What If America Had a “Media Wallet”?

Europe’s New Plan to Save Journalism (And Why It Would Never Work Here)

The EU is exploring a new kind of “media wallet” — a platform that could change how people pay for journalism. (AI-generated image).

Three months ago, I told you that 99% of Americans won’t pay when they hit a paywall. The data was brutal. It still is. Paywalls don’t work for most people. Micro-transactions keep failing. The industry keeps recycling the same broken models and hoping for a different result.

Now, Europe has published a plan that finally admits this reality. Sort of.

A group of scholars from the Europaeum programme has just released a proposal for the EU Media Wallet. It’s a government-backed platform that would let people pay per article instead of subscribing to dozens of outlets. Think of it as Spotify for news, except the EU would build and run it instead of a company.

It’s a thoughtful idea. It’s detailed and deliberate. And it shows exactly why something like this would never work here.

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What Europe Is Actually Proposing

Here’s the basic idea. You’d create one account on a central platform. Every eligible news outlet in the European Union could list their stories there. You’d pay per article, not per subscription.

The platform wouldn’t replace subscriptions. News organizations could still have their own paywalls or memberships. This would serve everyone else. The people who want to read one story from the Denver Post and another from the Miami Herald but would never subscribe to either.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Blendle tried it and shut down in 2020. Piano and TinyPass built the infrastructure for it.

When I worked with Piano, I saw why this kind of model struggled. The idea was clean. The behavior wasn’t. People didn’t want another password. They didn’t want to stop and think before they could read. The problem wasn’t the price. It was friction.

Our approach wasn’t micropayments. It was a monthly or annual fee that included premium content, special events, and deeper interaction with our staff. It was meant to feel like a relationship, not a toll booth. What we learned was clear. People don’t pay for access. They pay for belonging. The more transactional it felt, the less it worked.

Eventually, we moved toward a philanthropy model. Readers weren’t subscribing anymore. They were contributing. They felt like they were part of something bigger than themselves. It became a shared mission, almost a movement. That’s what inspired generosity.

So what makes Europe think they can succeed where private companies couldn’t? Two things: scale and subsidy.

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The Myth of the Self-Sustaining Membership

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The Part That Actually Makes Sense

Here’s the clever part. They’re not pretending young people will suddenly start paying for news. Instead, they want to launch a Youth News Pass. It would give anyone between 18 and 24 free access to participating outlets.

It’s a loss-leader strategy paid for by taxpayers. The EU would fund the access and pay participating outlets for the free reads. The idea is to build the habit now and hope those readers become paying customers later.

It’s smart. It’s also an acknowledgment that the economics don’t work without public money.

Public radio understood this a long time ago. It didn’t start with subscriptions. It started with trust. The tote bags came later.

The Youth News Pass alone is projected to cost about €200,000 a year in salaries, platform maintenance, and payments to outlets. And that’s just a pilot.

When I ran membership and fundraising at Lehigh Valley Public Media, I thought a lot about what a subsidy like that would mean. A single investment could have funded an entire membership department. It could have doubled the number of reporters focused on engagement. It could have bought time, which is the one thing every newsroom runs out of first. That’s what public policy can do when it’s focused on habit formation instead of triage.

Reaching 18- to 24-year-olds remains the holy grail for American publishers. Lately that work has shifted toward partnering with news influencers and trusted messengers. Those efforts help reach younger and more diverse audiences through voices they already believe. It’s important work. But it’s not the same as access. Europe’s plan is trying to provide both.

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Why America Won’t Touch This

That’s the theory. Let’s talk about reality.

If the United States wanted to build something like this, who would run it? The National Endowment for the Arts? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Some new agency that doesn’t exist yet?

That’s the first problem. The institutions that could have done it are disappearing. CPB is shutting down. The funding is gone. The NEA is under attack from the Trump administration and the Republican-led House and Senate.

The timing almost feels like parody. Europe is building public media infrastructure while we’re dismantling what little we had left. We’re not starting from a weakened position. We’re starting from ashes.

To build something new, you’d need congressional approval, a budget, and a staff. It would take years just to launch a pilot. And that pilot would die before it began. The same political forces that killed CPB would come for this too.

You can already hear the outrage. Government-run media. Taxpayer-funded propaganda. The end of a free press.

The EU proposal tries to guard against that by requiring editorial independence and press council oversight. Now try explaining that to an American audience. Half the country believes the media is biased against them. The other half believes tech companies are silencing them.

The political reality isn’t difficult. It’s impossible.

Republicans are defunding public media. Democrats might like the idea on paper but won’t spend political capital on it. Both sides would weaponize it. “Why is that outlet getting my tax dollars?”

Even if you cleared the politics, the money would sink you. The EU pilot costs €195,000 to start and another €63,000 for each added region. The U.S. has fifty states, hundreds of markets, and a fractured news ecosystem.

Scale that up and it’s a political target every budget cycle. And we’d be starting from zero. No infrastructure. No experience. No appetite for it. Just a funding cliff waiting for an execution.

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The Infrastructure That Built Public Media Won't Save It

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The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

The EU Media Wallet brings an uncomfortable truth into view. Maybe journalism can’t survive as a market product anymore. Maybe it never really did.

Local papers once lived on classifieds and car ads. National outlets survived on scale. The internet wiped out both. Now a few big brands have loyal subscribers, and everyone else is struggling to hang on.

When we shifted from membership to donations, it wasn’t just a strategic adjustment. It was an admission. People weren’t paying for access. They were investing in impact. They gave because they believed in the work. They weren’t buying a product. They were joining a cause.

A funder said something to me recently that I can’t stop thinking about. Maybe not everyone producing news today should survive the next five or ten years. It’s a painful thought. But it might be the right question. If journalism is a public good, who decides what’s worth saving?

The EU proposal takes that idea further. If journalism is a public good, then fund it like one. Build infrastructure. Subsidize access for the people who won’t pay. Make it work through collective investment instead of faith in market forces.

That’s not a conversation we can have in America right now. Maybe not for a long time.

We’re moving the other way. We’re cutting the NEA. We’re closing CPB. We’re dismantling the very institutions that could have made a model like this possible.

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What This Means for American News

I’m not saying the U.S. should copy this plan. We couldn’t even if we tried. The institutions are gone. The political will is gone. The culture isn’t built for it.

But the fact that Europe is even trying says a lot. The dream of paying per article never dies because the problem never goes away. People want to read journalism from multiple places without signing up everywhere. That desire hasn’t changed.

Private companies have tried and failed. Blendle closed. Apple News+ still hasn’t changed the economics. Substack works for individuals but not for institutions.

So what could actually work?

Maybe there isn’t one answer. Investigative journalism needs institutional backing. That might come from owners like Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post or from nonprofits like ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Opinion and analysis can survive on Substack. Breaking news will always be free because someone will post it.

The EU Media Wallet tries to create a middle path. It gives traditional newsrooms a way to earn from casual readers without depending on loyal subscribers. It accepts that government subsidy is part of the solution.

We won’t accept that here. That window closed years ago. And the institutions that might have opened it are closing with it.

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So, Where Does That Leave Us?

Right back where we started. With a problem everyone sees and no solution that works at scale.

The Pew data I wrote about in June hasn’t changed. Ninety-nine percent of people still won’t pay when they hit a paywall. Young audiences are still getting their news from TikTok and Instagram. Local newsrooms are still shrinking or shutting down.

Europe’s plan at least faces reality. We keep pretending the market will figure it out.

The hard truth is that sustainable journalism may require uncomfortable answers. The EU Media Wallet probably won’t work the way they hope. But at least they’re facing the real problem instead of dressing up the old ones.

Europe is trying to rebuild the bridge between journalism and the public. We’re still arguing about whether the river even exists.

So what do you think? Is there a path forward that doesn’t depend on government support? Or are we stuck in a permanent crisis with no way out?

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