In the last week alone, digital media outlets have laid off hundreds of people. The publishers of USA Today are fighting off a takeover attempt. The Washington Post ran a Super Bowl ad about how important journalism is. But subscriptions don’t make enough money and ads are annoying, data-sucking and don’t even work most of the time. Enter tech. Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of the payments and processing giant Square. He’s got a startup called Invisibly that’s part micro-payments where you pay for individual articles and part ad tech where you, the reader, can earn free articles by trading more data. Choose to pay for no ads at all or strike a balance somewhere in the middle. McKelvey told Molly Wood the whole point is control. Today’s show is sponsored by Avery Publishing, Kronos  and Lenovo for Small Business.

The United States and several other countries have made it clear that they don’t want hardware from Chinese telecom giant Huawei to be part of future fifth-generation wireless networks. They’re worried that Huawei could install back doors in a 5G network that could let the Chinese government, companies or hackers spy on information crossing that network. But no matter who is building a 5G network, there will be cybersecurity threats. So who’s in charge of making sure that protection against hacking, spying or other cyberthreats is built in from the ground up? Molly Wood talks with Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017. He’s now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He says the government should be in charge. Today’s show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

Apple released its earnings Tuesday afternoon, and although it met its lowered expectations, revenue from iPhones was down 15 percent over the same quarter last year, and the future trend is still down. For years, Apple’s smartphone strategy has been to make premium devices with a premium price tag. The starting price is basically $1,000 for a new flagship iPhone. But those prices are hard to swallow in China and India, markets Apple is depending on to grow its global market share. Even here in the United States, consumers aren’t upgrading their phones as much as they used to. Molly Wood talks with Julie Ask, principal analyst at Forrester Research, about whether Apple can keep commanding such high prices. Today’s show is sponsored by Kronos, the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Lenovo for Small Business.

One of the major challenges of using renewable energy like wind or solar is that there’s overproduction. The sun shines and the wind blows mostly during the day but then drops off at night — when people tend to use the most power. Batteries can help smooth out those peaks and valleys, but cost has limited wider adoption. Now battery storage is maturing as an industry. So what does that mean for regular people? Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks with Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, who says the tech is getting to houses through transmission lines, maybe even yours. Today’s show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and WellFrame.

Social media was invented to keep up with friends, but if you’re fed up with data leaks and privacy concerns, you might decide to quit. It turns out social media may not even need you to know you, because your friends and their posts are pretty good indicators of who you are. In a new study, scientists took to Twitter and found people who interacted regularly. By analyzing the tweets of just eight or nine of a user’s friends, they could predict the kinds of things the original user would post. Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks with Jim Bagrow, a professor at the University of Vermont who led the study. Today’s show is sponsored by the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Triple Byte.