The Paywall Paradox
Figure: "The Paywall Paradox" — a digital wall between the public and the truth.
Fraud Frog Manifesto – Part 1: The Paywall Paradox
By Killian Yates
“When instead of just putting good news behind a paywall, you just put good news on fucking paper and you deliver it.”
We’re living in an age where truth costs $9.99 a month—but clickbait, spyware, and disinformation are completely free. Journalism didn’t fail—it was hijacked. Somewhere along the way, the public service of the press got swapped for a pay-per-outrage subscription model designed to track your behavior more than inform your mind.
What we have now isn’t journalism—it’s data collection disguised as storytelling. Every article behind a paywall is competing against a thousand rage-bait headlines and engagement-optimized garbage. The entire internet has become a casino of attention, and facts have become tokens to be hoarded or hidden—depending on who profits most.
Uniform Resource Locators? More Like Uniform Resource Leaks
The internet’s most basic plumbing—URLs—have been weaponized. What used to be a simple address is now a bloated string of surveillance code. Lazy marketing departments don’t innovate; they infest. Every link is a micro-spy, every redirect a trade-off. Corporate media doesn’t even need a newsroom anymore—they just need your IP address and a contract with a data broker.
Return to the Page
But here’s the thing: they can’t hijack what’s printed. Paper can’t track you. It can’t be silently edited after the fact. It won’t crash, redirect, or get censored by an algorithm. It sits in your hand and tells the story. That’s journalism with weight.
Publications like Retirement Connect get it right—print the truth, let local businesses fund it, and deliver it to the reader free of charge. That model worked for a hundred years before we broke it trying to digitize without accountability. It can work again, and it must.
Journalism Is a Practice, Not a Platform
The problem isn’t broadcast, cable, social media, or blogs. The problem is pretending that media companies are journalism companies. Journalism is a discipline. Media is a tool. That difference matters.
I use social media to tag journalists, raise issues, document corruption, and elevate public threats. And because I do, my local news won’t talk to me. I’ve been blackballed by outlets that can’t even keep a full staff for 30 days. That’s not bad business. That’s something darker—a rot that’s infected the watchdogs who were supposed to defend the public, not hide from them.
We Can Fix It
The answer isn’t to shut it all down. It’s to open up bandwidth, create civic-powered broadcast zones, fund physical print, and demand actual reporting. We already limit speech for public safety. So let’s build public broadcast models that protect the public good—not just platform whoever pays the most to yell the loudest.
This is only the beginning.
