ABSTRACT
Professional journalism is expensive to produce. It has historically been funded in a variety of different ways—through subsidies from political actors and media proprietors interested in power to pursue their own ends, by for-profit businesses based on selling content to audiences and selling audiences to advertisers, and through various forms of nonprofit models, backed by private philanthropists or politically mandated investment of public resources. These different forms of funding provide the economic context of journalism. They vary from country to country and evolve over time, intertwined with changes in audience behavior, media technologies, the wider economy, and political frameworks. They enable professional journalism by providing resources but also constrain it by influencing how it is practiced.
