VERITAS Subsidies For Media
I've written before that the model of South Korean export subsidies should be used more for everything.[^1]
If you had a bunch of money and wanted to support media – as many people with money eventually want to do – I would suggest looking into tapered subsidies based on an external arbiter of quality, along the lines of Korean export subsidies. For pizzazity, let's call them – oh, I don't know – Verified External Results-based Incentives, Tapered Astutely. Subsidies!, or (if you insist on acronymizing it) VERITAS.
Option 1: Tapered Matching Funds
Many non-profits, and seemingly ~all American politicians, now offer "matched donations": if you give a dollar TODAY, your donation will be matched 1/2/5/10x by a generous benefactor.
This is largely intended to give small donors an (often-fake) impression that they had a large counterfactual impact – in practice, often the Matching Donor would end up giving the exact same amount whether or not the small donor gives or not.
If the match is truly honest, though, these Matching Funds have a side-effect of creating a performance-linked subsidy for the non-profit as well.
The traditional problem for a megadonor to a non-profit is that they're so reliant on her beneficence that they're inevitably incentivized to pretzel themselves around pleasing her instead of around their putative goal.
Matching funds go part way to solving this issue: maybe the non-profit still couldn't survive without the mega-donor, but she can potentially improve their incentives and their outcomes by tying her donations to their ability to raise funds from others.
Back to media companies, you can easily imagine a "matching funds" donation for a media company:[^2] a wealthy supporter can promise that for every dollar the company brings in via subscriptions from paying companies, she will supplement with an added bonus. Like the Korean government subsidizing carmakers, the hope would be that her donations can shepherd them through their fragile infancy until they're able to stand strongly on their own two feet.
To make this more VERITAS-y, the donor should also taper her matching funds: she should say something like "I'll give you $5 for every dollar you raise elsewhere this year, then $3 for every dollar you raise elsewhere next year, then $1 for every dollar you raise elsewhere the year after; after that you're on your own, I promise not to give you more money even if it means you have to shut down."
Option 2: Tapered Topic Subsidies
Suppose you want more writing in the world about Topic X. You can start a magazine about X, or endow a section in a magazine.
But what if instead you just 1) created a list of eligible magazines, and then 2) paid an external bonus to any freelancer who successfully placed a piece in any of those magazines about Topic X?
Again, to be truly VERITAS, you would need to taper out the rewards: each writer gets $500 for their first such piece, $300 for their second, $100 for their third. But since it's very possible as a freelancer to spend 20+ hours of work on a piece and get paid $300 for it, you could very meaningfully change the incentives of freelancers to cover your topics.
How would magazines feel about this? I'm not sure, and it would be tricky. Would this be seen as a kind of improper editorial intervention? Clearly you're "allowed" to start an annual prize for The Best Writing On Given Topic, so you can imagine morphing that into an annual prize for many pieces on that topic, to a monthly prize, to... just giving money to everyone who writes about those topics in a major outlet.
[^1]: In short: the problem is that, in complicated industries like car-making, inexperienced companies can't realistically compete on a level playing field with experienced rivals – it's kind of like the "you need experience to get experience" problem in post-college job-hunting.
Developing countries are in a bind: their local firms have no experience, and can't compete equally with experienced firms abroad.
Some countries just never subsidized their local carmakers; they ended up with no local carmakers, because there was no way for local manufacturers to get good enough to compete with (literal and metonymic) Toyota.
Other countries gave unconditional subsidies to domestic carmakers, and/or erected trade barriers that forced local people to only buy these domestic cars. But these countries ended up with bad carmakers, because the local favorites got lots of money with no incentive to create a quality product.
The Korean industrial policy genius was to subsidize its infant industrialists if and only if they managed to sell their products abroad on open markets to people who had no need to buy Korean. Perhaps the Korean cars weren't amazing at first, and wouldn't be competitive at their true market price, but they had to be good-enough that foreigners would freely choose to buy them at a Korean Government-subsidized price. And that bar kept rising every year, because the carmakers knew that the subsidy amounts would keep tapering as the young infant industries grew up.
[^2]: it's neither here nor there, really, but it's interesting that media companies increasingly use the language of non-profits anyway: they don't ask you to subscribe, they ask you to support