Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Read this article in French in Médianes. For much of the 2010s, journalism’s crisis was framed as economic. As social media platforms became gatekeepers of revenue and distribution, newsrooms were told to adapt: repair broken business models, build subscription bases. Financial stability was treated as the only prerequisite for independence. If journalism could sustain itself, it would be safe. But now it is clear that economic independence is not enough. Legal pressure—from lawsuits to the threat of litigation—can impose costs that directly affect the financial stability of news organizations, even when their business models appear sustainable. In the U.S., the dangers of legal pressure on financial stability became most clear with a lawsuit that led to the collapse of Gawker—bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. It demonstrated how litigation could be weaponized to dismantle a newsroom, as we talked about on a recent episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast.…