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Author’s note: The internet defunded journalism, and Bette member David M offers a mechanism to refill those coffers in this guest op-ed. David M has a background in science and technology, and he writes periodic guest op-eds for Bette Dangerous.—hsc
“This simple system would restore the lifeblood of one of the most important industries in modern civilisation.”—David M for Bette Dangerous
SAVE JOURNALISM: Fix the EU’s News Pay Model
Bette member David M offers a proposal for how the EU could fund the Fourth Estate in this guest op-ed
By David M
The recent mid-term elections in the US restored a great deal of faith in America. I pray they don’t restore Europe’s faith in American tech platforms.
This isn’t meant to be a scree against American tech. This is meant to be a plea not to lose the opportunity to re-found tech in Europe.
The European tech sovereignty movement, made urgent by America and her platforms’ betrayal of democracy, is an unparalleled opportunity to correct some tragic mistakes. American regulators were nowhere to be seen in the ‘90s while the online world was being forged, and all around us we see the tragic results today. At this extraordinary moment, in this extraordinary place, we have this one chance to make some of this right and perhaps to save democracy in the process.
One of the things we have to save is journalism. Journalism’s pay model was destroyed by the internet. We must replace it.
The world we live in now provides essentially no common mechanism for people to pay for the news they consume, thereby leaving one of the very pillars of democracy defunded and emaciated. If democracy is to survive, in Europe or anywhere, we must find a way to pay for news.
I loved publicly funded broadcasters like the BBC, but I believe a vibrant news media requires some competition from some for-profit players as well.
Distributing news from a printing press made charging for journalism (relatively) easy. Distributing news via links on social media platforms does not. People all over the world began to behave as though news was free, which effectively it was. Except that deprived of their funding stream, news producers laid off their journalists, starting with their crucial investigative teams and continuing until today where even entertainment reporters are being replaced by AI. For more than a decade the news we receive has been little more than excerpts from politician’s speeches and government reports, or just straight Russian propaganda -- anything easy and cheap.
Here is a concrete proposal for restoring funding to journalism. The guiding principles are
1) if people want to consume news, they, not the government, should pay for it
2) distribution of news via links posted on social media isn’t going away
What those social media links lack is a channel directing payment back to the news provider. That’s what we need to fix.
My suggestion is a framework which would mandate every social media platform distributing content in the EU to wire in that payment channel. No payment channel? no link. No ambiguity. I’m not asking for the government, or for the social media platforms, to pay for news. This is simply digital infrastructure. A reader clicks and the news outlet gets paid -- it’s that simple.
This framework needs to provide some pool of money from which these payments are to be sourced. Micro-payments are not the solution. Seeing charges rack up for every click makes people not consume, which is not the goal here. Instead we’ll go the way of the internet and use tiered subscriptions.
There will have to be a site where these generic news subscriptions are purchased such that when a subscriber clicks a tiny fraction of their subscription fees will be directed to the news provider. When the subscriber has exhausted their monthly pool they will hit a paywall, not on one news site, but on every news site. People who consume a lot of news will have to pay for premium tiers. This is frustrating of course, but so are all economic realities.
Of course readers of limited means will need access to news as well, so there will have to be a free tier. Everyone gets a baseline level of content, subscription or not.
This simple system would restore the lifeblood of one of the most important industries in modern civilisation.
While our regulators are busy doing now what America’s regulators couldn’t be bothered to do in the ‘90s -- real online identities to restore accountability, gatekeeping underage access to dangerous platforms, making platforms beholden to the consumer and not some enemy foreign power, the end of online distribution of child pornography, human trafficking, tax evasion, and criminal conspiracy -- a quick fix to the starving journalist problem would fit in nicely as well.
I encourage our regulators to consider how comforting it would be to have investigative journalists back at their desks encouraging the public to demand regulation instead of having to force it down the public’s neck.—David M for Bette Dangerous
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