Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
I would like to see more information like this, thanks for sharing. Though at least one of those examples has a red flag for me - The Baltimore Banner gets a non-trivial amount revenue from advertising. For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
"For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism."
Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started. Running a newspaper used to be a fantastic business, because you effectively had a local monopoly on advertising to a geographic area. If someone wanted to promote things in your city, you would be top of their list.
Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc completely decimated that business model over the past 20 years and the news industry is still trying to figure out how to fund itself via alternative means.
Historically news organizations have had very strong mechanisms for avoiding advertisers influencing their coverage - the "editorial–advertising firewall". Reputable new orgs like the Baltimore Banner should have policies like that in place today.
Getting grants is an alternative way and it's how freelancers are able to do reporting for cash-strapped newsrooms. Grants definitely have their own can of worms, though. Things like restrictive reporting requirements, do-not-do requirements, and the dynamics that just come from people giving other people relatively large sums of money.
Yeah, the problem with grants is that even with no strings attached there's still a subtle influence where a publication may not want to harm the interests of the source if that grant since they might not provide more funds in the future.
I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.
> Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started
That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.
> editorial–advertising firewall
This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!
> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.
Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.
Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".
The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.
Definitely a template. I can’t think of a single major issue I’ve had with anything they’ve put out. I’m sure something exists, I haven’t read literally everything they’ve put out stall, but I have been very impressed with everything I have seen.
Blaming society for the poor state of journalism is tempting but ignores that the root of the problem lies from within. Financial institutions and other journalists demand information dense journalism to do their jobs and have no problem paying for it, so this is what they receive. Most regular people view news as a form of entertainment and have no problem with sacrificing their attention, and this is what they receive.
What's changed is that the profit used to come from advertising. Since everyone read the news, they could charge a lot for ads.
Those days are over, and news now bubble up from social media. That kinda works, but it's far from ideal.
To me the 2019 "Covington kids" incident showed how broken the media had become. All the prestigious media, from NY Times down, reprinted a viral Twitter thread as front page news without any fact check.
The reported "facts" were completely wrong, and even if they had been right, some random kids being rude in a park should never be national news.
The press has always been for profit, it was never a charity. What I see today is a mix of trying to maximize profits (which is different from merely making a living from it), and it being more difficult nowadays to make money from diligent journalism, mostly due to how the internet works.
People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential.
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
Unlike opaquely financed and privately owned media companies, the Guardian is actually relatively clear and open in how it is financed and set up in a way to try to make them as independent as possible (see for example the Scott Trust's annual report https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/The_Scott_Trust_Limite...).
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
> But the press of today is a for profit endeavour.
For me, the press today is a for influence endeavour. Most journalists have a POV the majority of topics they write about they express that POV with how they discuss the topic. For example, which people they quote, generally only ones that agree with their POV. If they present an a opposing view they always couch it and phrase things to push the reader to discount that view. If they preset a supporting view they phrase it in a way to make it sound trusting and authoritative.
To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
You’re using multiple definitions of “free” here. One is freedom in the Lockean sense, the other is freedom from the properties and consequences of an emergent system. It’s a bit like saying you are free to choose your own mate and have kids without government involvement but you’re still a slave to natural selection.
The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.
For-profit media is definitely a problem, but Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post and Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter because they thought they were more profitable than any other investments they could have made.
I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses.
It certainly helps that they have their own revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.
Elon was quite clear the he bought Twitter to make it a free speech forum where you could openly discuss things, even from non establishment standpoints.
Here's an incident from September 2024 where links were blocked to a newsletter containing a hacked document with potentially damaging information about JD Vance - and the journalist who published that newsletter then had their account suspended: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...
Has it? I’ve never actually engaged with twitter. I always thought it was an echo chamber. From the outside looking in though it seems like twitter is the same pre-Elon as post-Elon. The difference is just which views are the blessed ones.
I see people advocating all known political views. Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
Of course, most progressives have left now that they encounter opposing views (AKA "fascism"), so you could think of it as an echo chamber. But it's not forced to be one by the site.
> Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
This is 100% a lie. Open nazi advocating violence were suppressed, but back then there were people who claimed they are conservatives or right wing who were not nazi.
Funny enough, open communists advocating violence were suppressed too back then. In fact, left was policed more strictly then the right.
No, he never intended that nor done that. He wanted to make it more biased toward right wing then it already was (and it was already biased toward conservatives in its moderation). Twitter did not became more open for all point of view. It became exclusively more far right friendly.
Elon Musk censors and suppresses whatever speech he does not like whole his life.
Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.