Long ago, before most media moved online, I worked for a small weekly paper in Louisville, Ky., the Louisville Eccentric Observer, coincidentally owned at the time by future U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth. It was my first real look behind the curtain of how a newspaper actually functioned.
Yarmuth ran things the old way. We used PageMaker (now Adobe InDesign) to digitize text and images, but the final product was still assembled with wax paste-up on physical boards. It was a hybrid operation, half analog, half digital, and it gave me a tactile sense of how much labor went into putting a paper on the street each week.
The LEO was free. It was distributed everywhere people lingered: restaurants, comedy clubs, grocery stores, laundromats, downtown office buildings. You couldn’t avoid it. Stacks of papers appeared overnight and vanished just as quickly. From the outside, it looked like reach. Inside, it was largely smoke and mirrors.
The advertising side regularly claimed circulation numbers in the hundreds of thousands. That struck me as odd, because I’d seen the purchase orders for printed copies. They were well under a hundred thousand. When I asked about the discrepancy, the answer came easily.
More than one person reads each paper.
You measure circulation not by printed papers, but by taking the number of printed copies and multiplying by the expected number of readers per copy. Someone picks it up at a café, then leaves it. Someone else flips through it later. A third person glances at it on a coffee table. This wasn’t presented as speculation. It was treated as standard practice. Every paper did it.
What mattered was not how many people actually read a given article, but how plausible the estimate sounded. Advertisers paid for presence, not for proof of attention. The numbers were elastic, but everyone involved accepted them because there was no practical way to test them cheaply or precisely.
Then the internet happened. When newspapers moved online, it became easy to know how many times a page was actually viewed, how long someone stayed, and whether they clicked an ad. Impressions and clickthroughs and conversions replaced estimates and assumptions. The data was transparent.
The results were devastating to the print media industry.
The Internet did not destroy journalism’s revenue model. It exposed that the model had never been real in the first place.
Measurement Replaced Assumption
The print advertising model worked for as long as no one could measure it.
Newspapers sold presence, not performance. An ad was assumed to be seen simply by existing on a page that circulated through a city. “Readers per copy” filled the gap between what could be printed and what could be claimed. Rate cards were built on it. Payrolls depended on it. Advertisers tolerated this because there was no inexpensive or easy way to test it, though they tried. Newspapers believed it because believing it made planning possible. It was a convenient illusion for everyone involved.
However, once attention could be counted cheaply, continuously, and precisely, the illusion collapsed. Ads placed next to articles were not being seen at the implied rates. Clickthroughs were low, and conversions, actual sales, were lower. Advertisers responded rationally. They pulled back, demanded performance pricing, or moved their money to places where outcomes could be demonstrated clearly.
For newspapers, this felt like betrayal. Rather than recognizing measurement as revelation, many interpreted it as loss. Revenue decline was framed as predation. Thus emerged the now-familiar claim that tech companies stole journalism’s money.
That diagnosis is emotionally satisfying and almost entirely wrong.
Platforms, Performance, and the Wrong Fix
By “platforms,” I mean large technology companies whose primary business is organizing, distributing, and monetizing user attention at scale, companies like Google and Meta (Facebook). These firms do not produce journalism. They provide infrastructure: search, feeds, ad placement, and measurement tools that allow advertisers to target specific users and see, in near real time, what their money actually does. They also provide traffic to papers that would otherwise be overlooked. And they had a lock on a mechanical innovation.
They could measure attention. Physical newspapers could not, not honestly or accurately, and certainly not at scale. Once that difference became visible, advertisers didn’t need to believe anything. They could see the numbers for themselves and make rational ROI decisions.
Legacy media was devastated. It is continuing to be devastated. And there is a new push for intervention, predictably, by the government to punish those mean old tech companies and help out the stalwart and brave media organizations.
Seattle Times President Alan Fisco says the media industry is dying and is calling for new taxes on tech companies to be used as grants to pay the failing news organizations
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 9, 2026
He’s calling for new taxes that will go directly to him and other news organizations…. pic.twitter.com/nLHpWq8jDC
Alan Fisco, president of The Seattle Times, publicly argues that the media industry is “dying” and has called for government action from Washington State to support failing news organizations. He has pointed to newspaper closures across Washington State and to massive layoffs at national outlets such as The Washington Post as evidence of systemic crisis. He voices strong support for Washington State Senate Bill 5400, which would impose new taxes or fees on large technology companies and redirect that money into grants for news organizations. The argument is that because tech companies distribute news content and earn advertising revenue in the same information ecosystem, they are obligated to help financially sustain legacy media outlets. The cost to platforms, he says, is minimal, but the benefit to legacy media would be invaluable.
This proposal does not, of course, address whether the old revenue model was accurate; it assumes it was and seeks to replace lost advertising revenue with public money rather than confronting why that revenue disappeared in the first place.
But subsidizing a bad revenue model is not a fix, ever. Instead, it freezes bad ideas in place and stifles innovations like those conservative media has been forced to make in an ideologically unfriendly world.
If journalism is insulated from audience feedback, political dependency increases, and failure becomes survivable. Institutions that learned to prosper in the constraints of the online environment are placed on the same footing as those that did not, or worse, they are crowded out by them.
Attention, which should be the primary focus of any media organization, is not guaranteed. It must be earned. An organization that does not earn attention is essentially pointless labor. It is not too big to fail. It should, in fact, fail.
Humility Is the Only Way Forward
What the Internet forced journalism to confront was not hostility, but reality. The response from legacy media has been telling. Instead of fully adapting, many are asking to be shielded from measurement and market feedback. That is not reform. It is denial.
The fix is not ideological or technical. It is humility.
Journalism that survives will know exactly who its readers are, why they are there, and what they are willing to support. It will treat trust as something earned repeatedly, not inherited from history or prestige.
If you’re reading this at PJ Media, you are already participating in that alternative model. PJ Media exists because readers choose it, and because a subset of those readers decide it’s worth supporting directly through VIP membership. That support doesn’t buy insulation from criticism. It buys independence from the myths that broke the old model.
Media that is supported by anything other than its readers is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the pixels that form it. Once journalism stops answering primarily to its audience, it becomes propaganda, PR, advocacy, clerisy, or entertainment, whatever its new funders need it to be. It stops being journalism in any meaningful sense.
The press does not need a bailout. It needs to relearn a truth the Internet made unavoidable:
You don’t get paid for existing.
You get paid for being worth it.
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