Which one disappeared first? An audience willing to pay for quality journalism or quality journalism? I suspect quality journalism declined first, and it declined to the point where it made customers skeptical of journalism in general. That then shrunk the audience, and it circled back around again in a continuing cycle.

High-quality and low-quality journalism have always existed, regardless of business model.

The difference is, when told to put their money where their mouths are, people on the internet like to pretend that high-quality journalism doesn't still exist so they can keep their wallets closed.

So far, the only journalism I've found worth paying for is Monocle. Had subscriptions to The Economist and The Information for awhile before canceling them.

What would be nice is a pay per article approach. I find Monocle quality enough for an annual subscription, and sometimes The Economist is worth getting for a weekly here and there.

Also, another thing keeping me from having many subscriptions to different rags is how much information is free online (even things like the HN comments section have a wealth of information).

To summarize your post:

"I should pay to support quality journalism, but since there's stuff free online, I won't, and it will die."

The fact that it's a positive feedback cycle doesn't mean you're not partially responsible for making it worse by not paying for news, even if it didn't necessarily start with you. Sometimes you have to pay for it even if it isn't perfect, if you want any hope of making it better.

I am consistently impressed by the rationales people develop for not being willing to pay for the product they say they want.

Yeah, sure, the fact that many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage are all the fault of their readers, the Internet or maybe "capitalism". But not the journalists themselves.

Only on HN (or, I suppose, The_Donald) -- comment claiming that "many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage" (about headline that is 100% accurate) sits high. My comment disagreeing is flagged.

Sad!

>Only in every case it ends up being completely accurate.

What I've noticed, anecdotally, is that Fake News is screamed at me when the story is accurate, but isn't parsed like a legal document.

So "Jim said he would kill all the sparrows" is the headline, but because Jim said "he would kill every sparrow" and not literally "all" the sparrows, FAKE NEWS.

It's absolutely infuriating.

to some extent it's probably a vicious cycle: previously paying eyeballs get drawn away to sensationalism (innately more interesting) over time, journalism funding goes down, less resources to put out journalism, more efforts at sensationalism to get a cut of the eyeballs, to where we are now.

OTOH FT/economist haven't shut down as far as i'm aware. not sure they're bastions of accuracy (or journalism) but pay to play may work for high quality content.