alt Hacker NewsThere's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?
Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Replies
I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.
What a shill comment :D.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.