The shady billionaire can continue brainwashing you even after you paid $30 a month, right? In my opinion, the main difference between the bad journalism that

The shady billionaire can continue brainwashing you even after you paid $30 a month, right? In my opinion, the main difference between the bad journalism that used to exist before, and the utterly horrible journalism that exists now, is that previously people treated the newspaper as a whole, and now they share articles on social networks separately. Why does it make a difference? Because when you have a package of 20 articles, and you understand that 3 of them are complete bullshit (because they are about a topic you know something about), you become less likely to trust the remaining 17 articles even if you see nothing wrong about them (because they are about topics you know little about). When a bad article can ruin your impression of the entire newspaper, the newspaper has an incentive to avoid at least the most obvious nonsense. The same mechanism mostly doesn't work online. People share one article at a time. You won't share it if you understand that it is nonsense. But the fact that some other article on the same online newspaper is obvious nonsense won't stop you from sharing this specific article. On paper, those articles are part of the same thing; online, each of them lives a separate life. (Actually, an online company such as Gawker can split their content among multiple websites, to further avoid bad impression from one article hurting the remaining ones.) Perhaps paying for online newspapers could return this perception of a newspaper as a package. (Assuming there would be no deals like "pay $100 a month, and get access to these five newspapers".) Maybe.