The death of local journalism is fundamentally a revenue problem. My cofounder and I have been working for the last year to find new revenue streams for newspapers at https://seward.presspass.ai/.
Our current hypothesis is that local rewards programs could be a sustainable revenue stream and give the newspaper a way to prove their advertising works with locals.
While trying this out, we've also helped a few papers get up and running - we're calling it "newspaper in a box". Check out a few of the papers we've helped launch: https://sewardfolly.com/ (9 months old) https://homerindependentpress.com/ (2 weeks old).
In addition to local journalism, cooperatives are another way democracy can show up close to home. Combining the two, I believe 404Media.co is effectively a journalist-owned outlet (i.e. a worker coop).
The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
This has _always_ been true, but for generations classified ad revenue neatly subsidized it. Once the internet came along and blew up that revenue stream, the industry was in trouble.
I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. Everyone will go on the internet and talk about how valuable people sitting in city council meetings is, but not enough people want to pay the monthly bill to enable that.
Disagree. Where I live there is a local news website that is mostly one guy, who attends city and county meetings, summarizes issues discussed and decisions made, analyzes the data that local government provides under various "transparency" initiatives---all stuff that our local newspaper no longer covers. I pay a monthly subscription (which isn't even required to read) because I believe that local news is the most important news. Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint, and it's easy to stay informed on those events through a variety of sources. But there's very little coverage of the stuff that does affect me: decisions of local government, boards and commissions, stuff that directly affects the taxes I pay and the community I live in.
You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.
I stopped subscribing to our local traditional newspaper because it's nothing but lightweight feature stories, local sports, and reprints of news from USA Today.
I think what you have there is cool, but I question if it would be sustainable.
In a market where "mostly one guy" can cover the beat that might work for awhile, with all the caveats that come from depending on an individual, versus an organization, to do a job.
In a larger market, where multiple people would be needed to cover the worload, I'm not so sure the funding model would work. I can imagine the subscription fees not keeping up with the step function of adding people to the organization. (You need that 3rd reporter to drive subscription revenue by expanding coverage, but current subscription revenue doesn't support it, so you can't add them.)
Maybe that's the answer, hope your town gets one or two good journalists who can live off the pool of people who do care. Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, etc.
I do wish there was a more systematic market for it though, it's crazy how much value a few reporters can provide just by providing the check on power of asking basic questions to those in power.
I do agree that local policies are important, but I'm wary of "Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint."
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
If something happens in the US or the middle east I'll find out about it - because so many other people need to know the same it isn't hard to find enough people to pay for it.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.
> Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint
The federal government decides the limits within which your local government must operate. A good chunk of your taxes go to wars in the middle east, and a good deal of the politicians in that federal government self-professedly care more about a middle-eastern country than the one they were elected to represent [1].
To rephrase a saying - you may not care about federal politics, but federal politics cares about you.
[1] "if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel." - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I
The problem as with many things is that people just don't care and they just want things as cheap as possible. Even if people had a great local journal, there's no real reason to pay well for it when you can just figure things out a day later on facebook. Quality can go down without most people noticing because lots of people couldn't tell apart good reporting from bad , a good portion would have to put in effort to do so and an even smaller portion would immediately notice. Less incentive to go into local journalism if you're bright as well, dying field with little chance to go 'up'.
Another reason I'm pissed my taxes aren't going to PBS/CPB anymore, and am praying they can still fund some local stations with new direct donation. Lots of communities depend on it.
You are 100% right. However, I personally think it is worse than that. Let's just say that local papers found some new feature (no idea what) that could fund local journalism. Do we think the money would be spent to create great journalism or would the money just be taken as profit by posting social media snippets as "news"? I fear that in this post truth world that we don't even have enough people that value the creation of journalism. Most just want to score internet points and get online ad revenue from talking nonsense on their daily podcast. And we've seen that sowing dissent is far far more profitable than creating journalism.
I work adjacent to an online publication business and freelancers are getting ~$750 for a 1500 word article. I don't know how you get actual journalism at that price. Increasingly we're just going to get people dropping concepts into GPT and editing whatever comes back for 30 minutes. I fear that the only way out would be a single one of the dozens of billionaires to step up and donate a self-sustaining grant towards long term journalism excellence. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have shown that they don't care about the world and just want to make their number go up at any cost necessary.
It’s not flawless but public funding for journalism is about the only answer here, I think. In the UK the BBC offers newscasts for different regions of the country… while they don’t exactly do a ton of hard hitting journalism they could if the money was spent more wisely.
Not sure I agree about this, in the UK we have some excellent examples of independent local journalism, for example the Bristol Cable that is funded by readers.
People's satisfaction with the internet is on the decline lately, for a variety of reasons. Maybe it'll cross a threshold where opting into a local-only net would be worth doing for enough people.
> "I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this."
The democratization of local journalism, where anyone can become a reporter: reporting events in the field, interviewing key people, and publishing opinions. With the internet, anyone could set up their own news outlet.
This idea is quite well-tested in my local area, where audiences directly send donation money to individual reporters who run their own sole-proprietorship news outlets.
> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
Media are the fourth estate. As such they are indispensable in a democratic state based on the rule of law.
How to kill it:
1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a.
2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment
> I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this.
I am not sure if it is still possible to mention public broadcasting because of dominant narratives ("public service bad, billionaire company good")¹, but left alone they will do a very good job usually.
I fear that in the last decade, even the PBSs of the world have pulled back. They still create content but they have been very loathe to come out against any interest that the billionaire philanthropists might object to.
woof, that article. The examples section doesn't contain a single concrete example and after reading the whole thing I can't tell whether they're talking about academics publishing news articles or congress' revolving door. Wikipedia has been struggling lately. Maybe that's what they're talking about.
For-profit businesses tend to get bloated and eventually succumb to their own growth, one way or another.
Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).
Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.
The only reliable funding sources then seem to be local car dealerships and lawyers who want puff pieces / ads about themselves. I think we need to acknowledge that communities producing news about their region is a public good and thus should be funded with taxes.
> How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area?
3-4 people easily, probably closer to 5-6 in reality. Minimum salary in my country is around 1200 EUR/month, but we also have free health care for everyone and other anti-democratic things.
I do feel like there's a turn happening in the economy, or at least, some new scene growing. Or maybe I'm just finally becoming aware of it. That being, rejection of monopolized products.
I've never seen so much activity around Linux, for example. Or, I follow a content creator called SkillUp who just launched a videogames news site with revenue purely from subscriptions, and apparently they got way more subs than they expected. And as has been mentioned, lots of indie games have been getting funding lately, and a relatively small studio just crushed the game awards circuit.
Modern-day patronage is kind of different from a subscription. It's a lot like a "pay what you want" subscription model, but people seem a lot more generous when you express it as a "donation with early access to premium articles" rather than payment for goods and services.
Yeah, as long as you remove the "for-profit" part, it's essentially that. Once it's a for-profit business, it perverses the incentives, and it'll be a race to the bottom or a race to see what subscribers can survive the highest prices, which is exactly what we wanna avoid :)
Non-profits don't really stop any of that. Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money, and use the non-profit status to pay employees less.
> Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money
Where is this specifically, in the US? Usually the laws of the country prevent this, since they're you know... Non-profits... But wouldn't surprise me there are a few leftover countries who refuse to join the modern world.
The US has this problem. There aren't really rules on paying executives as much as you want, or having bonus structures based on fundraising, as long as the board okays it and considers it as contributing to the mission. It is non-profit because it doesn't pay out profits to investors. This is a large way corruption happens in the US, ie a lot of those "X politician foundations" pay modest amounts of money to some cause, but a large percentage of the donations go to the executive as a salary for running the corp, the executive is the politician. Its a big shell game.
Maybe there's a third way. What about a company owned by a "perpetual purpose trust" - i.e. a trust with a defined purpose that is legally binding. It's the only shareholder, so no extracting value and all profits have to comply with the trust's bylaws in how they are used. Patagonia (US company) is one example of this; it's profits are legally bound to go toward environmental causes.
Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).
>? how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?
Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media? Plenty of examples out there in the world where those currently in power can't just cut funding to major institutions, I think that's the norm rather than the exception in fact.
The same argument applies to ad-sponsored media too. In fact, have you noticed that it was a very long time since a major paper did an exposé of the very sleazy online casino business? I wonder why.
That's a radical idea! Unfortunately, it gives a lot of ammo to the "anti-socialist" people who are vehemently against anything "public" funded by tax payers. Look at what's happening in the Nordics for example, where pretty much everyone supported public radio/TV at least when I was growing up, but nowadays a bunch of political parties are trying to have it removed/reduced.
Nordic public broadcasting is some of the lowest quality news media you can find. They're not a good example, unless the job of public service media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost (you know which ones).
Edit: Just an example. The funniest thing they've been doing regularly for decades now is when they go out on the streets with a camera to ask random strangers - the common man - about what they think about some recent development, like "What do you think about Trump?".
But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
> Nordic public broadcasting is some of the lowest quality news media you can find.
Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?
> media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost
I've seen news on Swedish public media that disparages all sides of the political spectrum, exactly what I expect from public media not taking sides.
> But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
> Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?
Even compared to non-government funded media in their own countries, just to start with. Or public broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC or PBS.
As for Swedish public media not taking sides, that is like saying Fox News doesn't take sides and isn't aligned with the Republican party. If you can convince yourself to believe that Swedish public media isn't politically aligned, then congratulations.
> Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
How do you not understand? When interviewing the "common man" out on the streets, you should do that, and not interview somebody who is a high level party functionary without telling people you are doing that.
That's like Fox News interviewing "random strangers" on the streets, but it turns out to be JD Vance in a wig.
I never understood why the journalism industry didn't go the way of wikipedia.
Britannica was the shining example of capitalism, being sold door to door. Encarta was done by Microsoft. Both got disrupted real quick by a million people making little edits to an open encyclopedia. An open-source gift economy with many contributors seems to beat capitalistic systems. Linux. Wordpress. MySQL. In general, science / wikipedia / open source projects also feature peer review before publishing, a desirable trait.
Everyone has a cellphone. It's not like we need professional cameras to capture things. What we really need is a place to post clips and discuss them in a way that features peer review. It would be better and strictly healthier than the current for-profit large corporations like Meta or X. That's one of the projects I'm building using our technology. Anyone interested, email me (email in my profile)
I think you're right to a point, but that "a place to post clips and discuss them" isn't enough. The world is filled with clips that are essentially meaningless or taken out of context to say something different. In addition to aggregation and discussion, research and investigation is required in order to get the story behind the clip.
The most dedicated Wikipedians in specific domains often tend to be academics in that space and whose day jobs tend to be adjacent to the niche they edit.
It's difficult to find the equivalent for local government, because the most knowledgable are already active, in the loop, and in the same circles so social ostracism is a real risk that they might be viewed as airing dirty laundry.
The number of people in a Chamber of Commerce, PTA, City Council, School Board, Rotary Club, local Library Foundation, Church Board, Teachers Union leadership, City Workers Union leadership, Police Union leadership, and a couple family offices may number in the 50-100 range, so no one is anonymous.
And finally, most local news groups are now owned by the 3rd generation of that family, and most of them have either already or are in the process of getting out of the local news business.
The reality is, if you want to make an impact in your local community (especially politically) you will have to build local relationships and become extremely active in existing cliques - playing golf at the private golf club, attending church or temple, becoming a member of the rotary club, contributing to library foundation fundraisers, become a junior member of the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
Finally, your pitch is the exact same one NextDoor back when they were a much smaller startup. Look at how that turned out. Making a Wikipedia type organization in 2026 would be nigh impossible given how decentralized the Internet has become, and how it isn't a niche platform anymore.
I once interviewed for a tech job at the Seattle times. I didn't land the job, but the interview was enlightening. I was told that the investigative reporters at the newspaper did all of the "work" of uncovering news. Subsequently, the TV broadcast station would just report on what the newspaper found. Meanwhile, the broadcast news was raking in tons more ad revenue than the newspaper.
Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.
I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.
Yeah thats interesting. I wonder what a solution would look like for this. Would legislating a 'finders fee' be the right approach for whoever news source was breaking the topic?
So the big issue with the entire business model of journalism is it's just too easy to buy influence.
Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
For more or less a nominal amount of money to him He's able to shape much of our public discourse.
I suspect a volunteer non profit news organization could emerge. But even then, how many skilled journalists are going to be able to work a "real" job too.
> volunteer non profit news organization [...] skilled journalists
This could maybe be done with retirees or those who are mostly financially independent, as well as those who want to help run the nonprofit.
The problem is that in the current climate, it is harder both to retire and to become financially independent.
If you want the labor of skilled journalists beyond a trickle of content from the ivory tower type, you either need to set up an intentional community or simply pay people enough to live on. I don't see any clear shortcuts. Quality output requires sufficient energy inputs.
Rightmove, the property sales website, absolutely destroyed local journalism in the UK. It was written on the wall, but local newspapers had all the local listings for property and other services. A local newspaper was 60%+ of house sales, but that advertising revenue paid for local journalists to sit and read council papers and attend meetings and get people out in the community. Nowadays, local journalism, even from national broadcasters like the BBC is a shadow of its former glory.
It’s interesting that property ads, and classifieds more broadly, benefit from a centralized platform but journalism itself does not. It’s an uneven impact of the technology shift from printing presses to digital. Why didn’t the drop in publishing costs make local journalism MORE accessible?
Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.
Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.
Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.
The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?
Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.
Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.
You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
What you're describing is a lot like NPR. Which was great, until the people in power decided to pull that funding.
The problem with the government is it doesn't like oversight. So in this situation, you need to devise a scheme where the government is forced to pay something, but also has no control over that money. Which is a hard problem.
This article should be at the core of any discussion about media concentration. The vast consolidation of radio stations is well known, but the same thing has been happening to small local newspapers. In both cases, you end up with a voice speaking to the public from afar, not local people talking to your community about issues that are important to your neighbors.
At that point, most people just go to the gossip corner of social media and spend the rest of their day being fed six hours of outrage.
In my local, extremely progressive community, Facebook Groups are about 20x more important to democracy than local journalism, which residents genuflect to but provides less value than a replacement-level blog. I love journalism and stick up for it here all the time, but this platitude about local journalism has never rung true to me.
This is why I subscribe to my local city and regional newspapers. Similar to emailing my representatives about political issues that are of interest to me. It isn't much and I'm just a drop in the ocean but at least it is more than complaining into a void or just reading other's complaints online and getting depressed.
For more local issues I can really feel like I am making a difference. We have sidewalks all the way to my kids' school and a crosswalk now a year after I made it my cause and messaged city planners and councilmen.
Block Communications just closed two papers in Pittsburgh this year. The Post Gazette has been around since 1786. There are fewer and fewer[1] options available and I suspect this is a disturbing trend across many locations.
It's rare to find local newspapers owned locally, and even rarer to find a local newspaper that's a fair representation of the local population instead of an insulated clique with heavy handed control over what's represented.
Local online forums dedicated to a locality produce more representative content and everyone can participate as long as their isn't a similar controlling clique in charge of moderation. See /r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA for how moderation manipulates outcomes. Both perspectives are important, but each clique tends to omit what others deem important; leading to topic over-representation/under-representation problems.
There's clearly a loss on long forum informational pieces, but your community is misinformed or misrepresented if those pieces only support the motives of the clique.
Seattle actually happens to have some absolutely great examples of local journalism as well as some extremely bad examples of corporate owned "news" factories.
https://westseattleblog.com/ is run by a single person (formerly a husband and wife team) and she attends huge numbers of local events and city meetings providing hyper-local coverage on things that are happening in the area.
This is a topic close to my heart and I've been working with a small team on a solution for a few years and its finally launching into beta now. Hope it works out. If not, back to the drawing board!
Local journalism is important but I am not really sure how to fix it. Lets say we make a big fund to pay for "independent journalism" at the local level. That only works for so long until people get inside with their own axe to grind and take control. The activist class will eventually get in, become managers and corrupt the organization if its a non-profit. If its a political organization it will have political pressures. If it is a for profit it will have financial incentives that probably cant survive in the modern day in small markets.
a geofenced, location verified X-type product would be a good way to bring back local journalism. Users can read, but only have write access if they are within a specific geofence. This would diffuse 'reporting' across the local community - we would have actual citizen reporters which Musk pretends is the case on X - and increase trust that what is happening is actually happening. Tried to build this a decade ago but tech wasn't there. Maybe time has come now?
I think we can safely the problem isn't lack of information at the local or national level. The problem is nobody is taking action on it when informed. It takes only 1 person to report a problem but the responsibility to take action is swallowed by the void, noise and we the people are helpless.
In my experience, local reporting has stagnated so badly that they now survive by kissing up to whoever is in power. The majority of pieces are puff pieces commissioned by the subject or friend of the subject, be it a school superintendent or local town council or what have you.
And yes, the bias is heavily to the left. I am very centrist in my views so a left or right leaning bias would be upsetting.
We live across the river from Bucks County PA in NJ, Bucks County journalism and the NJ equivalent are just shills.
Local journalism has always been like this even before the "death" of local journalism. No local publisher would dare risk access to local politicans nor risk public ad revenue.
This is also why I'm not convinced about public owned or funded journalism that isn't a cooperative, because that only gives additional power to the incumbent who holds the purse strings.
Centralisation generally leads to efficiency, but when pushed to far it will corrode core human values.
Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.
As someone who lives in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania that Stu Faigen calls home, I say that half of the county, which is about 325,000 people, should agree but will disagree because of how strident his politics generally are in favor of politicians and causes from one side of the aisle.
I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.
You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.
If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?
This breaks down when one half of a two party system goes all-in on lying.
Reality has a left wing bias because reality is fact-based.
To take a "neutral" political position in this environment is to accept blatant lies. Journalism should be a pursuit of truthful information, thus being "neutral' politically is untenable if you want to do actual journalism.
It's true that might not always be the best for your subscriber numbers. But some folks do, actually, care about the truth.
I don't think the OP is saying he has an issue with the reporting of facts. I think what he's getting at is that a lot of what passes for news today (especially online) are really just op-eds.
Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.
Local journalism has an incentive to serve its audience as they are easily held accountable as such. These media conglomerates do not. They can just shut something down without a care when they disagree with a population and publish unpopular slop (crime news, engagement bait, whatever), and it's suddenly unprofitable.
Did anyone read the article? This is obvious AI Slop. A million em dashes and tons of other chatgpt-isms are all over. This isn't journalism - it's nonsense.
This is a "reader" submitted article and not written by the staff at the paper. I'm surprised they didn't give it more due diligence though.
Democracy is quite literally "allowed to put up political posters" and "making your voice heard in public", if that's not a part of democracy, what exactly does "democracy" mean to you? Maybe that's easier to talk about, rather than what you think democracy is not.
> democracy is not displaying insulting posters or shouting like mad in the streets
The supreme court disagrees
> The Court recognized that "uninhibited, robust, and wide open" political debate can at times be characterized by "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."
For all that it's worth, from the outside it looks to have undergone a real, notable improvement. The feeling is exacerbated by the dumpster fire at bluesky insisting that it was the worst thing ever and because after the fact, about every default subreddit (which already were in a bad state) are now terminal with politics brainrot.
Our current hypothesis is that local rewards programs could be a sustainable revenue stream and give the newspaper a way to prove their advertising works with locals.
While trying this out, we've also helped a few papers get up and running - we're calling it "newspaper in a box". Check out a few of the papers we've helped launch: https://sewardfolly.com/ (9 months old) https://homerindependentpress.com/ (2 weeks old).
This has _always_ been true, but for generations classified ad revenue neatly subsidized it. Once the internet came along and blew up that revenue stream, the industry was in trouble.
I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. Everyone will go on the internet and talk about how valuable people sitting in city council meetings is, but not enough people want to pay the monthly bill to enable that.
You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.
I stopped subscribing to our local traditional newspaper because it's nothing but lightweight feature stories, local sports, and reprints of news from USA Today.
In a market where "mostly one guy" can cover the beat that might work for awhile, with all the caveats that come from depending on an individual, versus an organization, to do a job.
In a larger market, where multiple people would be needed to cover the worload, I'm not so sure the funding model would work. I can imagine the subscription fees not keeping up with the step function of adding people to the organization. (You need that 3rd reporter to drive subscription revenue by expanding coverage, but current subscription revenue doesn't support it, so you can't add them.)
Maybe that's the answer, hope your town gets one or two good journalists who can live off the pool of people who do care. Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, etc.
I do wish there was a more systematic market for it though, it's crazy how much value a few reporters can provide just by providing the check on power of asking basic questions to those in power.
Reporting does have some dangers.
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.
Article about it: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/this-local-newsletter-cove...
40%+ conversion rate on substack.
The federal government decides the limits within which your local government must operate. A good chunk of your taxes go to wars in the middle east, and a good deal of the politicians in that federal government self-professedly care more about a middle-eastern country than the one they were elected to represent [1].
To rephrase a saying - you may not care about federal politics, but federal politics cares about you.
[1] "if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel." - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I
I work adjacent to an online publication business and freelancers are getting ~$750 for a 1500 word article. I don't know how you get actual journalism at that price. Increasingly we're just going to get people dropping concepts into GPT and editing whatever comes back for 30 minutes. I fear that the only way out would be a single one of the dozens of billionaires to step up and donate a self-sustaining grant towards long term journalism excellence. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have shown that they don't care about the world and just want to make their number go up at any cost necessary.
"Everything needs to be a business model." Maybe the future generations will be more advanced.
The democratization of local journalism, where anyone can become a reporter: reporting events in the field, interviewing key people, and publishing opinions. With the internet, anyone could set up their own news outlet.
This idea is quite well-tested in my local area, where audiences directly send donation money to individual reporters who run their own sole-proprietorship news outlets.
How to kill it:
1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a.
2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment
I am not sure if it is still possible to mention public broadcasting because of dominant narratives ("public service bad, billionaire company good")¹, but left alone they will do a very good job usually.1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).
Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.
Maybe an incredibly lean organization could make it with 150,000 EUR? All digital, 3-4 really devoted employees.
3-4 people easily, probably closer to 5-6 in reality. Minimum salary in my country is around 1200 EUR/month, but we also have free health care for everyone and other anti-democratic things.
I do feel like there's a turn happening in the economy, or at least, some new scene growing. Or maybe I'm just finally becoming aware of it. That being, rejection of monopolized products.
I've never seen so much activity around Linux, for example. Or, I follow a content creator called SkillUp who just launched a videogames news site with revenue purely from subscriptions, and apparently they got way more subs than they expected. And as has been mentioned, lots of indie games have been getting funding lately, and a relatively small studio just crushed the game awards circuit.
Examples I know of in Canada include:
- NB Media Coop: https://nbmediacoop.org/
- Pivot: https://pivot.quebec/
Also, here's a game dev co-op from Montreal that has been around since 2012 as a bonus: https://ko-opmode.com/
Where is this specifically, in the US? Usually the laws of the country prevent this, since they're you know... Non-profits... But wouldn't surprise me there are a few leftover countries who refuse to join the modern world.
Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?
Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media? Plenty of examples out there in the world where those currently in power can't just cut funding to major institutions, I think that's the norm rather than the exception in fact.
Edit: Just an example. The funniest thing they've been doing regularly for decades now is when they go out on the streets with a camera to ask random strangers - the common man - about what they think about some recent development, like "What do you think about Trump?".
But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?
> media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost
I've seen news on Swedish public media that disparages all sides of the political spectrum, exactly what I expect from public media not taking sides.
> But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
Even compared to non-government funded media in their own countries, just to start with. Or public broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC or PBS.
As for Swedish public media not taking sides, that is like saying Fox News doesn't take sides and isn't aligned with the Republican party. If you can convince yourself to believe that Swedish public media isn't politically aligned, then congratulations.
> Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
How do you not understand? When interviewing the "common man" out on the streets, you should do that, and not interview somebody who is a high level party functionary without telling people you are doing that.
That's like Fox News interviewing "random strangers" on the streets, but it turns out to be JD Vance in a wig.
Britannica was the shining example of capitalism, being sold door to door. Encarta was done by Microsoft. Both got disrupted real quick by a million people making little edits to an open encyclopedia. An open-source gift economy with many contributors seems to beat capitalistic systems. Linux. Wordpress. MySQL. In general, science / wikipedia / open source projects also feature peer review before publishing, a desirable trait.
Everyone has a cellphone. It's not like we need professional cameras to capture things. What we really need is a place to post clips and discuss them in a way that features peer review. It would be better and strictly healthier than the current for-profit large corporations like Meta or X. That's one of the projects I'm building using our technology. Anyone interested, email me (email in my profile)
Compare:
1. https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
The most dedicated Wikipedians in specific domains often tend to be academics in that space and whose day jobs tend to be adjacent to the niche they edit.
It's difficult to find the equivalent for local government, because the most knowledgable are already active, in the loop, and in the same circles so social ostracism is a real risk that they might be viewed as airing dirty laundry.
The number of people in a Chamber of Commerce, PTA, City Council, School Board, Rotary Club, local Library Foundation, Church Board, Teachers Union leadership, City Workers Union leadership, Police Union leadership, and a couple family offices may number in the 50-100 range, so no one is anonymous.
And finally, most local news groups are now owned by the 3rd generation of that family, and most of them have either already or are in the process of getting out of the local news business.
The reality is, if you want to make an impact in your local community (especially politically) you will have to build local relationships and become extremely active in existing cliques - playing golf at the private golf club, attending church or temple, becoming a member of the rotary club, contributing to library foundation fundraisers, become a junior member of the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
Finally, your pitch is the exact same one NextDoor back when they were a much smaller startup. Look at how that turned out. Making a Wikipedia type organization in 2026 would be nigh impossible given how decentralized the Internet has become, and how it isn't a niche platform anymore.
Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.
I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.
Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
For more or less a nominal amount of money to him He's able to shape much of our public discourse.
I suspect a volunteer non profit news organization could emerge. But even then, how many skilled journalists are going to be able to work a "real" job too.
This could maybe be done with retirees or those who are mostly financially independent, as well as those who want to help run the nonprofit.
The problem is that in the current climate, it is harder both to retire and to become financially independent.
If you want the labor of skilled journalists beyond a trickle of content from the ivory tower type, you either need to set up an intentional community or simply pay people enough to live on. I don't see any clear shortcuts. Quality output requires sufficient energy inputs.
I love Rightmove as a shopper, but it's 2nd-4th order effects have been disastrous.
There have been attempts to unseat Rightmove (e.g. boomin) but it's such a behemoth in it's industry that is tantamount to wanting to unseat Google.
Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.
Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.
Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.
The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?
Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.
Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.
You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
The problem with the government is it doesn't like oversight. So in this situation, you need to devise a scheme where the government is forced to pay something, but also has no control over that money. Which is a hard problem.
At that point, most people just go to the gossip corner of social media and spend the rest of their day being fed six hours of outrage.
For more local issues I can really feel like I am making a difference. We have sidewalks all the way to my kids' school and a crosswalk now a year after I made it my cause and messaged city planners and councilmen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Newspapers_published_...
Local online forums dedicated to a locality produce more representative content and everyone can participate as long as their isn't a similar controlling clique in charge of moderation. See /r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA for how moderation manipulates outcomes. Both perspectives are important, but each clique tends to omit what others deem important; leading to topic over-representation/under-representation problems.
There's clearly a loss on long forum informational pieces, but your community is misinformed or misrepresented if those pieces only support the motives of the clique.
https://westseattleblog.com/ is run by a single person (formerly a husband and wife team) and she attends huge numbers of local events and city meetings providing hyper-local coverage on things that are happening in the area.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301
And yes, the bias is heavily to the left. I am very centrist in my views so a left or right leaning bias would be upsetting.
We live across the river from Bucks County PA in NJ, Bucks County journalism and the NJ equivalent are just shills.
This is also why I'm not convinced about public owned or funded journalism that isn't a cooperative, because that only gives additional power to the incumbent who holds the purse strings.
Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.
I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.
You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.
If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?
Reality has a left wing bias because reality is fact-based.
To take a "neutral" political position in this environment is to accept blatant lies. Journalism should be a pursuit of truthful information, thus being "neutral' politically is untenable if you want to do actual journalism.
It's true that might not always be the best for your subscriber numbers. But some folks do, actually, care about the truth.
Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.
This is a "reader" submitted article and not written by the staff at the paper. I'm surprised they didn't give it more due diligence though.
The supreme court disagrees
> The Court recognized that "uninhibited, robust, and wide open" political debate can at times be characterized by "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat