The Business & Future of News: Who Pays for Finding Out

Imagine a town with one newsroom of eight reporters. Each year the readers pay a small amount for the paper, and local shops and car dealers pay far more to put adverts beside the stories. Readers got the news cheaply because someone else was buying their attention. Then the shops moved to search and social media, the classified ads moved to free websites, and the car dealers followed. The readers were still there. The money was not.

That is the central fact of the business of news. A story costs the same to report whether ten people or ten million read it, and for most of the twentieth century the price of finding out was hidden inside the price of advertising. This piece is about what has taken its place: subscriptions, platforms, public money and, lately, software that writes.

All figures are dated, from the sources named, and change often. The models are invented illustrations, not forecasts, and this is not investment advice.

Who pays: four possible payers

News has four possible payers, and most outlets mix them: audiences (subscriptions, single copies, memberships), advertisers, the public (licence fees, taxes, grants) and patrons (foundations and donors). Each buys something different. Audiences buy the product. Advertisers buy the audience. The state, when it pays well, buys a public good and, when it pays badly, buys influence. Donors buy a cause.

In the United States, newspaper advertising was worth about $49.4 billion in 2005, according to the Pew Research Center's newspaper fact sheet, and about $9.8 billion in 2022. Over the same years circulation revenue barely moved, from about $10.7 billion to $11.6 billion. Advertising had been four fifths of the money. It is now less than half.

Without JavaScript: advertising fell from about 82% of newspaper revenue in 2005 to about 46% in 2022, while circulation revenue rose about 8%.

Advertising: why one page view is worth so little

A print advert sat beside a story that a local reader would read; the paper had a monopoly on that reader. On the web the same reader can be reached on a thousand sites, and an advert is sold through an automatic auction (see Digital Marketing & Advertising, 34/62). The price is quoted per thousand views, the CPM, and it is low. A site that earns a few dollars per thousand page views needs enormous traffic to pay one reporter.

Without JavaScript: with 2 million page views, 4 ads a page, 60% sold and a $3 CPM, a site earns about $14,400 a month, enough for roughly 2.4 reporters.

Subscriptions: the leaky bucket

The alternative is to ask readers directly. A subscription is steadier than advertising, but it behaves like a bucket with a hole in it. New subscribers pour in; some leave each month (churn); the number you have settles where gains match losses. If you add A subscribers a month and lose a fraction c of them, the bucket tends to A ÷ c, and the average subscriber stays about 1 ÷ c months.

Without JavaScript: 1,000 new sign-ups a month with 4% monthly churn tends to 25,000 subscribers; after 36 months there are about 19,250, and at $8 a month that is about $154,000 a month.

Cutting churn is worth as much as winning readers. The largest example is The New York Times, which reported about 12.80 million digital-only subscribers (about 13.35 million counting print) at the end of the second quarter of 2026, with digital-only average revenue per subscriber of $9.94. Such scale is rare. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026 (published 16 June 2026; 48 markets, 97,520 respondents) found that across 20 countries where paywalls are common only 17% pay for online news, roughly unchanged from 18% in 2025. The spread is wide: Norway 40%, Sweden 32%, the United States 16%, the United Kingdom 10%.

Subscriptions do not fix everything. They pay best for national and specialist titles, and they ask readers to pay for news they could get free elsewhere. A paywall also shuts out people who cannot pay, which is a public-interest cost that publishers weigh differently.

Platforms and algorithms: renting your audience

For years the front door of the news was a platform. The 2026 report's headline finding: for the first time, social and video networks (54%) are the most widely used route to news, ahead of TV (52%) and news websites and apps (51%). Some 27% of respondents got news from news-focused creators or influencers, and trust in news overall fell to 37%, the lowest since the survey began in 2015. Some 42% said they sometimes or often avoid the news.

A newsroom that depends on a platform is renting. The platform sets the algorithm, and can change it. Governments have tried to make platforms pay. Australia's News Media Bargaining Code (2021) was followed by Canada's Online News Act (2023), after which Meta began blocking news for Canadian users in August 2023, and Google reportedly agreed to a payment of about C$100 million a year. Whether such measures reduce dependence is debated.

Without JavaScript: with 40% of 1,000,000 monthly visits from platforms and a 40% fall in referrals, a site loses 160,000 visits, about $3,200 a month in ads at $20 per thousand and about 80 new subscribers a month at 0.05%.

News deserts: when no one is left to count

When the money leaves, local news goes first. Northwestern University's Medill School tracks it in the United States. Its 2025 report (released October 2025) counted 213 counties as news deserts (no local news source), up from 206, and 136 newspaper closures in the past year, more than two a week. Newspaper jobs fell 7% in a year and more than three quarters since 2005, and about 50 million Americans live where there is one local source or none. Medill's earlier 2024 report said the country had lost more than a third of its newspapers since 2005. Counts differ between sources and are estimates.

Nothing equivalent exists everywhere: the data are strongest for the US and parts of Europe, which is itself a finding. What is lost is not only information. The people who attend council meetings, read budgets and ask hospitals questions are mostly local reporters, and few others are paid to do it.

Public-service broadcasters: another way to pay

Many countries decided long ago that news is a public good, and fund it publicly. The BBC is funded mainly by the UK television licence, £180 a year from 1 April 2026 (£174.50 before), about 49p a day. Its charter expires at the end of 2027, and the government opened a review in December 2025 that includes how the BBC is funded. NHK in Japan is financed by receiving fees from households with television sets. The ABC in Australia is funded mainly by the federal government in multi-year funding rounds. In the United States, Congress rescinded about $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in July 2025, and the corporation began winding down, with staff remaining into January 2026.

Scholars and politicians disagree about the best model. Defenders argue that public funding insulates news from the market and reaches people advertisers ignore. Critics argue that anything the state funds can be held hostage to the state, and that it crowds out private outlets. Each model has a different weakness: a fee set by government invites pressure at renewal; a grant invites budget cuts; membership alone can starve a station.

Without JavaScript: the BBC is licence-fee funded (£180 a year from April 2026); NHK is funded by receiving fees; the ABC by multi-year government funding; US public media by membership, underwriting and now far less federal money.

AI in newsrooms: faster, and wrong in new ways

Newsrooms use software for transcripts, translation, tagging and drafting headlines. The risk is in the other direction too: readers now ask chatbots for the news. The Reuters Institute found that 10% of people used an AI chatbot for news each week in 2026, up from 7%, with 16% among under-35s and just 4% in the UK. A study by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, published on 22 October 2025, had journalists at 22 public-service media organisations in 18 countries check over 3,000 answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity about the news. About 45% had at least one significant issue; 31% had serious sourcing problems and 20% major accuracy problems. The share ranged from 30% for the best assistant to 76% for the worst.

Those assistants will change, and the figures are from one study at one date. But the lesson is stable: a small error rate compounds across many answers, and an answer that reads confidently is not checked.

Without JavaScript: at a 45% error rate, relying on five answers gives about a 95% chance that at least one has a significant issue; if a human check catches 80% of issues, that falls to about 38%.

The business questions are as open. Publishers split between licensing and suing: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, while other publishers have signed licensing deals (check the current state of both). If chatbots answer questions with a summary of the news, fewer readers reach the sources that paid for it, which could undermine the supply they depend on. Nobody yet knows.

What a graduate just sees

• A story costs the same to report however many people read it, so reach matters less than who pays.
• Every revenue source buys something: audiences buy the product, advertisers the audience, the state a public good or influence.
• A subscriber base is a bucket: sign-ups divided by churn tells you where it settles.
• Page views earn pennies, so ad-funded news needs huge scale.
• Platform traffic is rented; a change in an algorithm is a change in budget.
• When local news closes, the stories that vanish are the ones nobody knew to ask about.
• No funding model is neutral: each has its own way of being captured or starved.
• A small error rate compounds, so the cost of AI is the checking.

Where it shows up next

• Media Law & Press Freedom (35/96): the lawsuits and SLAPPs that small outlets cannot afford.
• Journalism Ethics (35/95): sponsored content, donor influence and the wall between sales and newsroom.
• Digital Marketing & Advertising (34/62): how the money on the other side of the screen works.
• In the world: newsroom product teams, membership drives, non-profit newsrooms, public-media boards and every freelancer pricing a story.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Robert G. Picard, The Economics and Financing of Media Companies (Fordham University Press, 2nd edition, 2011), a standard media-economics text; the data in it is dated, the frameworks are not.
• 📘 Gentler. Margaret Sullivan, Ghosting the News (Columbia Global Reports, 2020), a short account of local news loss, and Julia Cagé, Saving the Media (Harvard University Press, 2016) on ownership models.
• 🌐 Free data. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, free each June, with country pages for every market.
• 🌐 Free course. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas offers free online courses for journalists, in several languages (check the current list).