Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
there has to be a way to do journalism without a web traffic or profit incentive.
About 10 years ago, the crypto community was talking about this with regard to microtransactions. The idea was that nobody really wants to pay a monthly subscription fee to news publications, but getting someone to digitally pay 1-10 cents to read an interesting article is probably doable. Unfortunately, digital currencies became what they are today instead of anything actually useful.
Actually a better solution exists and is used to varying degrees of success in other countries. BBC, ABC, CBC to name a few. Are they perfect? No. Are they funded adequately? Probably not.
That said crypto once again is looking for a problem to solve and there’s nothing to solve that isn’t already solved. Fund the existing solution properly does nothing but help.
that’s the fucking opposite of solving this problem
That’s the whole idea behind transact.io (non-crypto), but it’s had trouble catching on with news publishers because they are very risk adverse.
No kidding. Back in the day, news organizations would actually sell physical papers. The Internet has destroyed them, for better or worse.