Making the news available at no cost is a victory

In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them.

People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all.

In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly.

I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this.

For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.

I never saw either as a purchase option on any major newspaper or site. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You need to be large enough to be able to get big name partners on board to seed the network.

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.

The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0: "You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is not about to stand idly by and let you steal all the attention. They will respond in kind. The result is a classic race to the bottom, where the level of rudeness gets steadily ratcheted up over time."

Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.

Noah Smith:

"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."

I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now.

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.

Easy. One of the primary reason that I don't subscribe to any kind of news anymore is exactly because of all the advertising and the being owned by giant money and power concerns.

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.