The business of news and freedom of the press

When considering challenges to media freedom, we generally think about legal restrictions. We examine the laws that governments impose on journalists, freedom of speech, surveillance and so on. But if the purpose of a free media is to interrogate and hold truth to power, then anything that limits that role must also be considered a restraint on media freedom, and journalists' ability to perform their democratic and social functions. In the pre-digital days, when classified advertising created the ‘rivers of gold’ that allowed journalism to be conducted largely independent of the sources of revenue, journalists were generally free to report according to classic editorial values. This paper examines the impact that the collapse of the news business model has had on media freedom. It argues that by turning news into a product that must generate either clicks or subscriptions, it has become a slave to commercial values. In the process, journalists are no longer free to perform their social and democratic functions, covering stories that are editorially important but may not be commercially significant. In this way, the paper argues that the digital revolution has had an impact on media freedom as insidious as any repressive government.