> Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.
If that is a tiny minority of people then there won't be a critical mass available to pay real journalists. No journalist can afford to work on long form investigative stories on minimum wage.
Even relatively straightforward legwork on a completely local story requires some driving around doing interviews. A whistleblower isn't going to just do a Zoom call with a journalist. A journalist can't get a first-hand account of an event from watching a webcam.
Good journalism isn't cheap. It doesn't have to be lavishly expensive but it's definitely not cheap. If only the New York Times can pay to hire journalists there won't be any meaningful journalism because they simply cannot scale to cover the world let alone the country.
If that is a tiny minority of people then there won't be a critical mass available to pay real journalists. No journalist can afford to work on long form investigative stories on minimum wage.
Even relatively straightforward legwork on a completely local story requires some driving around doing interviews. A whistleblower isn't going to just do a Zoom call with a journalist. A journalist can't get a first-hand account of an event from watching a webcam.
Good journalism isn't cheap. It doesn't have to be lavishly expensive but it's definitely not cheap. If only the New York Times can pay to hire journalists there won't be any meaningful journalism because they simply cannot scale to cover the world let alone the country.