Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble

one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism... "Brand You"... Viral headlines... Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again... none of them have answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism—especially the public-interest, watchdog, feet-to-the-fire kind that democracy needs to function....
Mother Jones is a nonprofit—precisely to avoid this fate. Tax-deductible donations from readers give us stability... our newsroom has been built on the belief that journalism needs to be untethered from corporate interests or deep-pocketed funders.. If we're going to have a functioning democracy, we'll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business...