Junk news and clickbait may be free, but most reliable and credible news is not. Fake news exacts its own costs.

Access to real journalism is not free. There is a need to budget  for being a reasonably informed citizen of the United States. While libraries and occasional internet sites allow free access to good information about politics, medical research and important trends, a person has to work more to track it down. A decent library is the exception, but the desire for convenience means that we tend to curate our own collections of resources, unwittingly settling on sources that monetize their existence by using “news” as bait. “Paid” stories appearing on the fringes of news websites are the most obvious cases of pseudo journalism. The first “sponsored” listings on a Google search are an obvious example.  Some who have paid to have top billing may offer credible information. But their content is usually selling their own products or services.  Ideally, journalism serves the public interest with the best versions of the truth; junk news serves some private interest.

Information has value. Especially in these times we need to consider paying the researchers, authentic journalists and news aggregators who must make a living for their efforts. The last election suggests the cost to the republic when voting is effected by of a ton of paid advertising and misinformation. Elon Musk alone supported the GOP to the tune of nearly $300 million in the last election. That included a brazen public offer to pay for votes for Donald Trump. We know he contributed to a mountain of false claims delivered to people who apparently never bothered to check their veracity.

We pay an electricity provider for light. We should be willing to budget some money to pay for information that will bring hard truths out of the shade.

We need to budget for high-quality news.

A reasonable budget for high quality news and information probably starts at about $200 a month, or $2400 a year. That’s the cost of access to several reliable sources within the information society. Everyone’s interests and resources will vary. The list below is one suggestion of a good mix: not unreasonable for some family budgets, but not all. To be sure, “information” is not a typical item to fold into family expenses. And yet most of us can not function without expensive smart phones, cable access, and an internet platform. It is useful to remember that a chunk of family money goes to costly travel and entertainment, money that may be spent in a shortsighted exchange of the pleasant for the essential.

Here’s one reasonable breakdown of some useful expenses, which will vary somewhat based on a family’s interests.

-Free and worthwhile: Library sources, and digital forms of Wikipedia, The Associated Press, and opinion websites like Vox or Politico. Scholastic for children offers a host of age-graded magazines on a range of national and international topics. Many are available in school libraries.

– A good newspaper, about $35 a week for hard copies . There is a good reason to  have physical a copy of a newspaper sitting on the family breakfast table. A parent can do no better than make “the daily miracle” of a newspaper ready available to their word-thirsty children. Children naturally like the variety of a newspaper. Scrolling a mashup of headlines on their digital devices does not cut it.

–A quality newsmagazine. A hard copy of the weekly The Atlantic is about $80 per year

-Cable access (40 Basic Channels, including some good news sources) about $50 per month.

$2400 a year may seem like an expendable budget item. But not paying to be as informed as you can be comes at a price, including the current rueful state of American national politics.