(2018-09-09) Mc Kenzie Subscriptions Are Bad For Democracy No Way

Hamish McKenzie (of SubStack): Subscriptions are bad for democracy? No way. The news media as an entity is getting weaker, both financially and in terms of political influence. None of this is happening because of subscriptions. A key reason it is happening is because for the last two decades the bulk of journalism has been give away online for free, the [[Web Ad] business for anything other than social media platforms has imploded, and now even the best publications are struggling to find a sustainable business model.

Donald Trump’s efforts to destroy the media’s credibility have been aided by this destructive economic trend.

To believe that subscription media is anti-democratic is to believe that almost all printed media, from The Economist to the New York Times, were anti-democratic until they started to give away their journalism online in the 1990s.

Once an important story has been produced, there are many easy ways for it to reach people everywhere, even if it originated at a subscription-based outlet. It can reach a wider audience through TV reports, rewrites, aggregation, email, text messages, screenshots, podcasts, and social media summaries like Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories, to name a few. When a message needs to find an audience, we are better off than ever before.