If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.
Coffin Flop vibes
By taxpayers, at arms length from government control.
The moment there’s a profit motive in news, it will skew what gets shown to people and not for their benefit.
Would you invision that to be similar to something like PBS but fully funded from government sources?
More like the way the CBC or BBC are funded, though I’d like a little bit more distance from the government in terms of who’s controlling it.
The problem with that (from a country that has a govt funded channel with news programs) is that if they start being overly critical of a political party when that party gets in they reduce funding.
This is the only answer I’m okay with. Keeping government away from it would be a challenge, but an easier challenge to handle than our current cesspool of for-profit media companies.
Same with elections, they should be fully funded by taxpayers, and not a single cent of private money should enter the equation. Depending on the office and the size of its constituency, every candidate gets the exact same amount. You accept a dollar from a corp? You’re automatically disqualified. Imagine how much harder candidates would have to work for their votes.
What I’d love to see is the government funding and running a way to do microtransactions over HTTPS.
Basically, one of the government’s jobs is to facilitate commerce, which it has done by issuing and regulating currency for centuries, and collecting sales tax. But we’ve moved beyond paper and metal currency. I can’t pay for an article on USA Today with a quarter. So the government should run a system, funded by automatically charged sales tax, that lets me do exactly that. Let me hook up my bank account to it, and say yes or no when a website wants to charge me 25¢ for an article (or however much).
It would be great to have a way that I can pay without a stupid subscription and without giving the website my credit card information. If I read 3 articles a month, I don’t want to pay a $14.99 subscription. But not charging that means news sites can’t survive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay for our media easily and news sites could charge for it in a non-exploitative way?
Brave does microtransactions by browsing. Before that, flattr basically did the same. There were apps that charged cents per article, or a few bucks for the entire paper. Subscriptions for multiple papers, to fix the “I’m not paying X for just one newspaper” problem, have also been introduced a few times. This stuff never caught on despite apps giving away discounts with that sweet VC money.
The problem isn’t technological. Most people just don’t want to pay. Some people missed all the different attempts at modernising news, but most people just seem to think paying a few euros per month is to much money for news.
None of that was backed by the government.
Not all media should be government backed. Government backed news creates a huge conflict of interest.
There should be at least one source of government backed news to provide an alternative to sensationalist news, or course, but if everyone takes money from the government that the readership itself can’t provide, the risk or government interference is too high to trust the news.
My personal primary news source is completely government-funded, but it would be foolish to set up a system where every alternative has an incentive not to report on the government’s failings.
Like a non-profit, with tax breaks and the ability to earn enough to operate, but little more than that or the taxes come back with a vengeance.
Everything needs money to run but when there’s the option to shovel out whatever bait it takes to chase the dragon of uncapped earnings, they’re not in it to keep us informed, just to keep us spending.
Patreon, pay by visit, ads. Personally I just want news sites to be not own by a billionaire.
pay by visit
“You can pay 2 € to read this article”
Me: you do realise that’s the price of a full, printed, newspaper, right?
And my credit card is going to love the per-transaction fees!
