So this book is not about the dawn of journalism, but because it's Franklin's family, it taught me some interesting stuff about the dawn of journalism. Namely the fact that journalism has never had a constant, unchanging business plan.https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ages-Life-Opinions-Franklin/dp/0307948838 …
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Early on, newspapers were kind of like the side-project of the dude who owned the printing press. It was not a money maker. It was a hobby printing press owners took up if they also happened to enjoy yelling their opinions about things at their neighbors.
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Then, it turned out that if enough people are reading your cockeyed ramblings, you can get merchants to pay you to also tell those people that a ship just came in loaded with fine cloth from Europe. Who knew!?
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I don't remember now if I learned this from "Book of Ages" or from
@john_overholt, but first subscription periodicals (where idea was to make business providing something closer to what we'd call journalism) were EXPENSIVE AS FUCK. Think scientific journal $$$s, not NYT$s.3 replies 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread -
Long story short, the Eccentric Biased Rich Guy With A Weird Hobby business model of journalism is, effectively, the strongest and most resilient business model journalism has ever come up with. Ad support comes and goes. But we've always had weirdos with money. For good or ill.
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Which, of course, means that what journalists really need is the Weirdo Eccentric Rich People whose eccentricities include not wanting to interfere with the freedom of the press they're paying to support. That's your bae goals.
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Well what they really need is public funding, i.e. the public deciding to forcibly take the necessary funds from eccentric and non-eccentric rick people alike via taxation, and strong legal frameworks to guarantee their independence.
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