Reputable news outlet revenue was always a mix of subscription and ads... i'm talking physical newspapets here... then with the internet, people stopped paying those subscriptions and news was funded by just ads, which wasnt sustainable.... so now we have ads and billionaires funding the news.

i'm not sure what you mean "this is a new phenomena"... journalism has always cost money. It was never free/gratis.

If news was all pay news, it would create other intractable problems

Sure, i agree. I didnt say subscription was the best revenue model. You also have the guardian's non-profit, or publicly funded media. But those have problems and biases too.

But surely all those models are better than what we have now

[–] TheHonourablePierrePoilievre@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 hours ago

Subscriptions have not been the major part of revenue for a long time. Media has from the start been controled by the wealthy.

the x axis is not labeled for some reaso. It covers 1956-2021 you can tell by clicking on the website. The big gap between the lines is mid 1970s to mid 2010s. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/

This is for the US. In Canada I think its even more exaggerated.

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

It's damned if you do damned if you don't at this point with tech sucking up all the ad revenue that is for sure.

Even before that though, the media has been consolidating, around 2001 there were like 10 companies that owned about every major outlet and network, and it's just gotten worse, and the internet wasn't sucking up all the ad revenue back then. That is the cause of a lot of this, obviously a large factor is tech being allowed to lawlessly lord over the internet and get their grasping hands on all that ad revenue while cheating everyone else downstream.