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Comment by afastow | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.

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DemocracyNow[1] is a good one. 100% free. Noam Chomsky is a regular guest here.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/democracynow

I wonder how they make money.

Checked wikipedia:

  Democracy Now Productions, the independent nonprofit 
  organization which produces Democracy Now!, is funded 
  entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, 
  and foundations such as the Ford Foundation,[failed 
  verification] Lannan Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund,[4]
  [5][6][unreliable source?] and does not accept 
  advertisers, corporate underwriting or government 
  funding.[7]

The remark from Bill Clinton is a fun bit:

  Clinton defended his administration's policies and charged 
  Goodman with being "hostile and combative".[51]

Some good publications are nonpaywalled nonprofits that rely on donations. Not sure you can make that work in every niche, but two examples: https://www.quantamagazine.org/, https://www.texastribune.org/

Quanta has the Simons foundation behind it. How free is a press if it can only live off the good will of a billionaire?

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.

Extreme freemium model! Free for everyone, except for that one billionaire :-)

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