Paywalls are class warfare. And major alternatives to that model, such as ad-funded for-profit journalism, philanthropist-funded nonprofit journalism, subscriber-supported journalism, and all combinations of those seem to fall short. Worse still, in places where there is no journalism at all, Facebook groups emerge where "citizen journalists" fill the information void with misinformation.

Medium also failed. It started as this ambitious project to "reinvent" journalism and/or publishing, but here we are back at paywalls and membership. Substack consists almost entirely of paywalled echo chambers. None of these represent meaningful alternatives, nor do I believe any Silicon Valley technological solution is going to solve this problem.

The answer is almost certainly the same as it is for so many things: eliminating tax avoidance and using the taxes collected from wealthy individuals and corporations to publicly fund journalism. This could take the form of a voucher-based subsidy model (citizens are allotted money or credits that can be used for subscriptions to journalistic media), or better in my opinion, money could be invested into public options provided at the federal, state, and local levels (one place this already exists to some extent is campus journalism at public universities). If we can fund public libraries, surely the same ethos underlying that means we can fund public newsrooms.