foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content,
I don't believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that's why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won't really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at.
Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)
I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn't cost that much to make the kind of news that's important. It's certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don't need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn't need to be corporate. News doesn't need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.
If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it's important. And should be linking to quality sources.
I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/
Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) -- it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it's worth paying for news to exist:
I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what's going on around us.
I don't especially value corporate manipulation and lobbying which is what I see from things like Postmedia, which owns way too many newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada
A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I'd rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it's better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it's important journalism happens and not to shareholders.
Currently I contribute to: Canadaland, The Local, The Narwhal, and The Tyee. I also pay for The Guardian because they don't have a paywall.
I'd like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I'd have to log in to read them and then they're associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don't want to support that. Plus I can't link people to the paywalled news. And I think it's important to be able to do that: it's all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won't. And I don't see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won't it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?
So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it's important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?
True, I do value public broadcasting and support it through my taxes so ya, CBC and TVO. I was mostly just thinking of things I had to opt into paying and brought that up in the larger context that you don't need a state or a massive corporation to produce quality journalism. And so if our state fails to extract a bailout from American tech companies to satiate our bloated media corps I'm pretty confident we'll be okay.