Comment by showerst

I agree with you on the value > price, but disagree about why. If you take out classified (and later internet) Ads, almost no newspaper and no TV news in the US was _ever_ profitable.

It might sound crazy but as a percent of revenue, news was actually moving more towards subs and away from ads even by the 1980s and 1990s. I used to work with a very long tenured editor who told me that in the 1970s north of 70% of most newspapers revenue was from ads.

Back then overhead was massive due to printing presses and delivery infrastructure, now it's dominated by labor costs, but the point stands that doing good journalism isn't cheap. Even people who care about the product don't want it enough to pay its production cost, and never have.