None has answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism

[rcjordan]

<related to our anti-adblock discussion>

online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or "cost per thousand" ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/04/that-popping-sound-you-hear

[ergophobe]

The people who are just hearing this POP now must be hard of hearing.

Interestingly, when I went to that article, it pitched me subscribing given that I run ad blockers. I made a small donation because I made the decision when I started running ad blockers that I would donate a few hundred dollars here and there to the kinds of places that I would like to see survive.

I'd love to see Buzzfeed and Upworthy disappear. They rarely add anything to the public conversation. But I do hope Mother Jones and The Economist and The New York Times and The Atlantic and so forth will find a way to survive while preserving their values. Mother Jones is not one that's typically on my radar and I probably read fewer than five articles a year there, but it is a voice worth having. Not one I would have ever donated to, however, if not for this link and their plea for help.