid that ads will get withdrawn. It's been postulated that the only reason for pharmaceutical ads is to suppress critical reporting on the industry; the amount of spending on them is preposterous, while the amount of sales that TV and news ads pushes is likely tiny. Which is probably why all the "reporting" we get now is rewritten press releases about what a miracle the new drug is - the endless breathless stories push more sales than the actual ads.
Even if your 60% guy owns a pharmaceutical company, he might even be happier to push reporting on the problems with other pharmaceutical companies.
"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.
I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City
The Salt Lake Tribune seems pretty centrist to me, but in Utah it is considered left-leaning.
The Salt Lake Tribune has always promoted the view of the opposition for Salt Lake City (and Utah). It might not be who you think.
Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.
Donors and owners are different.
As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?
In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them.
People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all.
In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly.
I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this.
For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
There is no winning.
'Free' and 'government funded' are not the same thing. The OP doesn't seem to be government funded.
Also, the BBC has no problem criticizing the UK government.
There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.
All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.
My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had.
The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former.
It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too.
CalMatters is a nonprofit and provides quality coverage. Perhaps that's a viable model at the state level. https://calmatters.org/about/funding/
I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's:
This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe.They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads (and I believe also zero government support but not sure), for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).
The Telegraph does the same thing; it's the lwn.net model. Doesn't the WaPo have share links? I can't recall.
A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/
Even though I like this and support that news should be free but it falls into the same internet trap. The cost to exist successfully on the internet is going up and with AI, it's going to be even more difficult for news orgs to justify this model. I hope people donate with all their heart.
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.
There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.
It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news.
Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
The Guardian
In the US: NPR, NBC, AP, The Guardian, ...
I use apnews.com, no paywall.
Hmmmm, the sentiment is nice but it coming from the Salt Lake Tribune is pretty rich... As someone living in SLC I've seen the "quality" of their journalism firsthand, even helped write a piece about it back in 2023:
https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/
The old saying is that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product[0]. The argument is usually that when you're getting things for free, you're being sold to advertisers in some sense. But it could just as well be that if you're getting things for free, the ability to influence you is being sold to those who want to influence you. In fact, with sufficient cynicism, all sorts of such theories can be considered plausible. Your experience seems to indicate that perhaps one does not need that much cynicism.
0: I've never thought much of the saying because I think you can have multiple people participate in an economic interaction.
That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already.
Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.
What is that based on?
This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.
The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."