> Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that scales to cover the production costs.
Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. Even with a dynamic site, such as a wiki, you can serve millions of occasional readers for $20/month.
As a 'newspaper' class resource, Wikipedia's all-in hosting for fully read/write content (meaning, visitors can edit, it's not static), is about $0.03 CPM, handling ~6.74B visits a month (80B visits a year) for $2.4M a year or $200,000/month.
So that's 8 million visits a month for $20, as a R/W membership wiki instead of a RO static site.
To be clear, this is not salaries. "Production costs" depend on whether someone has something to say and feels compelled to say it. The less meaningful the message to the messenger, they more they only say it for the money, and the more money it takes.
Adding salaries to wikipedia's number drops from 8 million visits per $20 per month, to 400,000 visits per $20 per month.
> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.
It's certainly enough, even de minimus.
Even with salaries baked in, costs remain low enough for patronage, public funding, or subscription models instead of advertising models.
At most any scale, the cost of saying something to the public is a rounding error.
For an earlier equilibrium, see "pamphleteering":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer
Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. Even with a dynamic site, such as a wiki, you can serve millions of occasional readers for $20/month.
As a 'newspaper' class resource, Wikipedia's all-in hosting for fully read/write content (meaning, visitors can edit, it's not static), is about $0.03 CPM, handling ~6.74B visits a month (80B visits a year) for $2.4M a year or $200,000/month.
So that's 8 million visits a month for $20, as a R/W membership wiki instead of a RO static site.
To be clear, this is not salaries. "Production costs" depend on whether someone has something to say and feels compelled to say it. The less meaningful the message to the messenger, they more they only say it for the money, and the more money it takes.
Adding salaries to wikipedia's number drops from 8 million visits per $20 per month, to 400,000 visits per $20 per month.
> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.
It's certainly enough, even de minimus.
Even with salaries baked in, costs remain low enough for patronage, public funding, or subscription models instead of advertising models.
At most any scale, the cost of saying something to the public is a rounding error.