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404media is corporate news outlet.
They have paywalls and ads.
If you are looking for good tech websites, I think Markup, Coda Story, Tech Policy Press, Spacebar, Knight First Amendment Institute, Libre News, 9to5Linux and Sifted might be more suitable for you.
There is an issue. To eat food it takes money. The source of the money will influence the reporting. Humans give those that pay what they want.
When I don't pay, someone else is. Sometimes a generous person, sometimes an aggressive nation.
Paying sucks, but not paying ever sucks more.
Yeah, our dollars count just as much as the billionaires', we just got to dig deep in to our pockets and outspend them!
Oh wait.
There literally is not enough money at the bottom to buy out the top on ANY ISSUE.
I don't get your comment in relation of the listed news websites.
Some of them is non-profit and it's working well for them.
Do non profit websites not have ads or subscriptions? How do they pay employees?
Donations and grants?
Ok, now I get it. You're looking for a Wikipedia style news site driven by donations.
But no, non profits can absolutely do ads. The only requirements for a non profit is that they have a cause and don't have share holders who get a profit. They can still have sketchy business practices if they want.
I think it's a good enough business model, if we want high quality indepth reporting where they do analysis on dumps of databases based on FOIA requests (really time consuming), and things that require more than surface level reporting, then people need to have this as a fulltime job. A lot of tech newssites just regurgitate news they get from big tech, or do surface level reporting and opinion pieces. While that is useful as well, it's not investigative and as in-depth.
We want professional journalists for a reason. We need it as a society. We need to be sure that they don't do harm to innocent people, that they actually have proof and sources etc. We need people to hold people and companies accountable. Someone has to actually produce the content that other newssites refer to.
They need to get paid on a consistent basis, just like everyone else. That is the most sustainable way we have in a capitalist society.
Small donations from a vast amount of people would be perfect, but is hard to achieve. Which is why they have probably gone for paywalled subscriptions and ads.
A lot of non-profits I listed focus on in-depth articles and investigations.
Example: https://themarkup.org/investigations/2025/02/13/dating-app-tinder-hinge-cover-up
Thanks, I'll checkout more of the sites you added. This seems interesting and good journalism. I try to mainly consume content that have a high signal/noise ratio, so quality is everything.
If you wanna checkup some more tech articles websites that does not have paywalls:
Thank you! I'll check them out and probably add several to my RSS reader.
They also don't have paywalls on their news items, just on the behind-the-scenes and bonus content.
They require an email to read the articles -- they were being ripped off by AI News sites iirc--, but you can use an email alias and they're fine with that.