The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven “news”. Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.

Personally, I’m excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I’m hopeful we’ll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.

High quality journalism can’t exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can’t afford it, visiting a local library for example.

I know “state-funded media” is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it’s always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.

I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.