Lots of interesting thoughts here. I wonder if news is not that different from education: Privileged people always had access to it, sometimes on a 1-1 basis

Lots of interesting thoughts here. I wonder if news is not that different from education: Privileged people always had access to it, sometimes on a 1-1 basis (informants/tutors). Then came technology [writing|printing], but real scale still required capital to pay for platform [campuses|printer] and content [educators|journalists]. But inevitably the profitability of businesses decline over time until all the profits are gone. Due to competition they start giving away content for free and start selling eyeballs, quality declines and the incumbents need ways to make money other than their primary revenue source. In both cases the most successful of the businesses can use their size to their advantage: Academia partners with industry to fund "scientific research". It also "helps prepare students for the job market". Newspapers decide to double down on advertisement. Basically both sell their soul, only a little at first, but things only get worse over time. The internet accelerates all this. Stupid fights like the above breaks out about who should get what share of the pie. But at the end of the day the core value still comes from the individuals (journalists/educators) who rightfully feel that they have been reduced to mere numbers and they could provide more value to less people and make more money going independent. So a lot of them do. We now have platforms for independent education (self published books, online courses, patreon, etc) but we don't really have them for (verifiable) journalism yet. I don't even know how that would look like. The best I could find was comedy and news-commentary podcasts where the reporters can really be themselves. edit: typo + minor edit