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?<p>If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against <i>less than subtle</i> interests?<p>Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.<p>This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.<p>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.
There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.
> Many people think you should avoid having bias.<p>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.<p>We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.
On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.<p>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 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 <i>are</i> regularly decieved by them right now.<p>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, othters can account for them as well, and be less likely to be decieved (even accidentally) by your communication.<p>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.
What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?<p>The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to <i>clandestinely</i> shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You <i>have</i> to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?<p>What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but <i>transparency</i> in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people<p>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 <i>that strategy loses</i>.<p>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.<p>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.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...</a>
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).<p>The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.<p>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 issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.<p>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.
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support</a>
<a href="https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d" rel="nofollow">https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d</a>
The problem has been differing narratives from different sources with different biases, motives, and objectives. The solution is a thorough interrogation of different sources, cross-checking and validating novel claims, using a Bayesian approach to maintaining a model of the world. Not rigid, but roughly scientific.<p>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.<p>Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew.<p>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.<p>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.
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:<p><a href="https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-a-theoretically/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...</a><p>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 conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.<p>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.<p>If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/" rel="nofollow">https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/</a><p><a href="https://www.therage.co/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://www.therage.co/donate/</a><p><a href="https://zola.ink" rel="nofollow">https://zola.ink</a><p>[2] <a href="https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184" rel="nofollow">https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184</a>
This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.
> This article costs $0.02. Read it?<p>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".<p>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"<p>Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?
An approach that <i>might</i> work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.
There is no micro-payment problem from the perspective of the vast majority of publishers. They simply don't want it. End of story.
Isn't it equally important to ask the question:how exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you can afford the salaries?
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?<p>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
NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up.<p>Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.
Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest.<p>Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account.<p>There will <i>always</i> be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist.<p>This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it.<p>Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform.<p>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.
I'm not saying that media should be used to influence instead of inform.<p>Rather, I'm saying you should acknowledge that you <i>are</i> influenced and <i>will</i> 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.
Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?
You can't be impartial; everyone has their own sets of biases that they can't get around. These are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but they're always there. It's not necessarily intentionally dishonest to say you're impartial, but it fundamentally <i>is</i> dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.
You seem to be conflating "try" with "being" (and possibly also "a little biased" with "a lot biased"). If I currently have a 12 minute mile and I try to get it down to 6 minutes, but only mange to get it down to 8 minutes I have both:<p>1. Not lied about my goal<p>2. Accomplished something similar to my goal.
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.<p>I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.<p>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.
Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.<p>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.<p>“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.<p><i>For-profit</i> free news is the problem.
It's a great indicator.
Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News.<p>Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse.<p>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.
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous.<p>What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.<p>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.
A intrepid reporter with a reputation is less likely to upload doctored footage for propaganda purposes.
Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?)<p>Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
> If the people arent interested in paying<p>They are, according to the OP:<p><a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-paywall-removal-details/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...</a>