In March of this year, I alluded to a trend that a number of commentators were also sensing and expressing unease about: the possibility that an increasing reliance on subscription-based revenue might imperil impartiality in journalism in favor of news outlets largely just reporting stories that their respective subscriber bases want to hear. This emergent phenomenon was notably documented by The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins in August of 2019, when he was writing in response to calls by subscribers of The New York Times for the newspaper to change a headline they deemed not tough enough on the Trump administration. In Jenkins' view, publishers now long for the days when it was advertisers alone, they needed to keep happy, whereas today, "...newspapers are more dependent than ever on readers to pay our bills."
The Unintended Consequences of Subscriptions
