A Cautionary Tale
To set the scene, let's start with a bit of history. Before Americans could start our current slide into fascism a few systems had to fail. One of them was journalism. Journalism has long been considered a pillar of democratic society. We were dubbed the Fourth Estate, a term that originated with the 18th century politician Edmund Burke. (I'm a journalist, if you hadn't clocked that yet.)
Burke's idea of the Fourth Estate came from the Anglo-French notion that society could be categorized into divisions, which they called Estates. The Estates of Old Europe were: the king and his nobility, the church, and the merchant class (ie rich people). When the printing press came along, and with it the Enlightenment, Western society was upended into a glorious mess. (But that's a tale for another time.) Printed media changed everything about society. The "Fourth Estate" was charged with keeping everyone else aware of, and connected to, each other.
Journalism grew into an institution that existed to describe society back to the people who were making it. This was the first time the people could hold up a mirror to themselves, even if it was an imperfect mirror. The new media of the 16th and 17th century gave birth to many things, some terrible, most good, but perhaps the best was giving the whole of a literate population the ability to participate in political choice, almost as much as the rulers did. It made democracy possible. Not easy; democracy was never easy, sturdy, or straightforward. But with journalism, it was possible. Journalism solved the information problem that made democracy hard -- how to give the citizenry enough information so the opinions they formed and choices they made were realistic and good. Journalism is required for making good voters.
And so, a thriving press (along with universal education) was understood to be vital to a working democracy. That's why when America came along, the amendments started with protecting the Press. Even for people who weren't into the news, it subtly held society up. The chatter about elections, the daily reports, sports and weather, the scanning of the next day's birdcage liner... papers created a floor of ambient information for the citizenry. People who might have once not known much beyond the ranges of their neighborhoods could look down on themselves and their country from on high, adopt a bird's eye view of politics, because someone was telling them what was going on. The News created a connection to a wider reality, a common destiny. We came out of small villages of knowlege in a mostly dark world into the light of collective, and eventually global, awareness.
By the time our grandparents were born people just assumed society would know itself, talk to itself, and maintain itself, if imperfectly. This was normal, as if society had always been like this. We accepted our information landscape without realizing how new, amazing, and powerful it really is. There was never much consideration of exactly what would happen if the Fourth Estate failed -- if it became a hollowed out profession, largely without professionals.
And then exactly that happened.
The classic business model of journalism throughout its modern history was called the Three-legged Stool. The money to do the job came from: leg one, advertising, leg two, subscriptions, and leg three, classified ad listings. Journalism was never a flashy moneymaker, but it was an honest living.
Papers tended to have rich owners, which was never ideal. But as often as not, editorial and the news room could fight owners off when they tried to meddle in the affairs of the paper. A gaggle of journalists actually agreeing on something is a force to be reckoned with, and usually they agreed that they didn't want owners trying to control what made it into the paper. When it came to it, journalists could often bully their owners. They did this both by being the owners' income stream, and by just being intransigent assholes. Journalism tends to attract the cantankerous. We're cynical idealists who enjoy being right more than being rich.
That never stopped journalism from being partisan, and for much of the history of America, that was considered a feature, not a bug. There were Democratic and Republican papers from the beginning of Democrats and Republicans. There were socialist gazettes, anarchist weeklies, and fascist rags. Objectivity was mainly a midcentury conceit, doomed to fade into opposing camps by the 1980s. But journalists were still expected to not lie about things. Spin, sure, lie? No. (This was an ethic honored in the breach too often in our history, but it's still an ethic we hold today.)
For readers, a paper was a thing that you paid for. You went out and got it, or it was delivered to your house everyday. Sometimes more than once a day; some places and times in history there'd be as many as five editions in a day, but mostly places at least had a morning and an evening paper.
Local businesses bought ads in them because that's where local businesses could advertise reliably. The classifieds let people make announcements, sell things, and post jobs. The financial pages had long lists of stocks and how they'd changed from yesterday, or even this morning in places with late editions. The paper was an institution, part of the fabric of a working local society, before other media came along. People paid money for their daily papers, and the papers returned that value and more to the lives of the people.
Radio, then TV, cut into the societal role of the newspaper, and by the mid-to-late 20th century print had lost some of its power. But it was still the authoritative voice. It was challenged by, but also complimented by, local radio news, and the Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley style anchormen on the big TV networks. Radio and TV cut into the advertising leg of print journalism's stool, but they couldn't serve a local community in the same way a local paper did. Your town's businesses could target their customers with ads, often from localized editions of regional newspapers. It was targeted ads before the net, and it worked well enough to keep the news coming. And we still had the classifieds, none of the new media could replace the idiosyncratic and deeply local classified ads.
Until something did.
The internet, famously, changed everything, including the funding of journalism. The net could be hyper local and global all at once. Anyone and everyone could have some kind of platform if they wanted it. The internet was better at content than anything before it in history, but content isn't news.
The internet's democratizing strengths were also what made it bad at journalism. Journalism is expensive to do, slow, hard, and professional. Shitposting is free, outrage is engaging, and they compete for the same time we have for media in our day. Paying for information doesn't make as much sense now as a consumer -- more than you could ever want is flying at your face constantly. But much of it isn't information that helps you become an informed citizen.
The second leg to fall was subscriptions, because paying for things that are otherwise free doesn't make sense. Websites, full of information and even news, were just there, available to anyone. All readers had to tolerate was some banner ads and popups. (And violations of your privacy and autonomy, but that was a secret.)
The next blow, and a devastating one, was classified ads. That leg was pretty much killed by one man: Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame. Craigslist was amazing. Seemingly overnight it became free to post anything, localized anywhere. Craig only charged for job listings and apartment rentals, but that was enough to not only pay for the site, but to make him (briefly) a billionaire. But that meant all that money that had been going to support journalism mostly went to Newmark and his staff. Newmark is a good guy who didn't mean to destroy the 4th Estate, and has used his philanthropy to prop up journalism, both old and new, in these, our waining days. But it is nowhere near enough to save the institution he accidentally gutted.
The last leg of the stool was the rest of traditional ads, that hadn't yet been taken by radio and TV. Facebook is not a good guy, Zuckerberg does not care about journalism. Facebook set out to get all the income papers and other journalistic outlets had left, by forcing them onto the Meta platform and taking the ad money their readers brought in. Facebook decided to essentially make journalists work for free. Zuck managed to play political games to make sure its monopoly on news income wasn't challenged legally, and it worked. Facebook became the distributor of news without having to pay for anything.
It was a bloodbath. Over a few short years, dozens of outlets simply died out.
This is how we got to the media landscape we have now. Catering to advertisers is not the easy question it was when advertisers had no alternative. Most ad dollars go to Meta and Google now, who do not have any motivation to inform the polity accurately and well. This state of perdition is steadily damaging societies around the globe, but it happened to America first.
Journalism still exists, mostly because journalists are stubborn asses. But where we are now is the nanometer between the rock and a hard place. In media right now, there are no easy answers. Higher quality content has been shown to neither bring in more readers nor more revenue. In fact, it may bring less audience and revenue than many of the lower quality alternatives that are more engaging and easy to consume. Our stool has been reduced to a cutting board. Journalism as we knew it is gone, replaced by dreck that exists to engage you long enough to sell your personal data to whomever can pay.
For publications still trying to earn money with ads and pay writers, being able to sell a premium product is a matter of being able to deliver a particular audience that is valuable and otherwise hard to reach for advertisers. That's the realm of the FT, Economist, Vogue, etc. But general, non-identity based news and analysis, the stuff of healthy democracy, barely has a business model at all post-internet. Journalistic outfits can go to Craig, and beg for foundation funds, or they can target a lucrative audience, but neither of those incentivize good general journalism for a mass audience. None of our current models support informing a broad polity about political issues, news of the day, and sports scores.
There is a lot of journalism I love these days. Investigative outfits like ProPublica are amazing and worthy of love, eyeballs, and financial support. Individual newsletter journalism can be fantastic, but none of these are, or should be, a person's only source for news. That would be depressing and leave out a lot of useful information about weather, baseball, and local community. What might be the most important job of journalism, the day to day, isn't something anyone can make a living doing. Even the New York Times is slowly turning into a video game company with a newsroom attached.
It takes hiring an expensive specialist for most newsrooms to figure out how to make a healthy readership into a revenue stream that can pay real, grown-up salaries. What that specialist is going to do is gather and analyze complicated data about the publication, site, and audience. Then they will massage all of that into a product the publication can sell ads against, with some level of guaranteed private data about the readers going to the advertisers.
This means doing journalism in the internet age requires gathering an unethical amount of personal information about the people who read your work and selling it to the highest bidder. This is what nearly every large going concern does now. New York Times, LA Times, USA Today, and so on, nearly every journalist outfit that can pay its reporters does so, at least in part, by gathering their readers' personal data and selling it to shadowy data brokers, who they know nothing about. Our data vanishes into a black hole of marketing and datamining firms, and only reemerges when corporations are trying to manipulate us.
That's the last remaining business model of general audience journalism -- Surveillance Capitalism. Journalism has to sweep up your personal information and sell you to companies who want to control markets. Your private information, where you go, what you look at, what you care about, all of it goes to corporations and political actors.
Sometimes they just use it to sell you sodas. Sometimes they use it to take the reins of power and pillage society, Cambridge Analytica style. But the news organizations and their journalists have no insight into how their websites are being weaponized against their readers, via personal data.
And honestly, most probably don't want to know. There's nothing they can do about it.