6 ms·

Making the news available at no cost is a victory

143 points by danso 5mo ago

superxpro12 5mo ago
The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?
- mcmcmc 5mo ago
  If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading. The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
  - troupo 5mo ago
    Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News. Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
  - kanelincoln 5mo ago
    Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
    - carlosjobim 5mo ago
      It's a great indicator.
    - mcmcmc 5mo ago
      I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase. If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can. “Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers. For-profit free news is the problem.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
  - afavour 5mo ago
    I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
    - idle_zealot 5mo ago
      I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary? What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
  - autoexec 5mo ago
    I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
- conception 5mo ago
  It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
  - afavour 5mo ago
    That model doesn't really work, unfortunately: https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-a-theoretically/ https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-... It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
    - Cider9986 5mo ago
      The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information. The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay. If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine. Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption. [1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/ https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/ https://www.therage.co/donate/ https://www.therage.co/donate/ https://zola.ink https://zola.ink [2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184 https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184
- andriy_koval 5mo ago
  > How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
- romanows 5mo ago
  NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.
- raincole 5mo ago
  Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.
- swader999 5mo ago
  Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up. Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
  - kg 5mo ago
    Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
    - swader999 5mo ago
      Yes and that affects all existing 'news' channels too. It comes down to general education levels and that has similar bad incentives in play.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse. They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
- oersted 5mo ago
  There's an obvious answer: a good public news service. I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect. The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society. This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree. I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding. And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
  - tr_user 5mo ago
    NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
    - socalgal2 5mo ago
      It’s hilarious that you think the issue was funding and not the fact that NPR was and is a voice for the left and the opposition thought it was unfair for the government to be paying for one side’s propaganda. If you can’t hear it you aren’t listening
- vslira 5mo ago
  I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts: Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in. Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust. Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply) btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
  - vablings 5mo ago
    The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA. I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
    - ambicapter 5mo ago
      So, you don't think any government program at all will work in this case?
  - bjelkeman-again 5mo ago
    Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d
  - 5mo ago
- mmooss 5mo ago
  > If the people arent interested in paying They are, according to the OP: https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-paywall-removal-details/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...
- boplicity 5mo ago
  Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest. Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account. There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist. This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it. Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
  - aidenn0 5mo ago
    Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?
    - boplicity 5mo ago
      You can't be impartial; everyone has their own sets of biases that they can't get around. These are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but they're always there. It's not necessarily intentionally dishonest to say you're impartial, but it fundamentally is dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.
      - aidenn0 5mo ago
        You seem to be conflating "try" with "being" (and possibly also "a little biased" with "a lot biased"). If I currently have a 12 minute mile and I try to get it down to 6 minutes, but only mange to get it down to 8 minutes I have both: 1. Not lied about my goal 2. Accomplished something similar to my goal.
  - frumplestlatz 5mo ago
    Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform. We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.
- EGreg 5mo ago
  Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous. What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded. And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
  - mohamedkoubaa 5mo ago
    Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
  - HWR_14 5mo ago
    A intrepid reporter with a reputation is less likely to upload doctored footage for propaganda purposes.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?) Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
- nemoniac 5mo ago
  Isn't it equally important to ask the question:how exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you can afford the salaries?
- observationist 5mo ago
  The problem has been differing narratives from different sources with different biases, motives, and objectives. The solution is a thorough interrogation of different sources, cross-checking and validating novel claims, using a Bayesian approach to maintaining a model of the world. Not rigid, but roughly scientific. Most people can't afford to do that, so they pick a proxy from among the many individuals that do the work of sorting and filtering and comparing and validating news from a wide spectrum. Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew. The solution is high intelligence local AI that maintains a world model for you, providing you with updates based on your interests and cross-validated world events, with a rigorous record of sources and reliability. Anything short of that is just repackaged proxy games. On the plus side, Asmongold or Hasan Piker are the low bar to beat. Haha. People are so well informed and educated now that they have access to the interwebs.
- nurple 5mo ago
  Easy. One of the primary reason that I don't subscribe to any kind of news anymore is exactly because of all the advertising and the being owned by giant money and power concerns. I would happily subscribe at a quite a bit higher rate for news orgs that go non-profit/co-op and nuke the ads, and I don't think I'm in the minority here. Keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you know the rest of the story. I applaud this step and hope they push their differentiation as a people-aligned source of Utah news even further. With how connected we are these days, what I'd really like to see is for them to make crowd-sourcing and discussion a systemic part of their processes and site/app. They can't be everywhere where news that's important to some is happening, but all of us together can.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- slwvx 5mo ago
  > How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? The Salt Lake Tribune (as in the article above) CAN afford salaries. > If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do? People ARE paying. I'm a subscriber to the Tribune and a donor.
- analog8374 5mo ago
  Make all the surveillance cameras and satellites public access. A culture of analysis and commenting will develop. We'd check the cultural effluent against the original stuff to keep it honest.
- jart 5mo ago
  They're funded by patronage. It's the most ancient economical model.
cathyreisenwitz 5mo ago
Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.
- dpoloncsak 5mo ago
  ...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push
  - rightbyte 5mo ago
    I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.
    - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
      The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work... Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here) Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes. If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
      - rightbyte 5mo ago
adolph 5mo ago
This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations. In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news organization, not owned by any person or company. The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."
droolboy 5mo ago
As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
- iron_albatross 5mo ago
  How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?
  - kingstnap 5mo ago
    In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them. People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all. In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly. I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this. For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform. Quite the pickle. I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them. Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for. There is no winning.
locusofself 5mo ago
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.
- grahamburger 5mo ago
  There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.
rvz 5mo ago
That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already. Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.
- mmooss 5mo ago
  What is that based on?
  - rvz 5mo ago
    1. Most news sites on the web have an ad model. 2. Bloomberg LP.
    - mmooss 5mo ago
      And there are also sites with free news, such as AP, NPR, CNN, Fox, etc.
      - rvz 5mo ago
        funded by....donations from corporations and billionaires?
        mmooss 5mo ago
        I don't know, what are they funded by? Is that how AP is funded? The NY Times, WSJ, FT and many others are now funded by subscriptions. Your claim from a few comments up doesn't seem to match reality: > That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already.
        rvz 5mo ago
        > Is that how AP is funded? Are these not foundations owned by billionaires funding the AP? [0][1] > The NY Times, WSJ, FT and many others are now funded by subscriptions. That doesn't seem to be "at no cost" does it? NY Times, WSJ, FT already are making billions of dollars sustaining themselves from that and are again owned and backed by billion dollar companies. Why? Because it is NOT free "at no cost" and there is always someone else paying. > Your claim from a few comments up doesn't seem to match reality: The opposite is true. You have only further supported my claim. [0] https://www.ap.org/about/supporting-ap/ https://www.ap.org/about/supporting-ap/ [1] https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-for-journalism-secures-over-30-million-to-bring-ap-content-to-local-us-newsrooms/ https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-...
Animats 5mo ago
It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news. Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.
- grahamburger 5mo ago
  I use apnews.com, no paywall.
- skrebbel 5mo ago
  The Guardian
- mmooss 5mo ago
  In the US: NPR, NBC, AP, The Guardian, ...
grahamburger 5mo ago
A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/ https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/
cdrnsf 5mo ago
My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had. The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former. It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too. CalMatters is a nonprofit and provides quality coverage. Perhaps that's a viable model at the state level. https://calmatters.org/about/funding/ https://calmatters.org/about/funding/
skrebbel 5mo ago
I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's: * Only paid subscribers can read * Subscribers can share an article (= copy a unique share link) * Shared articles are free for anyone This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe. They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads (and I believe also zero government support but not sure), for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  The Telegraph does the same thing; it's the lwn.net model. Doesn't the WaPo have share links? I can't recall.
monkaiju 5mo ago
Hmmmm, the sentiment is nice but it coming from the Salt Lake Tribune is pretty rich... As someone living in SLC I've seen the "quality" of their journalism firsthand, even helped write a piece about it back in 2023: https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/ https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/
- arjie 5mo ago
  The old saying is that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product[0]. The argument is usually that when you're getting things for free, you're being sold to advertisers in some sense. But it could just as well be that if you're getting things for free, the ability to influence you is being sold to those who want to influence you. In fact, with sufficient cynicism, all sorts of such theories can be considered plausible. Your experience seems to indicate that perhaps one does not need that much cynicism. 0: I've never thought much of the saying because I think you can have multiple people participate in an economic interaction.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
banana_gappa 5mo ago
Even though I like this and support that news should be free but it falls into the same internet trap. The cost to exist successfully on the internet is going up and with AI, it's going to be even more difficult for news orgs to justify this model. I hope people donate with all their heart.
glitcher 5mo ago
Growing up several decades ago it seemed like the news was more focused on reporting the facts of current events. Now I know this is naive and there have always biases, but I do miss the way it was delivered in an almost boring way without all of the additional commentary and sensationalism. But you know rose colored glasses and all that.
- mulderc 5mo ago
  NPR/PBS are still there and basically the same.

143 points by danso 5mo ago

The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?

mcmcmc 5mo ago
If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading. The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.
- troupo 5mo ago
  Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News. Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.
- kanelincoln 5mo ago
  Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?
  - carlosjobim 5mo ago
    It's a great indicator.
  - mcmcmc 5mo ago
    I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase. If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can. “Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers. For-profit free news is the problem.
idle_zealot 5mo ago
There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
- afavour 5mo ago
  I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
  - idle_zealot 5mo ago
    I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary? What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
- autoexec 5mo ago
  I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
conception 5mo ago
It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.
- afavour 5mo ago
  That model doesn't really work, unfortunately: https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-a-theoretically/ https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-... It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.
  - Cider9986 5mo ago
    The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information. The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay. If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine. Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption. [1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/ https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/ https://www.therage.co/donate/ https://www.therage.co/donate/ https://zola.ink https://zola.ink [2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184 https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184
andriy_koval 5mo ago
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts
romanows 5mo ago
NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.
raincole 5mo ago
Political parties and foreign actors, eventually. Propaganda pieces are usually free to access.
swader999 5mo ago
Maybe that is part of the plan, eliminate truth so that everyone just gives up. Perhaps crowd sourced facts/news with legit upvoting, weighted upvoting based on historic 'credibility'. Top contributions get a share of add revenue.
- kg 5mo ago
  Doesn't crowd sourcing and upvotes and revenue for high ranking just mean people will generate what's popular to get paid for it? Will there be money for unpopular truths somehow?
  - swader999 5mo ago
    Yes and that affects all existing 'news' channels too. It comes down to general education levels and that has similar bad incentives in play.
carlosjobim 5mo ago
Mass syndication has worked splendidly for all other media. But textual media publishers still refuse. They have to learn from Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and such and start offering bulk subscriptions for a fair price. It's better for the individual news providers to earn 10 cents each from 10 million subscribers, than to earn 10 dollars each from 10 000 subscribers.
oersted 5mo ago
There's an obvious answer: a good public news service. I know, I know, that one is problematic too. Some countries have pulled it off relatively successfully, but it's never perfect. The thing is, this is exactly what the government is for: services that individuals don't want to pay for, but are important to have as a society. This is possible if there's a real division of powers in the government. Yes, that sounds increasingly unlikely now, but it's no fantasy, it has been achieved in many different places and moments in history, to a reasonable degree. I mean, there's a reason why journalism is called "the fourth estate", maybe it should literally be the fourth independent government branch alongside the executive, legislative and judicial. We are in the "information age" after all. Or at least a relatively independent and technocratic government agency with decent funding. And don't tell me that "we have it but nobody watches it", then it's just not properly funded or supported. The BBC is extremely competitive alongside commercial news media, both in the UK and internationally. Many countries have similarly strong public media even if it is not internationally as well known, because of the language barrier.
- tr_user 5mo ago
  NPR got defunded and here in australia, the ABC are run by political appointees while the rest of the corpo media start branding it as leftist talking points. You can't fix this if the funding source isn't independent and it's competing against a lot more money
  - socalgal2 5mo ago
    It’s hilarious that you think the issue was funding and not the fact that NPR was and is a voice for the left and the opposition thought it was unfair for the government to be paying for one side’s propaganda. If you can’t hear it you aren’t listening
vslira 5mo ago
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts: Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in. Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust. Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply) btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
- vablings 5mo ago
  The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA. I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
  - ambicapter 5mo ago
    So, you don't think any government program at all will work in this case?
- bjelkeman-again 5mo ago
  Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presst%C3%B6d
- 5mo ago
mmooss 5mo ago
> If the people arent interested in paying They are, according to the OP: https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-paywall-removal-details/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/business/2026/03/31/tribune-payw...
boplicity 5mo ago
Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest. Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account. There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist. This means having a clear perspective and "owning" that perspective, instead of shying away from it. Coincidentally, this type of thinking can dramatically increase brand loyalty and trust.
- aidenn0 5mo ago
  Anyone claiming that they are trying to be impartial is being dishonest?
  - boplicity 5mo ago
    You can't be impartial; everyone has their own sets of biases that they can't get around. These are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but they're always there. It's not necessarily intentionally dishonest to say you're impartial, but it fundamentally is dishonest to claim you're capable of the impossible.
    - aidenn0 5mo ago
      You seem to be conflating "try" with "being" (and possibly also "a little biased" with "a lot biased"). If I currently have a 12 minute mile and I try to get it down to 6 minutes, but only mange to get it down to 8 minutes I have both: 1. Not lied about my goal 2. Accomplished something similar to my goal.
- frumplestlatz 5mo ago
  Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform. We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.
EGreg 5mo ago
Wait, I never understood why we need "intrepid reporters" hired by a certain company to enter a war zone, for instance. Everyone has cameras now. They're ubiquitous. What we really need is collaboration online to make sense of the footage being uploaded. And the same for any kind of news. Why do we need the capitalist model again? Look at Wikipedia, Linux, open source software, and more.
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo ago
  Exactly. News is by definition storytelling, and I don't think it's healthy to conflate the two or to pretend that storytellers are reporting on facts.
- HWR_14 5mo ago
  A intrepid reporter with a reputation is less likely to upload doctored footage for propaganda purposes.
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
Publicly funded, like the BBC "tax" in the UK which they used to have (not sure if they still do?) Or PBS/NPR in the US, funded by taxpayers. Worked reasonably well, and fairly independently, for decades until Trump defunded it.
nemoniac 5mo ago
Isn't it equally important to ask the question:how exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you can afford the salaries?
observationist 5mo ago
The problem has been differing narratives from different sources with different biases, motives, and objectives. The solution is a thorough interrogation of different sources, cross-checking and validating novel claims, using a Bayesian approach to maintaining a model of the world. Not rigid, but roughly scientific. Most people can't afford to do that, so they pick a proxy from among the many individuals that do the work of sorting and filtering and comparing and validating news from a wide spectrum. Some proxies are decent, some are not, and come with their own biases and skew. The solution is high intelligence local AI that maintains a world model for you, providing you with updates based on your interests and cross-validated world events, with a rigorous record of sources and reliability. Anything short of that is just repackaged proxy games. On the plus side, Asmongold or Hasan Piker are the low bar to beat. Haha. People are so well informed and educated now that they have access to the interwebs.
nurple 5mo ago
Easy. One of the primary reason that I don't subscribe to any kind of news anymore is exactly because of all the advertising and the being owned by giant money and power concerns. I would happily subscribe at a quite a bit higher rate for news orgs that go non-profit/co-op and nuke the ads, and I don't think I'm in the minority here. Keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you know the rest of the story. I applaud this step and hope they push their differentiation as a people-aligned source of Utah news even further. With how connected we are these days, what I'd really like to see is for them to make crowd-sourcing and discussion a systemic part of their processes and site/app. They can't be everywhere where news that's important to some is happening, but all of us together can.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
slwvx 5mo ago
> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? The Salt Lake Tribune (as in the article above) CAN afford salaries. > If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do? People ARE paying. I'm a subscriber to the Tribune and a donor.
analog8374 5mo ago
Make all the surveillance cameras and satellites public access. A culture of analysis and commenting will develop. We'd check the cultural effluent against the original stuff to keep it honest.
jart 5mo ago
They're funded by patronage. It's the most ancient economical model.

cathyreisenwitz 5mo ago

Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

dpoloncsak 5mo ago
...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push
- rightbyte 5mo ago
  I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.
  - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
    The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work... Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here) Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes. If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.
    - rightbyte 5mo ago

adolph 5mo ago

This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations. In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news organization, not owned by any person or company. The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."

droolboy 5mo ago

As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.

iron_albatross 5mo ago
How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?
- kingstnap 5mo ago
  In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them. People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all. In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly. I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this. For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
Can’t criticize the Liberals because they hold the purse strings. Can’t support the Conservatives because defunding them is explicitly on their platform. Quite the pickle. I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them. Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for. There is no winning.

locusofself 5mo ago

Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.

grahamburger 5mo ago
There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.

rvz 5mo ago

That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already. Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.

mmooss 5mo ago
What is that based on?
- rvz 5mo ago
  1. Most news sites on the web have an ad model. 2. Bloomberg LP.
  - mmooss 5mo ago
    And there are also sites with free news, such as AP, NPR, CNN, Fox, etc.
    - rvz 5mo ago
      funded by....donations from corporations and billionaires?
      - mmooss 5mo ago
        I don't know, what are they funded by? Is that how AP is funded? The NY Times, WSJ, FT and many others are now funded by subscriptions. Your claim from a few comments up doesn't seem to match reality: > That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already.
        rvz 5mo ago
        > Is that how AP is funded? Are these not foundations owned by billionaires funding the AP? [0][1] > The NY Times, WSJ, FT and many others are now funded by subscriptions. That doesn't seem to be "at no cost" does it? NY Times, WSJ, FT already are making billions of dollars sustaining themselves from that and are again owned and backed by billion dollar companies. Why? Because it is NOT free "at no cost" and there is always someone else paying. > Your claim from a few comments up doesn't seem to match reality: The opposite is true. You have only further supported my claim. [0] https://www.ap.org/about/supporting-ap/ https://www.ap.org/about/supporting-ap/ [1] https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-for-journalism-secures-over-30-million-to-bring-ap-content-to-local-us-newsrooms/ https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2025/ap-fund-...

Animats 5mo ago

It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news. Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.

grahamburger 5mo ago
I use apnews.com, no paywall.
skrebbel 5mo ago
The Guardian
mmooss 5mo ago
In the US: NPR, NBC, AP, The Guardian, ...

grahamburger 5mo ago

A list of the donors supporting the paper here: https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/ https://www.sltrib.com/supporters/

cdrnsf 5mo ago

My first job after college was working at the local newspaper right as subscription numbers crested and declined. It's one of my favorite sets of folks I've worked with and one of my favorite jobs I've had. The editorial section was distinct from the advertising section with the latter selling against subscription numbers and not meaningfully influencing the former. It got acquired and the staff got caught significantly as physical and digital subscriptions declined. I don't know what the solution is but I know competition for attention and ad dollars didn't help. Our information environment is worse for the decline of local journalism too. CalMatters is a nonprofit and provides quality coverage. Perhaps that's a viable model at the state level. https://calmatters.org/about/funding/ https://calmatters.org/about/funding/

skrebbel 5mo ago

I often wonder why the model of Dutch news site https://decorrespondent.nl/ https://decorrespondent.nl/ isn't more widely followed. In a nutshell, it's: * Only paid subscribers can read * Subscribers can share an article (= copy a unique share link) * Shared articles are free for anyone This makes it so that eg if some Correspondent article were submitted to HN, that'd be a share link by a subscriber, and everyone on HN can read it without a paywall. It'll say "this article was shared with you by $NAME" on top. At the same time if you then want to go to the Correspondent homepage and figure out what's been going on in NL slow news land, you can't, unless you subscribe. They've been 100% subscriber-funded, zero ads (and I believe also zero government support but not sure), for over a decade now. It's clearly a model that works, at least their target audience (lefty, highly educated).

pessimizer 5mo ago
The Telegraph does the same thing; it's the lwn.net model. Doesn't the WaPo have share links? I can't recall.

monkaiju 5mo ago

Hmmmm, the sentiment is nice but it coming from the Salt Lake Tribune is pretty rich... As someone living in SLC I've seen the "quality" of their journalism firsthand, even helped write a piece about it back in 2023: https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/ https://copdb.org/articles/name-the-bastards/

arjie 5mo ago
The old saying is that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product[0]. The argument is usually that when you're getting things for free, you're being sold to advertisers in some sense. But it could just as well be that if you're getting things for free, the ability to influence you is being sold to those who want to influence you. In fact, with sufficient cynicism, all sorts of such theories can be considered plausible. Your experience seems to indicate that perhaps one does not need that much cynicism. 0: I've never thought much of the saying because I think you can have multiple people participate in an economic interaction.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

banana_gappa 5mo ago

Even though I like this and support that news should be free but it falls into the same internet trap. The cost to exist successfully on the internet is going up and with AI, it's going to be even more difficult for news orgs to justify this model. I hope people donate with all their heart.

glitcher 5mo ago

Growing up several decades ago it seemed like the news was more focused on reporting the facts of current events. Now I know this is naive and there have always biases, but I do miss the way it was delivered in an almost boring way without all of the additional commentary and sensationalism. But you know rose colored glasses and all that.

mulderc 5mo ago
NPR/PBS are still there and basically the same.