Who Pays for Journalism?

In my Comms 101 class we recently discussed the same idea of who pays for journalism. The response of the class was pretty much unanimous: the majority believed that wealthy people pay for journalism (in the case of newspapers) because they have the money to spend on them and newspaper subscriptions cost money. I don't think that's necessarily always the case, and my doubts were confirmed in class last week when we talked about the same topic in Comms 239.

There was a lot of talk in class about how advertising pays for journalism, and I would have to agree with that. I feel like anytime I see any sort of journalism, whether it's print or online or the radio or television, there are all sorts of advertisements associated with it. Commercials on TV and radio, ads on the side of webpages, and ads in newspapers. They're everywhere.

Here's an interesting article I found about who pays for journalism. It's a viewpoint that addresses how it's paid for with paper journalism kind of falling out of the spotlight because there's more focus on non-print journalism with all the new technology that's taking center stage:  http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/who-pays-for-journalism-in-the-post-print-era/            

In the student presentation I enjoyed looking into how the matter of who's paid for journalism as changed over time and what it was like historically. Journalism didn't use to be such a business centered field, and I forget that a lot of times. Money wasn't always the main focus; the news was the priority. But of course, times have changed.

This was an interesting post I found that talks about how money affects journalism now: http://www.editorsweblog.org/2011/11/29/journalism-the-good-the-bad-and-the-money