How society used to pay for journalism
Journalism is either paid from below, by those who want to read the news, or paid from above, by those who want others to read it.
The excerpts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.
If you are going to blame “capitalism” for the faults of the press, you are compelled to prove that those faults do not exist except where capitalism controls.
Walter Lippmann. “Public Opinion”, 1922.
A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.
Vladimir Lenin. “Where to Begin?”, 1901.
The two types of journalism: paid from below and paid from above
From their very inception, newspapers essentially represented two types of journalism based on their respective business models. Commercial journalism sold news to readers; political journalism sold agendas to patrons.
Journalism emerged to sell news downward, to the end user—a reader. However, integrated into power relations, journalism inevitably, time after time, shifted toward selling agendas upward, while selling news downward remained a side business.
This gives us two ultimate “ideal” models of the media business. Journalism is either paid from below, by those who want to read the news, or paid from above, by those who want others to read it. These two opposing models, in varying mixes, have been employed throughout journalism’s 500-year history.
Business models and political pressure predetermined how these two types of journalism shape the picture of the world. Serving its readers, commercial journalism seeks to portray the world-as-it-is. Serving its patrons, political journalism seeks to picture the world-as-it-should-be.
Thus, from the very beginning, journalism became the battleground for what we now distinguish as truth and post-truth.
The eternal failure of selling news
Informing people is generally regarded as the foundation, justification, and social mission of journalism: journalism is supposed to sell news. In reality, this has never existed in a pure form. Although journalism emerged to be paid from below, it has historically always ended up being paid from above.
Even the “purely” news-selling business of the early Venetian handwritten newsletters in the 16th century was immediately acculturated by power. As Hotten recounted,
In 1536 the Venetian possessions and factories in the East were attacked by the Turks [...]. As may be imagined, the people of Venice were extremely anxious to hear the news from fleet; so the first regular monthly journal was established by the government to supply this information, and men were paid to read the particulars at the principal points of the city. But the heads of the Republic were fearful of the spread of the false news and opinions dangerous to their position, so they ordained that no sheets should be issued but such as were sanctioned by the Doge and his Council. (Hotten, 1874, p. 8-9.)
It is indeed fascinating how an account from 1874 regarding events of 1536 mirrors the issues of 2017, when “fake news” was named the “word of the year” by Collins Dictionary. The network of alternative news was accused of supplying “false news” that endangered established institutions. The ruling class discussed—and applied—measures to regulate this alternative news environment by introducing mechanisms of content filtering and restriction. The same issues and solutions are now being discussed regarding the alternative news environment of Facebook and other social media.
***
Those early seaport newsletters of the 16th–17th centuries—the Venetian avvisi and Amsterdam’s first newspaper, Courante—were all immediately appropriated by the elites to deliver something else. The alleged news business was always just a carrier for something else to be delivered—either another good (advertising) or the built-in agendas of political patrons.
The definition of a purely news business would be simple: this journalism should be paid predominantly, or even exclusively, from below by readers who consume news to stay updated on affairs or simply out of curiosity. The role of the payer is crucial in defining the function of journalism.
News itself is a very paradoxical commodity. It always “needs” to be read; there is always some degree of demand from below. But there is also always someone from above who wants to pay for certain news to be delivered to the public. And those from above—those in power or advertisers—are willing to pay for delivering the “right” news far more than those from below are willing or able to pay for receiving news.
The value of news as a carrier for agendas and advertisements is much higher than its value as a commodity in its own right. As a result, the audience always surrenders the right to pay for news to those from above. The elites and advertisers reorganize journalism into a subsidized news service in which news becomes bait to draw fish in.
Being paid from above is more economically efficient for journalism
The pay from above replaces the pay from below also because it is more economically efficient for the media. Transaction costs in retail are always higher than in wholesale. Collecting small payments from a dispersed audience requires additional costly infrastructure, whereas selling the audience in bulk to a smaller number of major payers is far more cost-efficient.
All things being equal, newspapers that only sell news to readers will lose out to newspapers that sell news to readers and sell readers to advertisers (or political sponsors). A business model that combines news retail with audience wholesale is always a stronger commercial strategy than news retail alone. Hence, from a commercial perspective, any newspaper offered such an opportunity will readily switch from news retail to audience wholesale.
And historically, this was the typical outcome. There was always someone from above who came and forced or seduced the media to sell the audience upward, not news downward. First, these were political patrons, then political parties, and later advertisers. The physically dispersed nature of the audience, the high cost of retail money collection, the political and financial persuasiveness of the elites, and the organizational specificity of the news business have pushed journalism to become predominantly paid from above throughout its history.
The instances when journalism tried to earn money from serving the audience rather than the elites—meaning predominantly selling news downward and not agendas upward—did not last long. The first news bureaus in the 16th century, the Venetian and Roman Scrittoria, produced news purely for sale to readers. But the noble houses and members of the elites, who were also among the readers, quickly realized the importance of spreading the “right” news. Politics swallowed the news business because politics is always the best business of all.
The last case of reader-paid journalism in history
The second (after the Venetian avvisi) and the last attempts to make journalism paid from below came in the late 19th century.
Everyone knows that Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, but few are aware that newspapers became the true mass media because of a sequence of relatively small technological improvements in the 19th century. The rotary press, wood-pulp paper, and the linotype cut printing costs and sped up production. This made cheap, quickly printed mass newspapers not just possible but inevitable, leading to large-scale circulation.
The press responded with new formats such as the penny press and the labor press. With newspapers now cheaper and more accessible, journalism once again tried to sell news to the public rather than agendas to the elites. This shift was not driven by a noble desire to free journalism from elite control, but by a business opportunity created by low production costs.
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The penny press appeared in the USA in the 1830s. These papers sold for only one cent, compared to six cents for regular newspapers (Kaplan, 2013, p. 6). Cheaper production also lowered the entry cost for the newspaper market. “Newspapers’ prices were dropping, yet publishers did not require extensive capital to reach and hold a readership,” Kaplan wrote (ibid., p. 7). Reader revenue drove the development of mass newspapers, and growing circulation started attracting advertisers.
Reliance on mass opinion and financial sustainability made newspapers independent from political subsidies and party control. This changed the nature of media coverage. The penny press papers “revolutionized content by declaring their independence from political parties and concentrating on news rather than opinion” (Nerone, 1987, p. 378).
Kaplan writes, “No longer dependent upon party subsidies but instead driven by the profits to be gained from large circulation and advertising, [newspapers]… embraced political independence, even objectivity. Papers ceased to address their audience in political terms—neither as citizens nor as fellow partisans—but instead as consumers” (Kaplan, 2013, p. 13).
***
The tabloids and yellow press originated from this type of journalism. Furthermore, investigative journalism is also rooted in the penny press. After the penny press, journalism in general learned to pay more attention to the interests of the audience it served.
Catering to the tastes of the crowd, the penny press devoted much of its attention to crime stories to boost sales. This tendency of mass-circulation newspapers to attract readers with sensational crime coverage was famously illustrated by the media hysteria surrounding the murders of London prostitutes in the 1880s by the mysterious “Jack the Ripper,” perhaps the first world-renowned media criminal.
The growing interest in crime led journalists to adopt the methods and investigative mindset of police and private detectives. The first investigative journalists were driven less by social conscience than by market competition, which pushed them to uncover sensational cases and hidden atrocities. These stories made their names and boosted their earnings.
With the further growth of newsrooms’ financial independence and the urban class’s demand for social justice, investigative journalism turned toward social issues, paving the way for muckraking journalism in the early 20th century and, later, for contemporary watchdog journalism.
The penny press also marked the final shift of the news production from an artisan form to an industrial business. In historical hindsight, the mass press became one of the earliest components of what Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) would later call the “culture industry”—a system in which mass culture is produced on an industrial scale, serving both commercial aims and ideological functions.
***
As production costs decreased, circulation grew, which made advertising more effective and encouraged businesses to buy more of it. “Coincidentally,” the economy as a whole was shifting toward a mass-market consumer society with an increasing reliance on advertising.
As a result, selling news to readers gave way to selling readers to advertisers.
Gross advertising income for mass American newspapers rose from 40% to more than 50% between 1870 and 1880, then to 60–70% by the 1900s, a level at which it remained throughout the twentieth century (Kaplan, 2013, p. 12). This new, purely commercial form of the media’s dependence on the elites was later described by Herman and Chomsky (1988) as the Propaganda Model.
The penny press signified perhaps the last and strongest attempt by journalism to escape being paid from above and rely entirely on the public’s “penny.” The attempt failed. Nevertheless, it changed the news environment by making journalism independent of direct political control. The relationships in the love triangle of “the media—the masses—the elites” thus became more complicated.
The latest “business models” of journalism—the membership model and soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause—facilitated the mutation of journalism into postjournalism. Read more in Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.
See other books by Andrey Mir:
NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
'The penny press papers “revolutionized content by declaring their independence from political parties and concentrating on news rather than opinion” (Nerone, 1987, p. 378).'
Today,every paper in every democratic country, even the NYT (which makes so much money it invites millionaire communists to its podcasts), and every tv network, has severely cut back on their foreign and internal offices and correspondents, trading them for an avalanche of bland ‘i agree with you, you agree with me?’ columnists who typically belong to the circles of the owners, editors and senior journalists.