That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already.
Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.
Making the news available at no cost is a victory
31–40 of 141 posts
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#32As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
There is no winning.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#33The "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?
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up.
Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#34It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news.
Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#35A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.
I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City
Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.
Donors and owners are different.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#37It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news. Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
I use apnews.com, no paywall.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#38The "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?
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up. Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#39The "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?
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.
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.
Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory
#40Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.
Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.