The first wave of media was fueled by cheap audience acquisition from social media companies like Facebook which created BuzzFeed and UpWorth. The second wave is the subscription wave. Consumers want curation, contextualization, and recommendations

Through almost the end of the 19th-century, the revenue model for most newspapers was subscriptions from party loyalists when a paper like The Press Democrat meant just that: the Democratic paper in that town giving that faction’s version of events.

At the core of this is a debate on whether The New York Times, The Washington Post and others are failing the American people by pushing more content behind the paywall.