While your question isn't wrong, how is that fundamentally different from how things were before? How can news be free if it relies upon paying readership for its sustained production?
There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.
It's my impression that early in Benjamin Franklin's publishing career he published newspapers so he could put ads in them to sell more books. And that later in his publishing career, he used his newspapers more to promote his revolutionary agenda. The man wasn't a journalist.
