How do you expect The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to make money?
- ads
- subscribers
- donations from small patrons
- donations from large patrons
These cover a lot of different business models.
If you want to make money at journalism (or just keep the lights on), focusing on ads when they've been a declining source of revenue for decades is kind of crazy. And that's not due to ad blocking.
Only extremists had an issue with the standard JPG banner ad at the top of every page.
Though those little rectangle GIFs were mint back in the day
What led you to that conclusion? (You may be right. I don't know.)
Not every problem is technical. Modern journalism is still just a participant in capitalism.
This is a business model problem, and figuring out how to build a healthy company and news organization with a reliable stream of revenues to allow long-term planning. Add in the pressure that most journalism is now private sector with growth expectations, such that the BBC and NPR are outliers.
uBlock Origin and rampant infotheft it is. And that's okay, I don't really care if they live or die. Just like they don't really care if I live or die.
It’s not your responsibility, you can simply not visit their site if you don’t wish to participate.
> Can we fund them with taxes (in a non-dystopian way that keeps political interference out of the equation)?
How can this possibly work?
Agreed, this is the best answer. If I don't agree with a sites choice in terms of background scripts/privacy/funding method, I just stop visiting it.
These companies have sucked all of the value out of journalism. Normally I'd be fine with that, but the tragedy of the commons on an entire vital industry seems to large to ignore here.