That's a really good point. Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism. Then again I feel like that's how we got CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. Maybe not a great idea. I really like Blomberg and to some extent WSJ. I hope they can maintain their integrity.
> Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism
To be honest, that's the past and present of most news as well.
Newspapers would have never been around based on advertising alone. The fee usually paid for printing and sending, and classifieds made up the bulk of the revenue. Now that they're decoupled and both news and classifieds are pretty much free, it's no wonder that news is struggling.
Hard news has (almost) never been a wildly profitable endeavor in and of itself.
The future of news survival is independent journalists being funded by people who care to have an unbiased investigative news media.
No idea how we get there, though. You basically need to persuade those who understand how critical journalism is to freedom to care to fund it, and to have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda.
Eh if we had benevolent entities funding journalism at a loss we'd all be far, far better for it.
We got Fox/CNN etc because journalism in service to advertisers = clickbait.
At this point, I think we can codify this: Journalism + Ad-Supported-Model = Clickbait.
Good journalism coming from firms which advertise is by accident. Like a broken clock being right twice a day.
I love subscription journalism because you're not playing the clickbait game.
There is no future for journalism in ad supported models. Plenty of future for infotainment, heck, infotainment masquerading as journalism might just take it all over, but journalism will certainly not be a part of that fold.
