Economic Models of Journalism

Did you see a blip? Me neither. My initial reaction is that this is like steering the car from the back seat. Rather than creating a constructive business model to fund good journalism, the governments are mostly creating a penalty system for bad journalism. However the more I think about it, the more I like it, even if I didn't think of it first. (My favored approach would instead focus on penalizing the reputations of the sources of fake news with a MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) system.) So I guess I now want to extend my ontology of economic models for journalism:

History of Journalism

(first entry pair is like a header (though this is the official list header))

Economic model of news propagation (roughly in chronological order)

What went wrong (or right)

Espionage

Originally only the king could afford it and (possibly) benefit from it. Still in use and still failing a lot of the time. (Interesting recent failures mentioned in Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.)

Subscriptions

Can you believe that people would pay to read the truth? Problem here is that it's really hard to compete with free and especially these days the Web can stuff all your input channels with free stuff. Often worth even less than you paid.

Advertising

Worked pretty well as long as you could see which parts were which, but that's mostly where it's collapsed these days as advertisers have gotten better and better at disguising (and thus discrediting) their pitches. But the Internet also hurt this model by allowing intermediaries like the google and Facebook to split the advertising revenue completely away from the journalists.

Public Service

The Golden Age? Basically funded out of the monopoly profits when the governments could auction off the limited amount of bandwidth. Mandated as a public service in those days, but the Internet destroyed the scarcity.

Disaster Porn

The dregs of the advertising model, with CNN now the leading practitioner. Not really new when you remember the long history of "If it bleeds, it leads", but most of the time it does not align with all the news you actually need to know. Great time killer, however.

Propaganda

Probably deserves to be higher on the list because it has deep historical roots, but propaganda has become much more "scientific" in recent years. FAUX used to be the leading practitioner, but the business seems to be in a state of transition now. Can you imagine worse than FAUX? How about Pravda in it's "glory days"? (That's why the Russians are so good at reading the news sideways.

Charity

Lots of systems floating around. Works better for comics than journalism? For example https://existentialcomics.com/ is funded via Patreon.

Anti-Fake News

The new model of this story. Fundamentally a punitive model? Too soon to say if it's going to go wrong or right. However I'm fundamentally opposed to censorship and have to predict this model is going to be abused. Especially when it starts clashing with the official government propaganda channels.

Solution-Driven

As far as I know, this is an imaginary model that doesn't exist anywhere, but I'm including it here in case you can point at an example. My idea is for the news (as a story or video) to be followed by some solution projects to help with the problems the journalists are telling us about. When enough donors agree to support a particular project, then the money gets released. A fraction would go to pay for the journalism and the journalists would also follow up on how well the solution worked (or didn't). I even imagine a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) as the intermediary to handle the money. Do you have a URL for anything like this? (But Kickstarter et alia are not remotely close.)

What did I miss?

I think I covered most of the major economic models for journalism and related services, but you're welcome to differ. I hope it's more than a flash in the pan. (Like usenet? (But I could probably shoehorn usenet into the charity model?))

(Watch out for trolls bearing links.)