Software communities make a well-known distinction between two concepts of free: free as in speech (libre) and free as in beer (gratis). Like any dichotomy, this one nudges us into a particular model of the world, a specific way of parsing our options: neither, one or the other, both.

Of course, memes and mental models are like water, or Amsterdam cyclists: they get everywhere. Software that is free in both senses, publicly created with visible source code and costing nothing to use, runs the internet. And we’ve become accustomed to the things on the internet following its rules. But it’s not always a good dichotomy for parsing the non-software world¹. The example that’s most relevant these days is the news.

News that is free as in speech is a messy issue. News organizations exist uncomfortably with the wider free culture movement. And a more classically free-speech axis of analysis leads to a whole spectrum of hotly-disputed classifications, running from “accurate” through “biased” and “false” all the way to “tools to destroy the concept of truthfulness itself in society”. As Pilate pointed out, truth is complicated.

Free as in beer is arguably even more important for news than it is for software: financial considerations should not prevent people from having good data to make informed choices. (See also, insider trading laws.) But its downside, though a simpler story than speech-freedom, is no less profound in its effects. The collapse of former revenue sources has completely changed the landscape of both print and digital news. We all know the litany: discontinued print editions, advertising revenue falloff, paywalls, clickbait-chasing, nontraditional outlets of variable reliability, et cetera. A classic post-disruption landscape, like refactored code: maybe better in the end, but currently full of new and undiscovered bugs of varying severity.

I want, at least in my own head, to get away from that duality, which privileges these two characteristics above a bunch of others. I want to elevate one of their causes and effects to parity: independence, autonomy, free as in bird², if you will. And the news is the poster child, the medium whose failure mode most needs a third axis of analysis. (Most. There are others.)

Quality news that’s free as in bird is difficult to obtain, because news costs money. Although amateurs do good work, we need a corps of reporters and editors with the kind of professional skills and experience that only decent pay permits. Fact-checkers cost, as do libel lawyers, equipment, and bandwith. And the press, like the civil service, needs to be paid enough that backhanders and hiden influence can be refused on principle rather than accepted out of necessity.

At the moment, paying for all of this comes out of three pots: advertising, subscriptions, and ownership. Advertising is a receding source of funds, a mess of malware and arms races with ad blockers, and a political attack vector. Ownership is and has always been problematic, because with it comes editorial control, not always in the service of the truth. But it is, it seems, all but inescapable. Subscriptions, in addition to being a move away from the theoretically abstract good of free as in beer, feel inadquate, but they’re what us non-millionaires can do.

So free as in bird is unachievable. Woe! Right?

But what we do not identify as a thing, we do not measure. Sure, many of us know the organizations and people who control huge slices of our memetic and cultural landscape. Yes, we talk about their influence. But I at least know a lot more about how many articles I get from each paper before I hit a paywall than I do about who owns them and how much editorial influence they exert.

One of my reactions to the election result was to pay for subscriptions to a few outlets (the New York Times, the Guardian, de Volkskrant, Teen Vogue³), with the intention of growing the list based on what good articles I’m consistently linked to (candidates: the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Mother Jones). But now I think I need to ask about bird-freedom: who owns these outlets, and how does that affect them?

(Of the sources named above, the New York Times does OK, being owned by a publicly-traded company. The Guardian is owned by a trust explicitly barred from exerting editorial control. De Volkskrant, Teen Vogue, and the New Yorker are owned by privately-held media conglomerates. WaPo is owned by Jeff Bezos, which is a black mark in my book; I avoid doing business with Amazon because of their labor practices⁴. MoJo is owned by a nonprofit foundation.)