Making the news available at no cost is a victory

ddanso about 4 hours ago 98 commentsRead Article on sltrib.com

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superxpro12•about 3 hours ago

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?

If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?

idle_zealot•about 3 hours ago

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 less than subtle interests?

Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

boplicity•about 2 hours ago

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.

This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.

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.

jvalencia•about 1 hour ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy•about 1 hour ago

> Many people think you should avoid having bias.

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.

We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.

nyeah•about 2 hours ago

On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.

chromacity•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

nathan_compton•about 2 hours ago

What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?

The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.

afavour•about 3 hours ago

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.

idle_zealot•about 3 hours ago

I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have 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?

What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.

autoexec•about 3 hours ago

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.

idle_zealot•about 2 hours ago

> 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'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 that strategy loses.

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.

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.

nurple•27 minutes ago

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.

vslira•about 2 hours ago

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:

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.

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.

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)

btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.

hydrogen7800•29 minutes ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...

oersted•about 2 hours ago

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).

The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.

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.

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.

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.

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.

pydry•about 2 hours ago

The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.

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.

vablings•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

ambicapter•about 2 hours ago

So, you don't think any government program at all will work in this case?

bjelkeman-again•about 2 hours ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d

observationist•about 1 hour ago

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.

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.

Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew.

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.

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.

conception•about 3 hours ago

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.

afavour•about 3 hours ago

That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:

https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...

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.

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.

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.

If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.

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.

[1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/

https://www.therage.co/donate/

https://zola.ink

[2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184

conception•about 2 hours ago

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.

joenot443•about 1 hour ago

> This article costs $0.02. Read it?

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".

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"

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?

michaelchisari•about 2 hours ago

An approach that might 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.

boplicity•about 2 hours ago

There is no micro-payment problem from the perspective of the vast majority of publishers. They simply don't want it. End of story.

nemoniac•about 1 hour ago

Isn't it equally important to ask the question:how exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you can afford the salaries?

andriy_koval•about 3 hours ago

> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?

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

romanows•about 3 hours ago

NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.

swader999•about 2 hours ago

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.

kg•about 2 hours ago

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?

swader999•about 2 hours ago

Yes and that affects all existing 'news' channels too. It comes down to general education levels and that has similar bad incentives in play.

raincole•about 2 hours ago

Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.

boplicity•about 2 hours ago

Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest.

Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account.

There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist.

This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it.

Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.

frumplestlatz•about 1 hour ago

Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform.

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.

boplicity•about 1 hour ago

I'm not saying that media should be used to influence instead of inform.

Rather, I'm saying you should acknowledge that you are influenced and will 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.

aidenn0•about 2 hours ago

Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?

boplicity•about 1 hour ago

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 is dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.

oersted•about 2 hours ago

There's an obvious answer: a good public news service.

I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

tr_user•about 2 hours ago

NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money

mcmcmc•about 3 hours ago

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.

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.

kanelincoln•about 3 hours ago

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"?

mcmcmc•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

“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.

For-profit free news is the problem.

carlosjobim•about 2 hours ago

It's a great indicator.

troupo•about 3 hours ago

Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News.

Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.

carlosjobim•about 2 hours ago

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.

EGreg•about 2 hours ago

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.

What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded.

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.

HWR_14•about 1 hour ago

A intrepid reporter with a reputation is less likely to upload doctored footage for propaganda purposes.

mohamedkoubaa•about 2 hours ago

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.

insane_dreamer•about 2 hours ago

Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?)

Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

> If the people arent interested in paying

They are, according to the OP:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...

cathyreisenwitz•about 3 hours ago

Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

wrqvrwvq•about 3 hours ago

Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.

cathyreisenwitz•about 1 hour ago

Very true

clickety_clack•about 3 hours ago

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.

cathyreisenwitz•about 1 hour ago

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."

strongpigeon•about 2 hours ago

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.

fragmede•about 3 hours ago

Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)

dpoloncsak•about 3 hours ago

...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push

rightbyte•about 3 hours ago

I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.

dpoloncsak•about 3 hours ago

The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...

Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)

Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence

My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.

If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.

moralestapia•about 3 hours ago

It might also be the case that one single "donor" puts in like 60% of the budget.

But that is also no different from one single client being 60% of your revenue.

In both cases, they'll be calling some shots.

pessimizer•about 1 hour ago

Better that than a press that won't say anything that will upset entire industries because they're afraid that ads will get withdrawn. It's been postulated that the only reason for pharmaceutical ads is to suppress critical reporting on the industry; the amount of spending on them is preposterous, while the amount of sales that TV and news ads pushes is likely tiny. Which is probably why all the "reporting" we get now is rewritten press releases about what a miracle the new drug is - the endless breathless stories push more sales than the actual ads.

Even if your 60% guy owns a pharmaceutical company, he might even be happier to push reporting on the problems with other pharmaceutical companies.

kgwxd•about 3 hours ago

"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.

flexagoon•about 3 hours ago

I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City

datsci_est_2015•about 2 hours ago

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.

grahamburger•about 3 hours ago

The Salt Lake Tribune has always promoted the view of the opposition for Salt Lake City (and Utah). It might not be who you think.

droolboy•about 3 hours ago

As 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.

iron_albatross•about 3 hours ago

How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?

kingstnap•about 1 hour ago

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.

throwatdem12311•about 2 hours ago

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.

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

'Free' and 'government funded' are not the same thing. The OP doesn't seem to be government funded.

Also, the BBC has no problem criticizing the UK government.

lanfeust6•about 2 hours ago

There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.

All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.

skrebbel•about 2 hours ago

I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's:

   * Only paid subscribers can read
   * Subscribers can share an article (= copy a unique share link)
   * Shared articles are free for anyone

This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe.

They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads (and I believe also zero government support but not sure), for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).

pessimizer•about 1 hour ago

The Telegraph does the same thing; it's the lwn.net model. Doesn't the WaPo have share links? I can't recall.

cdrnsf•about 2 hours ago

My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had.

The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former.

It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too.

CalMatters is a nonprofit and provides quality coverage. Perhaps that's a viable model at the state level. https://calmatters.org/about/funding/

banana_gappa•about 1 hour ago

Even though I like this and support that news should be free but it falls into the same internet trap. The cost to exist successfully on the internet is going up and with AI, it's going to be even more difficult for news orgs to justify this model. I hope people donate with all their heart.

grahamburger•about 2 hours ago

A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/

locusofself•about 3 hours ago

Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.

grahamburger•about 3 hours ago

There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.

monkaiju•about 1 hour ago

Hmmmm, the sentiment is nice but it coming from the Salt Lake Tribune is pretty rich... As someone living in SLC I've seen the "quality" of their journalism firsthand, even helped write a piece about it back in 2023:

https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/

Animats•about 2 hours ago

It'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.

skrebbel•about 2 hours ago

The Guardian

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

In the US: NPR, NBC, AP, The Guardian, ...

grahamburger•about 2 hours ago

I use apnews.com, no paywall.

rvz•about 2 hours ago

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.

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

What is that based on?

adolph•about 3 hours ago

This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.

  In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a 
  nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news 
  organization, not owned by any person or company.

The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."