Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the common weal, that is, sources of general improvement, which markets and other mechanisms cannot provide. Generally, this is achieved through spending and taxation[1], legislation and regulation, and in some cases specific executive roles. Most functions of government, passage of laws, operation of courts, defence, social welfare, backstop insurance,[2] and public goods and services such as schools, roads, police, fire, ports, and often services including hospitals, sewerage, water, electricity, postal services, and occasionally communications and media.

There are of course many instances of media organisations directly funded through governments, most especially in broadcasting: the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, and more, partial list here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025>.

Print media has more often been at least nominally privately-held, but often with major indirect public support. In the US that takes the form of discounted postal rates, legal notices, tax breaks, and direct advertising expenditures by governments. See:

"A Reminder of Precedents in Subsidizing Newspapers" Jan. 27, 2010, <https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/media/28subsidy....>.

Many of those subsidies have decreased, been eliminated, or no longer apply (e.g., postal discounts given Internet-based distribution) in today's world, and along with other business challenges have made commercial newspaper (or online news-media) operation all the more challenging.

A key challenge is that information is a public good, in the economic sense:

- It is (mostly) nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. That is, one person's consumption doesn't preclude others doing so (unlike, say, food or land), and it's difficult (though not impossible) to restrict access.

- Marginal costs of production, that is, the additional cost for an additional unit produced or consumed, is near nil. This has implications on how market prices fall, which is (absent other manipulation) also near nil.

- News and information have high positive externalities. That is, there are benefits to consumption which the producer cannot readily capture through market mechanisms.

I've addressed this in more length here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20170611065351/https://www.reddi...>

A lot of this boils down to "there's no easy way to erect tollbooths on the consumption or distribution of information, and high costs in the form of deadweight losses (people excluded from access) from doing so."

But there are at least two remaining tollbooths:

- The ISP, with whom the reader has an existing financial relationship.

- Tax authorities: local (city/county), state, and national.

Each of these can charge audiences, and pay publishers, for media accessed online. My proposal is that payments be relatively nominal (on the order of $100 to $400/year for a household), and be made with minimal prejudice to qualifying publishers and authors. (Some independent arbitrator of which publishers qualify, and a mechanism, perhaps itself market based, for payment rates based on media category would probably be part of such a scheme.) Indirect supports analogous to postal-rate subsidies, legal notices, and direct government advertising might also apply.

A tax / universal content fee approach directly addresses the many issues of applying markets to information goods (addressed in this comment and links).

All successful media models at scale divorce reveneus from consumption. Advertising most particularly.

TFA and my many comments (as well as those of numerous others in this thread) address what the failures of the status quo are. Most saliently: news organisations, print, broadcast, and online are simply failing to survive presently, and lack of effective news and informational sources is a key driver of social and political dysfunction. Weak media institutions are highly susceptible to malign influences.

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Notes:

1. How and whether these two must correspond is ... a longer and tangential discussion. See especially MMT: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory>

2. Flood, earthquake, major storm, other natural disaster, major industrial risks such as nuclear power plants, and the like.