One complaint about making people pay for news is that poor people will lose access to the news. This is a valid concern, but keeping news free by employing a corrupting, distorting, ineffective, and inefficient business model is not the solution.

Millions of people can not afford enough food to eat, but we do not make food free for everyone. We don't make housing free for everyone because millions of people cannot afford rent. News should be no different. When it is subsidized by third parties, its independence becomes compromised, and it can no longer be relied on to deliver unbiased reporting. That is already enough of a challenge anyway, but at least ownership of news organizations, and who controls them, is public and not subject to politics.

The "free" ad-based model does not work for most publishers anyway, as only a small percentage of news publishers can be sustained by on-line ad revenue. There is no right to free news, as those who report it deserve an income as much as anyone else who works.

A better solution is to directly address the issue for those who cannot afford it, either with discounts or passes. We will work to make it easy for individual publishers to offer free or discounted subscriptions, but they should also be offering these options on their websites.