Not always. Subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal are an foundation revenue source. I think this is also the case for the FT and the Economist. I don't t

Not always. Subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal are an foundation revenue source. I think this is also the case for the FT and the Economist. I don't think it coincidental that these are financial papers. Information is valuable and businesspeople will pay for it. That has implications for their reporting, too. Their stories are under pressure for accuracy, because the readers are paying for information and will go elsewhere if they don't get good stuff. I think ad-first news models are more prone to some bias to generate an audience. People generally don't like hearing things they disagree with, so anyone requiring a large audience finds themselves pressured to adopt particular attitudes to get and hold that audience. Why don't business people assert the similar biases? They do. But the ones paying up for information -- e.g. WSJ subscribers -- are almost by definition more interested in information than people who aren't. That particular crowd is also alert to the potential in contrarian opinion, they know people can get _paid_ for knowing something unexpected. So they've incentive to overcome their own cognitive dissonance. I read recently that the NY Times was moving to more dependence on subscription revenue. I think that would be great, the more a reader pays, the higher the demand for accuracy.