1/ We still need ways to pump billions more dollars into journalism and news gathering across the country. The FTC published an interesting paper ten years ago on this subject, "POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM." https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_events/how-will-journalism-survive-internet-age/new-staff-discussion.pdf

2/ The paper (rightly, in my view, as we have now seen over the past decade) concludes that while news organizations may do their best to innovate and find new business models, it will never be enough. We have to look for other sources of big dollars.

3/ Honestly this idea of "rational ignorance" sounds a bit like prophecy given where we are at right now.

4/ The report considers a number of "Potential Revenue Sources from Changes in Law:"

-Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators
-Collaborative Actions and Antitrust Exemptions (such as coordinating on industry-wide paywalls)

5/ It also looks at the idea of government subsidies. One thing that is often forgotten is that the United States federal government once supported the news industry very robustly- through postal subsidies that would amount to +$30 billion in today's dollars.

6/ Concepts for subsidizing news gathering include establishing a "journalism" division of Americorps:

7/ Increasing funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and reorienting it more to local news gathering:

8/ The establishment of a national fund for local news, perhaps with a telecom tax or fee (would most Americans even notice a $1 per month fee on their phone bill, for instance?):

9/ Tax credits to news organizations for employing journalists:

10/ Citizen news vouchers through the tax code:

11/ Funding for universities to invest in journalism activities (sounds like ideas from @emilybell):

12/ The report also proposed ways to pay for these investments- a mix of taxes and fees that could be assessed.

13/ The report also went on to describe various other solutions- changes to nonprofit rules, tax exemptions, hybrid corporations, etc. It looked at ways investments in government transparency and data provision could reduce costs for news gathering....

14/ And, it looked at ways to leverage other federal government investments in tech to benefit journalism. As a technologist I find this particular idea very interesting, and would love think more about what it could mean. It is possible to imagine pools of federally funded IP.

15/ I have proposed we could look for other ways to capitalize journalism that draw directly from fines against some of the players creating the biggest externalities in the information ecosystem that journalism must contend with- such as Facebook. https://protegopress.com/how-congress-should-spend-the-ftcs-5-billion-facebook-fine/

16/ There are so many ideas out there- and so many of them are doable, if we can find the political will.

Why this matters... “How We Know Journalism is Good for Democracy” by @jcstearns https://link.medium.com/pqWJFYISE3