That's a great question. Thank you so much for posing it. It gets right at the heart of the key core issue of the financial sustainability of independent news.
I've spent quite a lot of time, both thinking on this question and working on it with philanthropists and fellow civil society actors—people like Ed Greenspon, Kevin Chan of Facebook—to try to figure out the best way to ensure we can create mechanisms through which independent media can be funded. The best that I have come across is an idea that goes back to “The Shattered Mirror”, looking at the opportunity to set up an entrepreneurship fund for independent media in Canada, which would be co-funded by philanthropy, by government and by individual private donors who care about independent news, and would be co-managed by a consortium of industry experts: journalists managing funds in the interest of improving journalism.
The challenge with all of this, not to put too fine a point on it, is getting journalists to work together so that we can—