Abstract

Much academic enquiry into financing journalism looks to the precarious prospects for sustaining commercial models. In contrast, this chapter explores arguments which suggest that a viable journalism requires alternatives to commercial funding. Mainstream debate across industry and the academy accepts, often as a premise, that journalism can only flourish as a commercially delivered product operating in highly volatile and adverse market conditions (Grueskin, Seaves, and Graves, 2011). Various radical perspectives respond that the commercial model is broken, is the agency of crisis for news media and cannot serve as the basis for sustaining a diverse public journalism. These differ in how far mainstream, market media are repudiated, but common to the critical perspectives explored in this chapter is their contribution to serious debate about the qualities of journalism that need to be sustained and fostered and about the ways in which this may be achieved.