Interesting article. However, at the end there is this idea that the government should fund news reporting. I grew up in Norway where the government did exactly that (the only TV channel when I was a kid was run by the government). Thing is, that government funded news outlet almost never said anything really critical about the government.
"One of the highest-profile acquisitions came in 2011 when Bloomberg—already a behemoth in the business-intelligence sphere—bought a longtime employee-owned trade outlet, the Bureau of National Affairs. BNA, as it is known, went for $990 million. [...] Contrast that with the recent sales and acquisitions of more household names in journalism. The Washington Post was sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million. The Boston Globe sold in 2013 for $70 million. "<p>Thing I learned from this article: There are real paying customers for the news, and --surprise surprise-- it's the people whose jobs depend on it. The bulk of the American public doesn't care enough to pay, and so won't get the full news.<p>I'm not sure that there's a way around this... ideas?
What about cities and counties funding newspapers? The author thinks that there's at least some good DC reporting from national papers and non-profit media, but that what suffers are the local papers.<p>Funding at the local level could be provided by ballot initiatives that pull money directly from taxes instead of the general budget. That way local politicians can't influence the news too much.<p>People are pretty passionate about funding libraries. I could see the same people accepting newspaper taxes.
Would be neat to see these outlets offer individuals non-commercial licenses at heavily reduced prices. I wonder if some parts of the geek population would enjoy access to good(better?) information.
Here is an idea:<p>First there is put up reddit/quora mashup. List of questions submitted by people. Ranked by up-votes. And you can dismiss questions by clicking "I have seen this". Only catch is that everything has to be a question.<p>Then put bounties and deadlines for the questions. Regular users can pay to increase the bounty. A week after the question is posted comes the deadline. Then every article written as answer gets posted to everybody who up voted the question.<p>Then the money is distributed so that 20% goes to the company running the website, 80% is shared among the authors, closely reflecting the up votes of paying users.