this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Could a lottery/lotteries be used to fund a newspaper in Canada? (self.canada)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by hellofriend to c/[email protected]
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Reading up on One Big Union. The Wikipedia article mentions that at the end of its days it was generating income via a lottery in its bulletin. This gave me an idea.

In the interest of diversifying news media, strengthening journalistic practices and integrity, creating non-partisan news coverage, and giving Canadian works a national outlet for publishing, I would like to start an online newspaper. However, I would like to limit ads since I find them distasteful at best and compromising at worst. This leaves subscription income and one-off purchases as the main revenue sources.

The issue with this is that people don't purchase news media anymore. They either look at an ad-supported website or they wait for someone else to buy a paywalled article and copypaste it somewhere. So the issue with a non-ad-supported model is that there's no incentive to buy. Hence, a lottery a la a 50/50 draw or some such. This would give people incentive to buy, increasing the circulation of the newspaper. So I'm hoping someone might be able to provide some insight into the matter.

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[–] hellofriend 8 points 6 months ago

That creates a weird power dynamic where the state could potentially withhold subsidies if it doesn't like what is published. Furthermore, it would provide an easy source of revenue to news and media corporations that are already established and entrenched since they already have the funds to easily handle all the paperwork that would be involved. Additionally, Postmedia accounts for at least 33% of the market by revenue. This is owned by a primarily American corporation. Subsidizing Postmedia would effectively be giving Canadian money to foreign corporations.

What I think needs to happen on a policy-level is that foreign ownership of news media needs to be curtailed and protections must be put in place to prevent larger companies from buying local newspapers. The current players in the news industry need to be broken up. But this isn't something I can change, nor is it even likely, so there's no sense talking about it. I'd much rather focus on something I can do myself to incentivize people to buy a publication.