Free Press: A corporate benefit that benefits all

I am always excited to offer additional benefits to Adzerk’s employees…but this week I decided to roll-out a more unusual perk, predicated on recent world affairs. I sent the following email out to my team at Adzerk earlier this week:

“I think being informed and supporting a free press are more important now than they have ever been in the past, because of that I am adding a new employee benefit to Adzerk. If you subscribe to a credible news source (and please subscribe for a year to make this easier) Adzerk will reimburse your subscription. I recommend The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, or if you want something with a more conservative leaning I would suggest the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn’t be more than $300/year. Send your receipt to Joanna and she will make sure you are reimbursed on the next available payroll.

‘Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;… whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” — Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:253’”

I would love to see what would happen if this took off in other startups and companies around the world. If thousands of companies offered this and millions of employees subscribed, we could have the press we need and deserve here in America and abroad. Just as I feel it is our responsibility as a company to ensure our employees have health and dental insurance, training, and proper equipment — it is also our responsibility to ensure they are informed and educated.

So I challenge all companies to offer this benefit; for surprisingly little a year you can make a difference for your employees, the free press, the country, and the world.

Postscript

Some people have pointed out the irony of this decision since we are an ad focused company, but we have long believed that ads are not the right model for most news organizations. It creates a negative incentive by prioritizing page views and advertiser friendly content. We believe in making the internet a better place. We work with communities, marketplaces, and commerce companies where we feel advertisers can benefit without creating negative incentives or harming the user experience.