Yet another plan to save the media with technology

February 05, 2019

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.