> Tech's position on the issue of how to fund journalism online is fundamentally incoherent.

Who is "tech"? "Tech" has an incoherent position because "tech" is an incoherent entity you've invented so you can disagree with them.

Here's my position--I think you'll find the position of a person who exists in reality to be a bit more coherent:

Advertising is always bad. At the very best it's forcing biased views into our attention. At the worst, it's manipulative lies packaged with all manner of malware. Advertising breaks the fundamental ideal of capitalism that the best products and services for the best price win, because better-advertised products can win even if they're inferior. If one company advertises, all their competitors have to advertise, which takes money away from producing quality goods and services, and these costs are passed back to the consumer. And fundamentally, paying for content with advertising means that the content creator is serving the advertisers rather than the consumers of the content.

I disagree with paywalls for academic publishing: these usually do nothing to support research financially, and hinder education and further research. Research is typically funded by institutions and governments anyway.

For journalism, I prefer donation-based services, but I'm not opposed to paywalls, provided that they don't also include ads.

For most other things, subscription or purchase models are perfectly acceptable. My personal preference is to have ownership of the content I have paid for (download an EPUB/MP3/MP4 or buy some physical media rather than stream it)--but this is a preference rather than an ethical position.

> After 20 years of experiments, there are only two models that have been consistently proven to work: restricting access to paying customers only (a.k.a. paywalling), and open access combined with heavy, invasive advertising (both the traditional kind, and more insidious kinds like clickbait headlines and sponsored content). That's it. Those are the only models anyone's found that don't lead to bankruptcy.

For journalism, none of Mother Jones[1], Pro Publica[2], or NPR follow either of the business models which you claim are the only ones that work. For academic publishing, there's a whole list of open access journals[3] which again have neither paywalls nor advertising.

PBS has existed for a lot more than 20 years.

At a more fundamental level, an entry-level Squarespace subscription costs $16 for the month, $12 if you pay annually[4]. There's lots of kinds of content that don't have to be for-profit at all, and the costs associated are well within the ability of most people to pay.

> OK, fine. So what then does tech propose these publications do, exactly? Are they supposed to just lay down and die?

In many cases, yes.

Your argument seems to be, if these companies aren't evil they'll go bankrupt. I'm saying, if they are evil, then they should go bankrupt.

Advertising models, in particular, support low-quality content, and even when they don't, the quality content is mixed in with low-quality content in a way where it's hard to distinguish the two (your Buzzfeed example is a good one for this).

Isn't the fundamental principle of capitalism that the value of something is what people pay for it? So if nobody is willing to pay for, donate to, or devert institutional or government resources to something, it probably doesn't have much value, now does it? Why should we accept harmful business models just to prop up businesses that don't provide value?

Obviously, content providers who make money off this will disagree. But I don't see why we as humans or as a society should be concerned if these people can't make money off their harmful business models. Good riddance.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/

[2] https://www.propublica.org/

[3] https://doaj.org/

[4] https://www.squarespace.com/pricing