Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.
Such as?
See https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...
"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.
Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.
The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].
The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.
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[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.
[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.
>Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited
isn't that true for all industries?
>Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
lol wat. you got a source for that?
The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.
How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...
I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.
I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).
Google isn't free.
https://hackernoon.com/how-does-google-earn-money-as-simple-...
It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?