Who pays for truth

Paywalls protect quality journalism. They also price it out of reach for the audiences who need it most. I don't have a tidy answer, but I think the question is more urgent than the industry admits (or knows?).

A few weeks ago at Stockholm Mediaweek, James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General at NATO, said something that stopped the room.

He wasn't talking about missile shields or eastern flank deployments. He was talking about his nephew. And about the Financial Times.

"My nephew came to me and said: NATO is Russophobic. You're trying to dismantle Russia. It turned out that because he didn't earn a lot of money and couldn't afford the Globe and Mail, couldn't afford the FT, he was getting his news from platforms. In particular, Russia Today. For free. He was exposed to disinformation because he couldn't afford the truth. And that really hit home."

James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General, NATO

It is a remarkable thing when a senior NATO official frames paywalls as a strategic vulnerability. But that's what he did. And I think it deserves a serious response from the media industry, not a defensive one.

"Truth is expensive. Disinformation is free. And it moves more easily on networks."

Appathurai, on the structural asymmetry of the modern information ecosystem

It is a remarkable thing when a senior NATO official frames paywalls as a strategic vulnerability. But that's what he did. And I think it deserves a serious response from the media industry, not a defensive one.

The model that saved journalism may be undermining it

The subscription model rescued newsrooms. I have seen it first-hand, and that's not an exaggeration. When digital advertising collapsed under the weight of the Google and Meta targeting duopoly, paywalls allowed quality publishers to survive. 

The New York Times, The Economist, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter: these institutions exist in their current form because readers agreed to pay for them.

That was the right call. And it worked.

But something else happened at the same time. As quality journalism retreated behind subscription walls, the vacuum it left was filled. Not by nothing. By something far more deliberate.

Appathurai described how Russia's information operations are built precisely on this asymmetry. They don't need to outspend quality journalism. They just need to be free when quality journalism is not. They optimize for the audiences who can't afford subscriptions, often younger, often lower-income, and they run for years, patiently, waiting for trust to erode.

He walked through the mechanics: dormant bot networks activated eight years after they were planted; micro-influencers with 500 followers paid to slip political narratives into lifestyle and sports content; dozens of competing false narratives deployed simultaneously, not to convince but to exhaust. To make people give up on the idea that truth is knowable at all.

He also shared an example that has stayed with me. A group of 100 well-educated people were exposed to false information, and they were told beforehand that it was false. 

After a hundred days of repeated exposure, 99 of them believed it was true. Repetition beat the warning. It is not about intellect. It is about how we are wired as humans, and it is why recurring falsehoods are so hard to defend against over time.

The question we're not asking

Most debates about paywalls in media circles focus on the business model: what price point works, what bundles hold subscribers, what the conversion funnel looks like. These are legitimate questions.

But there's a prior question that gets much less attention:

If journalism's reach is structurally limited to those who can afford it, is it still journalism in the public interest sense? Or has it become something else: expert analysis for the already informed?

There's a version of "free and independent journalism" that is genuinely free from political interference and, at the same time, inaccessible to large parts of the public it claims to serve. I'm not sure those two things are compatible. Not indefinitely.

A note of caution. I'm not arguing that quality journalism should simply give its work away. The economics of that don't hold. And underfunded journalism is not free journalism; it's journalism that becomes dependent on whoever funds it.

But I do see it as a societal responsibility for the press to act as a counterweight to the information bubbles of the global platforms, which spread everything from dubious, opinionated content to pure misinformation (and a few cats in between). 

And that raises a broader, harder question: how do we win back the trust and attention of younger audiences?

Two kinds of "free"

The word "free" is doing a lot of work in this conversation, and it's worth separating two very different things it can mean.

Free as in unencumbered. 

Journalism that is editorially independent, not subject to pressure or state influence, written without fear or favor. This is what the paywall is supposed to protect.

Free as in no cost to the reader. 

Content the reader doesn't pay for, that circulates without friction, that reaches the widest possible audience. This is what state-sponsored disinformation has mastered.

Right now, we've arrived at an uncomfortable place where those two definitions of "free" sit on opposite sides of the same wall. Editorially free journalism costs money. Algorithmically free disinformation costs nothing.

And the audiences being shaped by each are not the same audiences.

What happens to the public without it?

Appathurai raised the example of Taiwan, a democracy that has built genuine societal resilience to disinformation through rapid response systems, civic inoculation programs and radical transparency. According to Appathurai, public trust in institutions there went from 38% to 64% in a matter of years.

One of the things Taiwan got right: it treated media literacy and access to verified information as a civic infrastructure problem, not just a commercial one. Truth wasn't left to market forces alone.

I'm not suggesting European democracies should replicate Taiwan's exact model. But the underlying logic is worth sitting with. If verified, high-quality information is a public good, and the evidence suggests it is, then treating access to it as a purely commercial transaction has consequences for the societies that depend on it.

When a young person reaches for Russia Today because they can't afford the Financial Times, that isn't a personal failing. It's a system failure. And the system is ours.

The open question:

If the reach of your journalism is limited to those who can already afford to be informed, who is actually winning the battle for public understanding?

I don't conclude. I am just curious.

I don't have a clean answer to any of this. I'm genuinely uncertain, and I think honesty about that is more useful to you than a confident prescription.

What I do believe is that the media industry has been so focused on the survival question, how do we fund journalism, that it has sometimes deferred a harder one: funded journalism for whom?

Appathurai is a NATO official, not a media theorist. When someone in his position starts talking about paywalls and the cognitive security of democracies in the same breath, it is perhaps worth pausing, as an industry, to ask whether the model we built to save ourselves is creating a problem larger than the one it solved.

Not to dismantle paywalls. Not to give everything away. But to be honest about the trade-offs we've made, and whether we're comfortable with them.

Because the alternative, accepting that disinformation has unlimited reach while truth stays behind a paywall, is, as Appathurai put it, "a false economy."

The cost gets paid either way. The question is who pays it, and when.

I'd genuinely like to hear how your newsroom is thinking about reach beyond the paywall. Just hit reply.

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Based on the keynote by James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General, NATO, at Stockholm Mediaweek, September 2026.