Getting news off of Facebook is a good thing. When people see real news stories mixed in with crazy uncle Louie’s links to neo-Nazi blogs, they seem to lose their grasp on reality.
It's also a natural progression away from shopworn notion of the 90s that "information wants to be free."
Turns out journos are like the rest of us: they want to be paid for hitting the road to put legs under stories worth reading.
Also turns out that people are willing to pay for news after all, and that publishers and advertisers have to work for a living and continue to innovate if they want to compete for eyeballs. There are now more bundling and a la carte offerings from online news providers. When paywalls first went up, internet denizens said F that and the newspapers turned to cutting deals with social media and aggregators.
Eventually some papers said ok this is not working for us and someone said how about a paywall after a few freebies, or how about letting subscribers share freebie links to some stories and maybe have an array of pieces every day that are free to read because public service. Then it was how about letting a subscriber share a sub with someone else. Yeah someone finally remembered that in real life people do read the newspaper for free over some else's shoulder in the train.
All that at least kept ad rates up.
Now we're at the dicier stage that streaming platforms have already arrived at: promos, promos, promos. Fortunately to cut down on churn, some papers have also realized that not everyone wants to deal with monthly bills and would rather just bite the bullet and shell out for a semiannual or annual sub and be done with it. So there are more payment options besides promotional offers.
The downside is that in the meantime, independent journalism has continued to shrink, hedge funds buy whole newspaper chains, walk in with buyout-or-get-fired offers to newsroom staff, ditch the physical printing side and then flip the thing while there are still real estate assets in the picture.
The upside is that while the internet is not free, and journos are broke, more professional reporters and columnists are now migrating to platforms that host independent publications, and the how-to-retain-paying-subs experiments are rebooting.
So we're not quite to the point where "all news is local" only because our own eyeballs are the only thing observing what's happening... but it has got close to that while we've been thinking info is free.
The choice is ours to realize that paying for news is a lot like paying for coffee. I dunno about you but I'd rather make my own coffee and stick to letting someone else tell me what happened last night in Ukraine, Qatar, and even over in East Podunk 40 miles up the road.
I find ways to pay for info I can use, same as I find ways to put beans with the rice. We can all do that, and Facebook can drop dead for my money. To me aggregated news "for free" with a social media app was always a trap, and a foundational part of that other problem: consumer data turning us all into products.
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