You're right, this is wrong in our current paradigm. But our current paradigm is wrong, too.
I want a world that supports business models other than web advertising. It negatively impacts journalistic integrity and freedom while further exacerbating the race to the bottom search engines and other content aggregators create.
WSJ is responding poorly to a bad situation. I suspect it'll cost them.
Out of curiosity, do you think journalistic integrity was also impacted when newspapers used traditional paper advertisements as their source of revenue?
Eg, have newspapers _ever_ had integrity, and if they _did_, what's different?
> Eg, have newspapers _ever_ had integrity, and if they _did_, what's different?
They did somewhat before the massive corporate consolidation starting in, IIRC, the late 1970s when newsrooms started getting axes and the major dailies progressively became skins over wire services and lightly-rewritten press releases.
The internet often gets the blame, but it providing actual competition was decades after the terminal quality and subscribership decline of American newspapers began.
It actually was the internet competition (both wire services being directly available to readers and the loss of advertising) that actually got some of them talking about building up newsrooms, rebooting investigative journalism, and relying more on subscription income (paid subscription was never paying the bills before, it was pursued as a key metric advertisers used in determining how much it was worth to advertise in a paper.)
That's a very interesting thing to try to quantify. I would say they had _more_ integrity, but risks always existed. Reuters used to have a corporate structure that would prevent it from capture, and even that didn't guarantee impartiality.
Multiple revenue streams (sales, classifieds) would make them less beholden to advertisers.
Of course they would still have to write material that sold!
I don't like to use John Oliver as a source, but there's some decent content in this:
I want a world that supports business models other than web advertising. It negatively impacts journalistic integrity and freedom while further exacerbating the race to the bottom search engines and other content aggregators create.
WSJ is responding poorly to a bad situation. I suspect it'll cost them.
http://brave.com/ is one approach.