Best ways to support journalism in 2025

Concrete ideas for news consumers, journalists and policymakers.

“I Want You for U.S. Army” poster detail, by J.M. Flagg, 1917. (WikiMedia Commons)

Although I enjoy writing this newsletter, I get self-conscious when I get another big influx of subscribers — hello, Bulwark readers — from one of my pieces explaining why independent journalism, our information environment and our democracy are totally boned right now.

We know things suck. What can we do about it?

‘Tis the season for new beginnings, so based on my experiences as a longtime newspaper reporter, Guild president, policy advocate and journeyman digital creator/troll, here are concrete ways you can support positive change in 2025. I’ve broken up the recommendations based on whether you’re a news consumer, a journalist or a policymaker.

If you are a news consumer:

• Donate to any nonprofit newsroom that produces high-quality investigative journalism about a subject that matters to you. Start by checking if your local community has one of those newsrooms. If you don’t know where to start but just want to put some charity dollars to work, donate to ProPublica for national investigative journalism. (Bonus: Consider giving to Investigative Journalists and Editors, the premier training organization for accountability reporters in all sorts of newsrooms.) Even though corruption is everywhere, investigative journalism is labor-intensive and often can’t pay for itself. A lot is dependent on sometimes-fickle philanthropists. Local nonprofit newsrooms can become more stable, like ProPublica, if they can build up a larger base of small donors while producing banger investigations.

• Subscribe to independent writers you enjoy, but be on the lookout for emerging journalist collectives and co-ops that allow you to bundle your subscriptions. I’m flattered so many of you have pledged subscriptions to this newsletter. But I’m anxious about monetizing this blog because newsletter subscriptions are an incredibly weak bang for your buck, at least relative to what you’d still get subscribing to legacy publications and getting a ton of writers for the same amount of money. (Divisions of labor, economies of scale and some good ol’ advertising are the three legs on the stool of cheap, quality media. But right now everything is moving in the direction of tiny, inefficient and ad-free media. This all means more entrepreneurial risk placed on journalists, more costs placed on consumers, and the creation of media small enough for hyperlitigious assholes to drown in the bathtub.) What I feel a lot better about are journalist collectives like Defector, 404 Media and Flaming Hydra that allow you to get more writers for the dollar, which will eventually be healthier for writer and reader alike. Look for more of these to emerge in 2025.

• DON’T use AI chatbots or AI summaries as replacements for searching for original information on independent websites; DO use social media services that don’t suppress hyperlinks. Be wary of any digital infrastructure (or any content creator, or any newsroom for that matter) that won’t point you directly to primary sources. Our information infrastructure is awful on that front, probably the worst it’s been since the creation of the internet. It’s like we built the world’s biggest digital skyscraper after every contractor on the jobsite cut corners to line their pockets. You should be rooting — yes, rooting — for the Trump administration to follow through on the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts to break up Google and bring high-quality competition back to the search and digital advertising markets. You should also hope publishers and creatives prevail in their copyright litigation against AI developers, if only to force Silicon Valley to recognize that treating creators and knowledge workers like hogs on a factory farm is giving us all intellectual E. coli. Preferring social media services like Bluesky that aren’t openly hostile to hyperlinking should be your baseline. But what we really need are platforms that prominently and proactively feature high-quality, originally produced information. My antitrust priors prevent me from saying “and that’s why you should give even more of your money to Tim Cook for an Apple News+ subscription,” but Apple is one of the more responsible players in this regard.

• If a commercial news outlet produces an investigation or a project that really matters to you, reward it with a subscription, even if you cancel shortly later. Even though a lot of America’s commercial news media is currently owned by civically derelict maniacs, these newsrooms nonetheless employ the lion’s share of our high-quality journalists and are managed by people whose jobs are to follow the audience (mostly) wherever it goes. Take it from me: These journalists want to do major projects. But these places often produce nonsense because — you guessed it — audiences reward nonsense. Direct subscriber dollars from a project or an investigation are the strongest Pavlovian bell you can ring for a commercial outlet to produce more stuff like that investigation. If the commercial place lets you down afterward, you can huffily cancel and post righteously on social media about your stand, so it’s kind of a win-win. If they want you and your money back, they should try producing another killer project. (Major caveat: As I explained previously and was 100% correct about even though no one wants to hear a word of it, canceling subs over stupid billionaire extracurricular nonsense is highly unlikely to influence further stupid billionaire extracurricular nonsense. Subscriber dollars are a stronger signal to management than to ownership, and management is terrified of ownership.)

If you are a journalist:

• Start organizing with the other journalists who do the same stuff you do, whether you’re newslettering, freelancing or working in a traditional newsroom. If you’re doing independent writing on Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, etc., think about what a cooperative or a collaboration could do for you in terms of getting your work circulated to wider audiences through bundling subscriptions or crossposting. If you’re a freelancer, check out the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union. If you work in a traditional newsroom without a union, reach out to The NewsGuild-CWA, Writers Guild of America East or SAG-AFTRA about how to start one. If your newsroom already has a union, become a steward, bargaining committee member, or run for leadership; if you have a union but it sucks (it happens), read Labor Notes, starting with “What to Do When Your Union Leaders Break Your Heart.” Having strong social organizations can be the most transformative thing in the world, but they’ll always be fatally useless if you think the purpose of the org is for somebody else to serve you hand and foot.

• Never, ever put all your eggs in a single platform basket, whether it’s Substack, Google Search, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube, TikTok — whatever. A major theme of my newslettering and journalism troublemaking is that modern content creation has degraded into glorified digital sharecropping. You’re simultaneously tenant-farming on the land of somebody else making the real money while having to bear 100% of your own entrepreneurial risk. That’s just fundamentally not an economic pathway to rebuild middle-class knowledge jobs and productive capacity at a scale capable of countering the hydrant of bullshit waiting on the other side of everyone’s iPhone lock screens. Nonetheless! Unless we get some First Amendment-protected content infrastructure, better competition policy, or more bargaining countervailance for creators, existing online will mean doing business at a disadvantage with multiple companies you don’t like. The best you can do balance your risk portfolio. Make more than one home to insulate yourself from evictions like Meta banning journalism or a prominent federal contractor turning X from a news hub into his governmental lobbying platform. For newsletterers, I’m wary of Substack’s potential to emerge as an Uber-like platform intermediary between writers and audiences; even the feel-good nonprofit Ghost is tangled up with Google’s dependency-creating Google News Initiative. Platform lock-in is your enemy, so always work with one eye on the emergency exit.

If you are a policymaker:

• There are a growing set of public policy tools you can propose support local journalism. You can check them out at Rebuild Local News, which is the organization I tend to trust most about these things. There’s growing bipartisan support for ideas to support local news, but the actual practice of making public policy to support journalism is a political minefield even on its best days. Locally you’re likely to have to deal with a bunch publishers who hate each other, and you also have to avoid subsidy ideas that induce publisher corruption or violate the First Amendment. That said, there are a couple of ideas in particular that have found some appeal.

• If you’re aiming big, aim for a local journalist wage subsidy. New York, Illinois and California have recently advanced versions of the basic concept that if you want more local journalism, you can induce it by subsidizing a percentage of the wages that local newsrooms pay to local journalists. In Canada, 35% of hundreds of journalists’ wages are covered by the Journalism Labour Tax Credit; Paul Deegan, president and CEO of News Media Canada, says that “of all possible public subsidies for journalism, we believe this is the most effective in that it rewards newsroom investment.” The upside is that you don’t have the government picking winners and losers; the downsides are the costs to the public budget, which is why I think the Big Tech companies polluting our information environment should foot the bill for the cleanup. In my dream world, platforms are initially taxed to create an independent endowment that fund these subsidies into perpetuity with minimal ongoing political involvement.

• If you’re looking for a starter policy, think about a government advertising set-aside for local media. Your government agencies already have advertising and communications budgets; these sorts of proposals suggest setting aside a percent of those budgets for advertising spends in local media. The risks are that if you don’t set up this policy well, it could create new ways for pols to discipline local press, which would be worse than if the policy didn’t exist at all. But again: budget-neutral.

• Be wary of anything that proposes the state should imitate philanthropic grant-based programs. The upside of philanthropic grants for journalism are the discretion: the freedom to microtarget growth and give money to risky projects that are otherwise unlikely to get bank loans or private investment. The downside is that grant-based giving tends to be massively inefficient and unstable, and discretion can turn into a corruption magnet when state appropriators become the givers. In either case, we already have Press Forward and its local branches without needing governments duplicating and heaping their own drama on those efforts.

• Break up Big Tech. Journalism is a captured industry. It shouldn’t be. Free the free press!