I agree with this, but I think it's a step in the right direction. To wit, imagine a service like this, but it costs $20/mo, and it breaks all paywalls for you but allocates that $20 to the pay-walled things you read that month, piecemeal. It would save you a great deal of friction, far fewer accounts to maintain, and reduce your dependency on any single news-source. And of course authors stand to gain - as long as they are okay accepting a variable allocation for each consumption (which they almost certainly are).
Perhaps if Google didn't treat every other party as a source of wealth to plunder, by hook or by crook, but rather shared the spoils with the very content generators so crucial to their own existence, out of some sense of fair play, we'd have a marginally more healthy ecosystem today.
Perhaps.
But I'm content to burn the whole thing down. All ad-supported business models are eventually utterly toxic. Well, at least the ones that succeed.
Can I please just have the government provide value for taxes and fund well reputable journalistic pursuits; some smaller ones locally, major ones nationally, and a trickle of funding globally (in aggregate among countries this should work out).
The primary purpose of journalism is to hold public officials to account. They can't do that while dependent on public officials for their paycheck.
Think about what you're asking. You want the government to take your money and give it to media outlets of their choosing? Just give your own money to the media outlets of your choosing.
> The primary purpose of journalism is to hold public officials to account.
No, that's a benefit journalist enterprises sell.
The primary purpose of journalism (at least, in a capitalist society), is, as for any other industry, to capture and deliver value to the capitalist class.
So if I understand you correctly, a guy with a weekly newsletter covering the local political beat who charges a $10/month subscription fee and uses it entirely to pay his own salary is doing so for the purpose of delivering value to the capitalist class.
Is he the capitalist class, this person making say $40,000/year? Are his customers meant to be? Do they become the capitalist class when there are two of them writing the newsletter and they split the money?
> So if I understand you correctly, a guy with a weekly newsletter covering the local political beat who charges a $10/month subscription fee and uses it entirely to pay his own salary is doing so for the purpose of delivering value to the capitalist class.
No, I said that the primary purpose of the industry was one thing, not the primary purpose of a particular one man operation that is inherently made marginal by the structure of the economy, and is not the typical of the industry as a whole.
