Liberals Are Losing the Journalism Wars

“Paying for news” has always been an odd concept. Radio and television in the United States were historically free, once you bought the hardware. Local businesses and classified ad buyers heavily subsidized the big city newspaper at its peak. If access to disinterested reporting on local affairs is socially important—and I do think it is—we will have to find some way to produce and (perhaps more importantly) distribute it that does not rely on people who actively wish to pay for it.

There are plenty of people who are both engaged enough and economically secure enough to seek out and support particular publications directly (including The New Republic). If you’re reading this, you are probably one of them. These people have been able to sustain numerous national institutions that do incredibly important work, but this has so far proven to be a solution only for the large, established, and nationally focused press. There is simply no evidence yet that that model can work on the local level across this enormous country. (There isn’t even evidence to prove that it can sustain magazines and newspapers in the country’s largest state and second-largest city.)

News, as is commonly noted, is expensive to produce, and the people who produce it deserve to be fairly remunerated for doing so. But at some point, we (collectively, not individually) have to decide if the point of journalism is to employ journalists or to publicize useful information.

If you think of news as a commodity and citizens as consumers, it makes perfect sense to believe that people unwilling to pay for the highest-quality news deserve the crappy product they get from local TV, talk radio, and some conservative hack’s network of phony local news sites. But should it be acceptable to have a luxury tier of actually accurate and useful journalism? True information about your community is not the same as, say, furniture (except in how the cheap and crappy versions of both are contributing to societal collapse). If you accept that the responsibility of journalists is not just to produce important work but also to figure out how to disseminate that work to the widest possible audience—and to recognize that it is in a competition for attention with actual propaganda—the paywall goes from an unfortunate necessity to an active hindrance to the mission of the job.