ABSTRACT
American news media have been under financial pressure for years, as advertising moves to the internet, and there’s no end in sight. As of mid-2020, this abysmal trend had pulverized one thousand eight hundred newspapers, one thousand seven hundred of them dailies, according to a running count kept by Penny Abernathy of the University of North Carolina. First, the sheer scope and immediacy of the financial threat is triggering some creative thinking about the journalism of the future. The salubrious affect of declining advertising may be most clearly witnessed in not-for-profit journalism that never was heavily dependent on advertising. Other innovative online publishers offer to pay freelance journalists to publish their work, and they’re beginning to raise money to do it.
