People didn’t pay for news before the super rich controlled the media
where did people get all this free news from before? Internet blogs dont count as news…
Reputable news outlet revenue was always a mix of subscription and ads… i’m talking physical newspapets here… then with the internet, people stopped paying those subscriptions and news was funded by just ads, which wasnt sustainable… so now we have ads and billionaires funding the news.
i’m not sure what you mean “this is a new phenomena”… journalism has always cost money. It was never free/gratis.
If news was all pay news, it would create other intractable problems
Sure, i agree. I didnt say subscription was the best revenue model. You also have the guardian’s non-profit, or publicly funded media. But those have problems and biases too.
But surely all those models are better than what we have now
It’s damned if you do damned if you don’t at this point with tech sucking up all the ad revenue that is for sure.
Even before that though, the media has been consolidating, around 2001 there were like 10 companies that owned about every major outlet and network, and it’s just gotten worse, and the internet wasn’t sucking up all the ad revenue back then. That is the cause of a lot of this, obviously a large factor is tech being allowed to lawlessly lord over the internet and get their grasping hands on all that ad revenue while cheating everyone else downstream.
where did people get all this free news from before? Internet blogs dont count as news…
Reputable news outlet revenue was always a mix of subscription and ads… i’m talking physical newspapets here… then with the internet, people stopped paying those subscriptions and news was funded by just ads, which wasnt sustainable… so now we have ads and billionaires funding the news.
i’m not sure what you mean “this is a new phenomena”… journalism has always cost money. It was never free/gratis.
Sure, i agree. I didnt say subscription was the best revenue model. You also have the guardian’s non-profit, or publicly funded media. But those have problems and biases too.
But surely all those models are better than what we have now
It’s damned if you do damned if you don’t at this point with tech sucking up all the ad revenue that is for sure.
Even before that though, the media has been consolidating, around 2001 there were like 10 companies that owned about every major outlet and network, and it’s just gotten worse, and the internet wasn’t sucking up all the ad revenue back then. That is the cause of a lot of this, obviously a large factor is tech being allowed to lawlessly lord over the internet and get their grasping hands on all that ad revenue while cheating everyone else downstream.