This piece originally appeared in Sam Whitmore’s MediaSurvey.com in late June 2017.

We all know that the Bezos Post and the Grey Lady are doing well selling monthly subscriptions. (During the last three months of 2016, the Times added 276,000 net digital-only subscribers, more than they started the year.) They are the counter-examples in the otherwise dismal NewspaperDeathWatch (done by my podcasting partner Paul Gillin) series of layoffs and site closures.

But what about some way new models that could support quality journalism? Here are a few bright spots, some operating sites, some ideas that are still being worked out:

• The Marshall Project, which is a non-profit newsroom focused on criminal justice with stories such as The Mental Health Crisis Facing Women in Prison and How to Cut Down on Searches in Traffic Stops: Legalize Pot.
• Press Think, which is a US version of the Dutch site, De Correspondent. That site is funded solely by its 56,000 members who pay about $63 a year. Jay Rosen is leading that effort, which has articles on politics and the gaming nature of PR. It is funded by a foundation for now. The idea is to optimize for trust.
• Stratechery, which is Ben Thompson’s one-person effort to look at the intersection of tech and business, with recent pieces on the Amazon/Whole Foods deal (which has one of the more insightful things said about the merger) and Google and antitrust.
• The Information, which is also tech news related. That has been around for several years and has done some excellent reporting, which is what you would expect if you hire some of the top journalists and charge $400 a year for subscriptions.
• Most recently is Civil, which announced plans to build a blockchain-powered marketplace on Ethereum. This marketplace could be where citizens and journalists form common communities and financially support factual reporting and investigative work. The motivation is to substantially limit misinformation through effective collaborative-editing methods. Call it “fact-checking as a service,” if you will. It hasn’t yet launched.

All of these efforts are worth watching to see what gains traction. Against this landscape, or maybe in spite of it, are a series of re-energized corporate blogs that seem to be well-funded (such as IBM’s SecurityIntelligence.com) and new information delivery models (such as Jason Calacanis’ Inside.com series of email newsletters — NB: I am a contributor to both efforts).

Will any of these gain real traction? Hard to say. Paying for content is expensive, and paying for superior content is even more expensive. Crowdfunding may not bring in enough dough, whether it is in traditional dollars or some crypto-currency that can trade at wide valuations.

Part of the problem certainly began years ago when advertising revenue evaporated, or at least moved to other places. But that just shifted the cost basis of most pubs. There is the issue that Google and other search sites now collect those funds, and have sucked the air out of any news-oriented site.

But another issue is the trust deficit that news sites now have with their readers. Witness the CNN issue earlier last week, or any of the latest collection of presidential Tweets. So, as they say in the media, stay tuned.