Let's pay for the news we need

What if we resolved in the year to come to pay a fair price for the news we need? Web, online or print. Your hometown newspaper. The New York Times. Public radio. Any enterprise that attempts to do journalism for the public good.

 Do "mainstream" media always get it right? No. But the news we often get for free isn't news at all. It's ideology wrapped like cotton candy around a flimsy cone of fact.

 Mainstream journalism's biggest mistake was not reading the tea leaves of the technological communications revolution. In all my years at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, we thought our competition was the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis. Our competition ended up being the classified ads that dried up in the back of the D section and migrated toward cars.com.

 What followed were years trying to give away their product for free. In doing so, newsrooms have been decimated. It's not just fewer reporters available to cover fewer stories. It's that fewer sets of eyes - editors, colleagues, etc. - are employed to ferret out truth from rumor, fact from folly, and news from propaganda.

 If anything matters much in this world, we have to pay for it, save for God's grace and sunlight. Let's pay for the journalism we need. Subscribe. Buy. Or let anyone and everyone with a keyboard and access to a Web site or an app dictate the future of our citizenry.