> divides it among members by what you use most

The problem with this is that it assumes the value is proportionate to how much time you spend on something.

The value of good reporting is independent of the amount of time you spend reading the reporting.

That's why subscriptions make sense; you are supporting the company in a predictable fashion, which lets them have predictable amounts of resources, which ultimately supports the reporters doing the job.

I subscribe to the New York Times; and I'm happy to pay the same amount whether I read ten articles a month or one hundred. Why? Because I want to support the work they're doing. It's the same reason I subscribe to the Washington Post. It's also the same reason people should subscribe to their local newspapers. If nobody is reporting on local issues, then who is going to be keeping local government accountable?

> What I can imagine is a "digital pass"

this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.

The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

The BBC is obliged to collect it (through their contractor) but the government chooses how much is collected and how to spend the money. Some even goes to what you probably think of as privately owned local newspapers. When money was tight at Channel 4 (a publicly owned company that runs a TV channel with advertising and a very different remit from the BBC - the BBC's mission is to educate, while C4 is more about pushing boundaries, so that amazing wildlife documentary is from the BBC but the first soap opera to have a gay Muslim couple get married is probably C4) C4 were going to take some of the license fee money too.

Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.

In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).

It's just semantics, sure, but it does mean the UK's largest broadcaster is not state-owned and has independence. That's important.

It does not. Politicians have absolute power over funding regardless. They decide exactly how much BBC can collect and in what circumstances (or they give BBC the mandate to do it themselves, but they can revoke or change that at will).

It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.

Who mandates the license fee? The government. So, it's a tax, and the BBC is both the state agency collecting the tax and the state agency funded by the tax.

This works on a national level. Switzerland does it too. But I don't want to read only Swiss Newspapers, I wanna read the NYT and The Times etc. as well. I do think that the digital pass idea is worth thinking about more.

That doesn't solve it. It ensures you have people calling themselves journalists who get paid, but journalism is in decline because (a) trust in journalism is in decline and (b) a lot of it is duplicated.

The BBC specifically has a trust issue in the UK. Even one of its own long term journalists wrote a book called "Can we trust the BBC?" (spoiler warning: the given answer is no).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Trust-BBC-Robin-Aitken/dp/08264...

Tax-funded institutions that are not accountable to the people paying the tax is corrosive. Resentment builds and has nowhere to go. For now at least if you're willing to disconnect from broadcast television entirely, you can avoid paying the license fee. But similar license fees in other countries have been adapted to include the internet; it's hard to know if the same will happen in the UK.

My favourite recent example of ridiculous tabloid-level BBC journalism is "Brexit threat to sandwiches":

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44960293

Staying in the EU for a bit longer would keep the chiller cabinet full of sandwiches - but it would doubtless raise the political temperature.

The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

This is hardly an isolated example. Consider what sort of journalistic process led to this story being written, edited, reviewed and approved for publication. Is it one citizens should be forced to fund? What does that sort of thing do long term? Is it any wonder that trust in the press is in long term decline in the UK?

>The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

That is not what the article is about at all, "sandwiches" are just the hook. In fact the word sandwich only appears in the first sentence and the last. The article is about whether Brexit would lead to supply chain issues with food, which could result in food shortages.

No, sandwiches are referred to in the headline, the first paragraph, the second paragraph and the third paragraph ("the space between two pieces of bread"), and the final paragraph.

Regardless of how you prefer to interpret the story, absurd clickbait "hooks" are the sort of thing that drives distrust in the media.

I imagine it would be difficult to get such members of a group to agree on the value they bring to the table. NYT probably thinks they'd deserve more than the LAT, and certainly way more than USA Today. Can't imagine these groups cooperating. It's winner takes all and then some niches for Breitbart and the like.

Cable channels would likely have the same disagreements, as would netflix series. So it's not impossible. (We'd have a lot less value on AP stories, though.)

"Because that’s not how we use the web. People don’t visit a single site to seek out content. They search then nimbly hop from link to link building knowledge from an amalgamation of sources. The entire web is one big site."

"Given these usage patterns, paywalls fail miserably. The typical consumer would have to sign up to hundreds of properties, costing thousands of dollars per month. If they consumed every bit of content at the New York Times, the $25/month could be fair. But they don’t, leaving them with a glut of extremely underutilized and over-priced subscriptions."

https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276...

Somewhat related, though not a flat price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle