Yeah, to put it mildly, J. Random Web Developer’s view on the news business is … not helpful. It’s not as if news orgs don’t hate their current monetization mod

Yeah, to put it mildly, J. Random Web Developer’s view on the news business is … not helpful. It’s not as if news orgs don’t hate their current monetization models; a quick spin through Poynter would have confirmed that for him, while he probably should be aware that many outlets are focusing on subscriptions, partner content, and so on. But the nature of the web is that the vast majority of consumers are conditioned to have stuff for free, and if they can’t get news from the WSJ they’ll get it from Breitbart, and if they can’t get it from Breitbart they’ll get it from a Romanian teenager running a fake-news clickfarm on Facebook. And that’s without getting into the first- and second-order effects the Web has had on local journalism and newspapers, which have suffered from the twin scourges of the superstar economy (why pay for the Paducha Picayune when I have every national paper at my fingertips?) and the miserable margins of online ads compared to the print ads that used to be their mainstay. The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.