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1. It's horrible to see so many talented people losing their jobs at the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, etc. We need to face the reality that good journalism is not just not profitable, it is actively anti-profitable. But we need it, it's incredibly valuable for America overall.
2. Businesses create value & capture part of it for themselves. Good journalism could likely have prevented the Iraq war & stopped the housing bubble from inflating, which together cost America about $15 trillion. But there was no way for outlets to capture any of that value.
3. If anyone had done great reporting on the housing bubble and the bogus case for the Iraq war, they would not just have *not* made money, they would've been mercilessly punished. They would have lost advertisers and rich readers. Other outlets would have attacked them.
4. The same dynamic is repeated in smaller forms in a million different ways across America. We have vibrant soft & hard corruption that’s costing us trillions because there is no journalism to expose it. But we don’t even hear about most of it because…no journalism.
5. The fact that journalism ever appeared profitable was just a historical/technological accident, in which it was bundled with tons of other stuff that was profitable. And even then the journalism wasn’t any great shakes, since it was part of profit-driven outlets.
6. So there is no solution for our ongoing journalism apocalypse except for some kind of public funding. My favorite idea is @deanbaker13’s concept of individual vouchers niemanlab.org/2009/08/a-plan… but there are lots of ways to do it
