I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it.

I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.

I meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80% of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television. Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it (i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to freeload bandwidth without ads and consume content).

> Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.

How do the patreons of the world fit in there? There is such content creators that I enjoy enough to give them a few bucks every month to make sure they can keep doing it

Stuff like Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, etc is valuable to a specific type of professional and will always have a niche audience. That isn't really what the discussion is about.

Reporting on corruption and injustice is critical to a society, but doesn't have any monetary value. The way I see it, we already have a way we choose to fund that kind of thing: non-profits/NGOs. Some media outlets (Vox, The Guardian) are already turning to just asking for money in this way, and over time journalism might become more formalised as something funded by the public for civic ends, not as a commercial product. To that end it should be unbundled from stuff like sports coverage and celebrity gossip - which might really end up disappearing as a viable career and be done exclusively by amateurs.

ProPublica seems to break a couple of huge stories every year operating as a nonprofit. The fact that they aren't ad funded means they don't have to churn out lots of Content to keep eyeballs coming, so I know every story I hear from them is worth my attention.

Yeah, it's a good example.