this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
Well there are 3 alternatives.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
If I have to pay for it:
If there is a free one with ads:
Wanna regulate? Well. Then. Let’s regulate.
There are tons of countries that already have national and local publicly-funded news networks. Is your solution to move every currently private network to a public-funded model?
Cause to me that sounds like it sounds very expensive, and more importantly, very dangerous to give governments such extreme levels of control over information.
The same issue applies to government-run news too. You see it with the BBC as a government owned and funded institution. It's domestic UK news is pro-Monarchy, pro-Tory, and this is because of how it's set up.
Private news media, when there's a lot of it, tends to be less biased in the end because they're trying to compete with each other, meaning they can't go too far in one overt political slant. When one person controls more and has a wider reach, that dynamic becomes less important as they gain greater control over where journalists go and what events they cover.
I support public news media, but community-owned papers would avoid the monopolistic issue of either corporate consolidation or a government funded alternative.
I think the best solution would be to just have the best of both worlds, wouldn't it? We could attempt to create a balanced environment of specially funded public media and nuanced private news companies.
Removing the need for existing newspapers to rely on advertising to keep costs low enough for the consumer to be able to purchase an issue would go very far.
The problem has always been that the academic or "platonic" ideal of journalism as this "objective, 4th estate" that "speaks truth to power" has always been at odds with the costs of doing business. In fact, the first newspapers were owned by Political Parties and wore their affiliations on their sleeves. Switching to advertiser-supported models enabled more independence from political parties in the 1800s.
What's also true is that most local newspapers (heck, papers in general) are at least on paper, objective in the sense that their journalists are free to pursue and write the stories they want using their professional judgment.
You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they're government subsidized they're still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.
Here in Finland we have YLE, and it has news, movies/shows, documentaries, radio/podcasts etc. It is funded with tax money, and I consider the two biggest pros to be that news and more are easily accessible for free to anyone and that since YLE isn't trying to profit from journalism, there are no clickbait headlines. Though, the worst flaw is that goverment-funded journalism is prone to propaganda, and once you control the media, you control the whole country, so people need to be very careful.
Yea that’s precisely it. Publicly-funded media definitely can be the best option, but there’s always risks it can fall into pure propaganda some day
You can always have it be publicly funded but managed by a non profit designated by the government, and make it organized in such a way that if a politician or government institution had a problem with some reporting, there's nothing they can do.
The same concerns about editorial independence and human fallacy apply in the private sector top. There has always been pressure between the editorial, marketing, and journalist parts of newspapers.
The problem with this is that a government could simply decide to cut the funds for public media if there are views contrary to the executive branch and thereby establish a degree of control. An approach to mitigating this attack vector would be to do it like Germany does, collecting a special fee independently of the taxes that goes directly to the news organisations. This means that the parliament cannot control or withhold the funding of the public media unless there were a major legislation change, which would have to be the will of the majority of the population.
I think you're missing a potential 4th one, though I'm not 100% convinced as to its feasibility, but a Universal Basic Income and greater societal wealth redistribution raises the bottom so much that everyone can easily afford 30 news subscriptions.
Though personally I think more arms length public funding is the better option since the incentives of capitalism often don't align with the incentives of high quality journalism.
I love the idea of UBI. But I can’t help but worry I’m wrong.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
I’m not clear I can justify that
I did that too; it was during Covid :)
I think/acted similar to you… which is why I think we might all be common minding.
That said, people that aren’t motivated to do good things are most likely motivated to do nothing… so it might not be a big deal if they don’t show up for a job.
TLDR: fewer workers at Burger King probably would t make service worse
Very few people honestly want to do nothing. Even the image of the unemployed pot smoker who watched cartoons all day, maybe that person would find fulfillment in art? Or maybe they're passionate about something important in their community.
There's still an incentive to work and make more money to better your living situation and contribute productively back to society, but you wouldn't be as beholden to it.
Another way to think about it was that in the 50s a single worker could make enough to support a family, whereas these days both parents have to work full time. Providing UBI would be a more equitable way of reducing the reliance on work and increase individual families' health and well being by providing the baseline financial assistance that would allow one parent to take time off work (or both parents to reduce time at work) to better support their family, community, and social structure.
It's not quite that simple with PBS or NPR, but that's the basic idea. Open public funding with no political or corporate control sounds like the safest bet. It's as viable as people deciding to support it.
Not sure why you'd think "publicly funded" would seem like the "optimal" option. Same thing structurally as "state-run media", just friendlier phrasing. If we had direct democracy or something, that might be fine, but the fact that it has to run through politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests/agendas, that completely changes the picture. If you have that federally funded in the U.S., that basically just tucks under the executive branch like almost everything else, meaning it's just managed by the President, with basically only a paper tiger of regulations preventing interference in place.
In Germany, the independence of publicly funded media is guaranteed by the payment of a special fee that is collected independently of the normal taxes, and is distributed directly among the public media institutions. No parliament has to approve any funding, the only attack vector would be to change the legislation behind this financing but that would require a parliamentary majority and would therefore have to be the will of the people.
That's better than "all media is run by the Fuhrer" I suppose, but probably still preferable for people to have the choice of which to support.
This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.
I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It's a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what's happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.
But what keeps a local newspaper from creating an online service over which the papers can be bought, maybe even for a lower price because manufacturing costs are no longer extant?
They are all trying. I'm honestly not sure yet whether it will work. I hope so.
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can't operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it's not there at all, and that's why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
Because classified ads used to pay for the paper.
Heck, 'The Advertiser' used to be a popular name for newspapers.
You would sometimes pick up a newspaper specifically for the ads. You might be looking for a job or a car and that was a good starting place.
Back before VCRs were a thing, movies like 'Deep Throat' were only available in theaters. The local theaters ran ads for XXX movies on the same pages as the general stuff.
Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they'd remained a subscription service only.