Paying more money is often not sufficient to get more quality, though it may be necessary to get more quality. Without visiting Consumer Reports and digging dee

Paying more money is often not sufficient to get more quality, though it may be necessary to get more quality. Without visiting Consumer Reports and digging deep into Reddit, I don't know whether a $2000 refrigerator is better than the $1500 model standing next to it. I'd guess that this situation is more common than knowing that a higher priced product will be a higher quality product. In the case of newspapers, in-depth investigative reporting was never profitable on its own. Newspapers had geographically limited oligopolies over some common kinds of advertising in the 20th century. They bundled expensive investigative reports with low cost content like sports scores and weather forecasts. They interleaved display ads through all of it. Winning a Pulitzer could raise their prestige but it was revenue from bundled, mostly low cost content that made the business profitable. Classified advertising was particularly valuable because newspapers charged high rates and had to do no information gathering to fill those pages of the paper. Classified advertisers paid to show ads, and some newspaper buyers purchased the whole bundle just to see those ads. Craigslist was therefore the first big blow against the old newspaper revenue model. If Google News didn't exist, I believe that some other system would have further eroded the newspaper revenue model. Maybe it would be Reddit's news subreddits, Wikipedia's Current Events portal, or a lightweight "CraigsNews" aggregator. In any case, global discovery and reach online mean that most regional news organizations have fewer, less valuable eyeballs to advertise to than they did in the 20th century. Google gets blamed because it indexes news and has a lot of money. I don't think that Google has a lot of money because it indexes news. If Google shut down Google News and deindexed every news site, the news organization revenue problem would probably not be any better 5 years from now. The economic inefficiencies and geographic barriers of the 20th century news system produced a few positive externalities that people miss now. Legislators could try to directly fund news from taxes but they can't make people buy a newspaper to get weather forecasts again.