"I think that this is also essentially saying that people want nice things for free (or at a very low cost). I don't think the original commenter is actually tr

"I think that this is also essentially saying that people want nice things for free (or at a very low cost). I don't think the original commenter is actually trying to blame people.." My point was that free or unfree are not the issue here. It's just not true, just as its not true about advertising or data gathering. Free isn't what's making a problem. It was a problem before. Whether your business model is eyeballs (it usually is in print, online, paid or free), subscriptions or both the most important types of journalism aren't economical. They're generally produced because journalistic cultures value them. Those that don't generally just become tabloids. Sending a journalistic team to Yemen to produce 10 articles is much more expensive than having people work from the office and produce 100 articles about politicians' and academics' opinions about that war... or articles about Kim and Kanye. A view is a view, a magazine sale is a magazine sale. I'm not even sure people "want nice things" in the sense that they want quality journalism. We want them to have "nice things." It's important for society. Doesn't necessarily benefit the reader much. Good journalism has always been hard to fund and rarely economically sustainable. Nothing to do with "people these days" or with "free." It's related to FB and Google in a roundabout way. They are the monoliths. They get all the bread. People read the content on FB, and if you don't want to let them then people will read someone else's content. So people read the content on FB, and FB gets the ad money. FB doesn't have a journalistic culture, journalistic ethic, or any kind of ethic. It was the journalistic ethic that was enabling hard journalism to be cross subsidised. That ethic is now broke.