The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
What I want is this theoretical set of educated perspectives that claim to represent a broad range of views; when an actual broad range of views is more likely to include pizzagate than Burkian conservatism..
Maybe thefp.com would be a good starting point to ask - why is that not what you’re looking for? If you squint your eyes it provides a balanced perspective.
It's a bit hard to judge the site since it doesn't show full articles, but it does seem to be supporting only one side of at least some narratives. For example, I didn't see any article on the genocide in gaza that wasn't denying its existence. That particular issue aside, my overall impression is that it probably does what many left leaning news sites do: try to remain factually accurate in what it says while only presenting one side of the story and neglecting stories on anything that doesn't forward their narrative. thefp.com is better than many other right leaning news sites since it isn't just outright lying all the time (no pizzagate), but it's not honest reporting or covering enough perspectives. I might have just checked it at a bad time but it also seems very heavy on opinion instead of actual news or investigative reporting. It's got a lot to say about moms and politicians and celebrities but nothing about Nagatitan.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
Sometimes there is no "other side" or the other side offers meaningless contribution. The trend to present oneself as unbiased have often given platforms to voices that are not worthy of having a platform, for whatever reason, and someone needs to make a call, and they should be transparent about it. Are they not giving time because they choose to ignore legitimate and useful information or because giving someone a platform to rehash all the bogus reasons that the moon landing was faked again isn't worth it (to use an extreme example). Moon landing deniers can set up their own web site to push their faked moon landing agenda, they don't need to clutter up everyone else's content with their nonsense in the name of "unbiased reporting".
It's the same for 100s of other topics on which there is strong arguments to be made that the proposal will have the opposite of the intended outcome.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.
Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.
The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.
Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.
What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.
We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.
The news is exactly what the public demands: garbage.
If we really wanted good journalism we'd have it.
Maybe what I really want is a paper heavily biased towards multiple academic perspectives, and less towards populist coverage.
Why do I care about my fellow citizen’s opinions? I feel like I’m drowning in my fellow citizens opinions.
Maybe I read the news for different reasons than other people. Why do you read the news?
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
The Salt Lake Tribune (as in the article above) CAN afford salaries.
> If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
People ARE paying. I'm a subscriber to the Tribune and a donor.
https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...
It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.
If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.
Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.
[1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/
https://www.therage.co/donate/
[2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184
Edit: in reality this already exists. Amazon/Apple Pay/Google Play already have reloadable gift cards/accounts. Just like using it on the web, click yes to pay ten cents with whatever. The accounts can still be used to buy whatever. Done. Just have to gate it to gift cards accounts.
But you’re right, it’s a chicken and egg problem that won’t get resolved. If an org is already making money via subscription they have no incentive to do micropayments.
See this sounds excellent to me. In order to make it work for the boardroom though, it'd be more like $0.50/article or $0.99 for "breaking news".
I can imagine the math being roughly "Divide the monthly cost by the amount of articles an average user reads per month. Now slide it up to look round"
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?
Most people can't afford to do that, so they pick a proxy from among the many individuals that do the work of sorting and filtering and comparing and validating news from a wide spectrum.
Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew.
The solution is high intelligence local AI that maintains a world model for you, providing you with updates based on your interests and cross-validated world events, with a rigorous record of sources and reliability. Anything short of that is just repackaged proxy games.
On the plus side, Asmongold or Hasan Piker are the low bar to beat. Haha. People are so well informed and educated now that they have access to the interwebs.
you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
I would happily subscribe at a quite a bit higher rate for news orgs that go non-profit/co-op and nuke the ads, and I don't think I'm in the minority here.
Keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you know the rest of the story. I applaud this step and hope they push their differentiation as a people-aligned source of Utah news even further.
With how connected we are these days, what I'd really like to see is for them to make crowd-sourcing and discussion a systemic part of their processes and site/app. They can't be everywhere where news that's important to some is happening, but all of us together can.
Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account.
There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist.
This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it.
Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
1. Not lied about my goal
2. Accomplished something similar to my goal.
We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.
Rather, I'm saying you should acknowledge that you are influenced and will influence, and be explicit about what those influences are. This is the only way to actually combat bias; not by eliminating bias, but by making it visible, so it can be accounted for with everyone's thinking.
I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.
The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society.
This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree.
I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding.
And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
If you can’t hear it you aren’t listening
A culture of analysis and commenting will develop.
We'd check the cultural effluent against the original stuff to keep it honest.
They are, according to the OP:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...
Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.
“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers.
For-profit free news is the problem.
What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.
And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.