Why can't reporting just work for free? Why should people be expected to pay for news reporting?

if they didn't also inundate me with the ads in addition. It's kind of like some of the streaming where they want you to pay plus sit through tons of ads. News as profit is one of the things that's been so destructive to us. Our state paper was hooked to ownership by our local NBC affiliate for many decades. So the news was a "public good" and the paper charged to buy it for a nominal price with ads. But now the paper is mostly cut and paste crap from Gannett and the pages per issue are about 10 and they charge you almost $3 per issue for it and you don't even get want ads.

I have annual subscriptions to The NY Times, the NY Daily News, the Washington Posr and the Tesnof London.

The news readers don't seem to feel the urge to be cute, scream, or shout, when presenting the news.

crowd and you get the template whether it's here or Des Moines. They are this way about everything. They don't have much in the way of readership any longer for anything but local. They had been a well respected nationwide award winning paper before Gannett scooped them up. They are a joke here in WI and we get better news about things in Wisconsin from the neighboring state paper in Minnesota. Especially if it's about public or corporate corruption.

...just like most don't follow the details of the Trump trials or the Supreme Court arguments. It's not a more important issue to them than jobs, their kids education and the cost of groceries.

I'll also point that that only a minuscule percentage of Americans watch cable news (of any stripe).

attention or not has been around and behaving that way long before Television, we know that their is a chicken and egg effect that happens with media. Show me less and I know less. Show me less and I have less interest because I don't see it. Survey me to find out what I see as important it will be far less likely that I will mention something I don't see or hear.

Top 40 radio redux. What's on the playlist? What is selling in the record store. What is selling in the record store? What is played on the Top 40 radio.

I can remember people being unable to tell me much about Vietnam but they knew about the campus protests because they saw a photo in the newspaper. During the decline of papers/news reporting in the late '80's/early'90's there were still great papers doing great work covering a range of things and doing award winning investigative and feature work. The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Kansas City Star, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Des Moines Register, The Baltimore Sun and so many more I couldn't wait to read as I traveled the country. Some are still good but I don't travel much any more.

My point is these papers did/some still do great work and cover and investigate major things in our daily lives. They know that many ignore it or want to shut the world out at the end of the day but they also know that there are people like me and millions of others who do care, care to learn, care to get information to inform our opinions and do not consider it a "news" paper if the bulk of it is filled with display ads, recipes for potato salad, a review of a hot dog stand and the sports scores.

People have evolved their knowledge gathering tactics based on technology and sociology. The internet allows instantaneous searching for whatever information is desired, as well as the ability (not unknown here) to gravitate to the sources the reader already agrees with. Outside of a handful of national papers and news channels, the daily town paper simply can't compete.

in fact many of those would make use of AP,UPI, Reuters etc. and some would even have arrangements with news syndicates that carried some of the proprietary content from those big papers I mentioned. But your question of cause/effect is exactly my point about why a paper that is the statewide paper needs to be a different animal than the one that is from the small town of 30,000 people. Everything is not always about compete/profit. Some of the most "profitable" is also the worst. I think that we have to treat news and information and access as a public good. I don't think it should be there or not based on what is popular, popular opinion or what "aligns" with a view. I agree with you that people can fall into reading their "favorites" and that can have a negative result on them applying open mindedness and critical thinking. Even the ancient Greeks fought and argued about information, format and sources. Our struggle always is to seek what we don't know, listen for what we haven't heard, judge it with an open mind and remember that reconsideration is healthy.