Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?
Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have.
And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.
What part of the world do you operate in?
The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money.
I'm curious about Citieo and Soli; I'll send an email to the support address on your website, if that's alright.
Are they? Have they ever been?
The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas.
W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent.
There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did.
That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.
Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.
One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.
Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities.
I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal.
In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia.
Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.
On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.
Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.
In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits.
Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards.
Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.
The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/b...
Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about.
In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.
By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation.
With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value.
With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on.
Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.
The paranoia that it would be abused is very rational given that mere Whitehouse Access has been abused as a carrot/stick to influence reporting.
As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch. Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers.
Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies.
https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesve...
That sounds like Sinclair. Seems the U.S. ended up in the same place.
The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk
are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.
The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
The Guardian are pretty open about their's, the BBC claim to be non-biased while giving people like Nigel Fromage, pro-brexit right-wingers, climate change deniers an easy ride.