Richard Tofel and Dan Kennedy are two of the most careful thinkers in the journalism business, and they make an argument worth taking seriously: reader revenue is the only revenue that makes a newsroom genuinely independent. Not advertising, which bends the newsroom toward what advertisers will tolerate. Not philanthropy, which can be withdrawn. Not government funding — Kennedy has written about both of its failure modes plainly. Reader revenue. People choosing to pay — that is the model that keeps the editor's job description clean.

They're right. The logic holds. And the conclusion that follows — that paywalls are therefore a tool of independence — is where I'd push back.

The Case Worth Taking Seriously

The Tofel/Kennedy premise is grounded. Advertiser pressure is real and well-documented. Billionaire owners have already demonstrated, at The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, that their editorial preferences travel with their money. Reader revenue is different: when your audience is the one paying, the only editorial standard you have to meet is theirs.

The Guardian spent years making this argument by example. No paywall. Serve everyone. Ask readers to support the work if they value it. Richard Tofel interviewed The Guardian's head of reader revenue in 2024 and asked exactly the question you'd ask: was the free model ideological or business? The answer was both. The Guardian is a global operation at a scale that doesn't transfer directly to local news — but the principle does. Reader revenue, voluntarily given, produces a different kind of editorial relationship than revenue coerced at a gate.

The Road That Isn't There

Here is where the paywall goes wrong. The reader-revenue-equals-independence argument is correct about the destination. The paywall is not the road.

Gannett had about 1.45 million paid digital subscribers at the end of Q3 2025. I laid out the math in a piece this morning, but the number is worth keeping close for this argument: across more than two hundred local papers, that's roughly 7,000 subscribers per title, down 26 percent year over year. A newsroom with 7,000 subscribers is not an independent newsroom with reader backing. It is a failing business with a contracting subscriber list. When your digital readership is smaller than a high school enrollment and falling at that rate, the question of advertiser influence is moot. You've already lost the thing that makes editorial independence worth having.

Independence isn't a financial ratio. It's a relationship. The editorial decision to cover a story nobody else will touch only matters if people read the result. A newsroom with 7,000 subscribers — down from 10,000, heading toward 5,000 — has editors making brave calls for an audience that has nearly stopped showing up.

The Distinction They're Missing

Real editorial independence requires two things: enough revenue to operate, and enough readers to matter. Paywalls can, in theory, produce the first. They reliably damage the second. The Salt Lake Tribune implemented a paywall, watched its traffic fall, and reversed course. It is not alone. The documented experience of local news paywalls is consistent: when the gate goes up, most readers leave. Most don't come back.

Mercury Local's answer is to earn the attention first. Build the habit. Become the source people turn to before the algorithm makes the choice for them. The publications that earn that level of attention don't need to choose between serving readers and sustaining the operation — the attention itself is the asset. Independence built on audience is durable. Independence built on a shrinking subscriber list is a countdown.

Tofel and Kennedy are right that independence requires readers. They mean it in the financial sense — reader dollars, not advertiser dollars. I mean it more literally. Independence requires that people read you. A paywall that trades readers for revenue isn't buying independence. It's selling it.