Editor s Note: The Moral Economy is a new series that tackles key economic topics through the prism of Catholic social teaching and its care for the dignity of every person. This is the fourth article in the series.
The United States, a nation built on newspapers, has journalism in its future.
Thousands of digital startups. Billionaires backing nonprofit news. The emergence of working subscriber models, from Substack newsletters to America Media.
Two dark clouds hover over this promising terrain. One consists of Facebook, Google and Apple, tech companies worth trillions of dollars that dominate access to the internet and dwarf the biggest news companies. Instead of a handful of newspapers and magazines, we can now read over a billion websites, fracturing our attention, enabling conspiracy theories and fueling media illiteracy.