> We need healthy journalism
Fixed that for you. Healthy as in: well supported and properly diversified. It's hard to run an editorialized outlet if you don't retain enough paying subscribers, or - yes - advertising. Good, critical, well-thought journalism can't happen for free.
As news outlets moved to the Web in a bid to reach larger audiences, they stumbled across three major roadblocks. The first is cost structure, where building and maintaining a digital infrastructure to gather news, manage the editorial process and publish turns out to be quite expensive. The second is that most people expect the Web to provide / share information for free. While that's an original core philosophy that pushed the Web during it's infancy, it falls flat in today's commercialized context.
Both problems are within control of a news outlet. With proper strategic planning, it's not impossible to build a flourishing news outlet.
And third / most important: discovery on the Web isn't equitable. Facebook, Google et al don't write / make the news. They make it discoverable. And no matter how you do it, which criteria and which methods are used, making content discoverable is at heart a process of curation.
Discovery is everything. And the basis for that is the hyperlink. If others don't link to your news outlet, well, then you might as well not exist. You might be yelling into the void as you keep on churning out articles on your website. The act of creating a hyperlink between two websites isn't neutral: it conveys intent, endorsement, recognition of authority and so on. "Sharing", "Posting a link" or "liking a post" aren't neutral actions in that regard, there's multi-layered human complexity that explains why a link got posted.
The cardinal sin committed by social media is choosing to strip away that complexity and replace it with overly simple, yet utterly empty metrics such as "engagement" which have steered the design of functionality, affordances and behavior of "news walls" and "timelines".
As a result, journalism has suffered for without the ability to be discovered by potential audiences, you can't survive. Many small outlets have disappeared over the past years. And many others of changed the tune of their content just to ensure their articles generate enough hyperlinks on social media to drive potential readership.
Democracy suffers without good and diverse journalism. The "marketplace of ideas" ought to be a shared place build on common understanding. Not walled gardens fostering the emergence of echo chambers as an externalized cost due to their drive for more "engagement".
