Mildly Infuriating

Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.

Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.

This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.

The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.

With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.

And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.

So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We had fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.

Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.

I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.

The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.

Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.

Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.