> For a small town you'd need 1000 subscribers at 5k just to make a 60k pretax salary which support 1-2 staff members.

1000 subscribers @ 5k is 5 million dollars. You probably meant $5/month.

Correct, $5/month is the upper bound of what I've seen the more successful hyperlocals pull off (most recently bklynr in Brooklyn)

Honestly, it would be better for these hyperlocal sites to be supported by ads from the local community, both for lack of toxic ads and for the fact that most readers will be in the same community. Now there's a startup idea for you.

Yes, and that's pretty much what I do

>Advertising supports hard journalism, which supports a healthy democracy.

Hard journalism is corrupted by advertising. It leads to corporatocracy and an unhealthy democracy.

Independent media with public funding and a charter to support the public good (e.g. like the BBC used to be run) works better.

Hyperlocal media supports smaller coverage areas where it's not practical to have a publicly funded organization. Even then, you're going to have debates regarding the agenda of the organization.

At a local level advertising generally does not corrupt the journalism. At the local level, it's community oriented where the journalists are genuinely interested in giving a voice to advertisers as well as informing citizens. It's a more positive ecosystem than what you see on the national level.

I've never heard of hyperlocal investigative journalism. Local journalists simply won't have the resources to be able to do it.

At a local level advertising probably doesn't corrupt the journalism simply because there isn't very much of it.

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I serve ads for these types for a living, so I do have a lot of expertise here.

https://inn.org/members/ http://www.lionpublishers.com/members/list/

There are thousands more that are not members - simply professional and entrepreneurial journalists trying to make a living doing what they care about.

My hyperlocal news outlet is “sponsored” by many local businesses. I have always felt there was a conflict of interest created by this sponsorship.

One of the businesses is an auto shop. If that auto shop is doing something like re-using old oil to save money on oil changes or some other shady tactic would the hyperlocal news go after them?

I’ve never seen investigative journalism out of my hyperlocal news, it is all just community news about upcoming events and the like.

I could be mistaken but your links don’t make it clear to me that any of these hyperlocal organizations are doing investigative journalism. My hyperlocal outlet certainly doesn’t.

An ethical journalist will absolutely go after that auto shop. But what you're describing is a political/ethical conflict which can arise any time an organization accepts support money, even from readers.

There are not a lot of hyperlocal investigative news outlets listed there although granted there are some.

The ones that do exist appear to be non-profits relying on donations (e.g. aspenjournalism.org / birminghamwatch.org) that don't run ads and give a strong impression of being run by one or two people.

I'm really unconvinced that this is a significant industry let alone one that is supported by ads.

There are quite a few, and as I mentioned, most of them are not affiliated with any organization. I wouldn't operate a business based on a market that didn't exist. I guess you can choose to believe otherwise though - although I'm not sure why.

If corporate advertising inevitably corrupts journalism to support corporations, then why doesn't Government support inevitably corrupt journalism to support bigger, more centralized, and more intrusive Government?

I've never heard of a corporation run by somebody who wants to make less money.

I've regularly heard elected government representatives argue that their government should be smaller, less centralised and less intrusive.

What exactly made you think these situations were in any way analogous?

Pre-2003 BBC regularly used to hold the government to account because it was explicitly independent and it had a charter that emphasized its responsibility to the public. That kind of set up simply isn't possible if you are advertising funded - the conflict of interest is too great.

    > What exactly made you think these situations 
    > were in any way analogous?

That's so condescending it made me cringe. As if you're scratching your head why someone would be skeptical of state-run media.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of state funded media but the Koch-linked corporate think tank narrative of "big bad bureaucracies" is a pretty facile one.

I'm not really sure what your curious apparent inability to find companies not cartoonishly intent on profits or your acknowledgement of the existence of elected advocates of smaller government has to do with the question.

I'm also not terribly convinced by "holding things to account". I'm sure many news organizations have, and many more have been accused of, criticizing large corporations for specific misdeeds without necessarily questioning the overall capitalist systems that allows them to exist. Likewise, news organizations also can and have criticized specific governmental misdeeds without necessarily advocating that the government should not be involved in specific things at all, or that some specific things should be handled by a more local government versus a national-level one.

The BBC was never better. It’s a media organisation. By virtue of the people in the industry it must have a left wing bias. More importantly, being a bureaucracy that still exists we know that it’s continued existence is its primary aim. The BBC and all the similar organisations in different countries helped define the bounds of polite opinion. Whether that was 30-70 or 40-60 on some hypothetical left-right scale the effect is the same. People outside the Overton window hated the established media, whether the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph or the ostensibly non-partisan BBC. The explosion in television channels and more importantly, the internet led to an information free for all. The Overton window for polite opinion hasn’t shifted much but people are a great deal more aware of the alternate viewpoints and possibilities. The number of people who find the BBC or any other establishment organ both ideologically congenial and politically relevant has undergone a decline that’s irreversible. The information ecology and economy have changed.

There are plenty of media organisations with a right or left wing bias. The Overton window is defined by the audience not the media. Media gets dumped on by both the right or left when they step outside of the safe zone.

Most telling foreign news may seem left leaning when that country views them as right leaning. In other cases the reverse happens because large organizations pander to their audience and/or the government not what foreigners may think.

I'd say there are quite a few issues (foreign policy, for instance) where the cable news networks are more or less in lockstep with each other but not really representative of the general views of Americans.

Or, to give you another example, consider the tremendous amount of opinion column space given to people like David Brooks who represent a tiny proportion of voters -- and then compare it to the total absence of, say, anyone aligned with Sanders (who I think we can pretty safely say is more popular than any of the world's Never-Trump Republicans).

IMO, that's a function of a subset of Organizations. Al jazeera news exists as part of a different spectrum, but they still customize their message for different nations. Brazil's local news has again got it's own very different spin on things.

I mean, yes, media from different countries is different. That's one reason why I go read RT once in a while. But the US is dominated by its own homegrown media.

>The Overton window is defined by the audience not the media.

Corbyn's enduring popularity in spite of initial hostility from every single media establishment would appear to contradict this narrative.

The agenda of each media outlet is clearly set by the owners albeit with market forces sometimes pushing them one way or the other.

Almost, the Overton window is often much wider than individual media companies use. However, your point actually supported my argument as the audience was clearly willing to accept outside the range of existing content.

In the reverse case everyone would ignore Corbyn as people do flat earthers. It's only because he exits within the audiences realm of acceptance that anyone is willing to pay attention.

The Overton window is not purely defined by what the audience thinks. Consider the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or the US during WW2 when freedom of speech was at best a farce. In quasi democratic societies you’re constrained to stay within some distance of the median voter or have any attempt to influence the discourse break down. That’s plenty to influence politics. There’s a lot of difference between +1 and -1 standard deviations from the mean in politics, plenty to sustain the tribalism that’s the driver of most politics. Maybe you need to go up to + or - 2 s.d. to dampen dissent but I doubt you need to go further.

Imagine if the internet didn’t exist. Do you think anyone would have payed attention to the German New Year’s Eve rapes? It’s not like anyone in the media class was going to do it before the cover up was a story in itself.

I mostly agree with your point.

I was defining say Chinsease sensors as part of the audience rather than the news organization as the orignization does not have contowl over them. Much like in the US Fox News/CBS etc gets a list of words it can't say, they can add to that list but not remove from it.

Such as http://www.onlondon.co.uk/ though they raised money through a fund raising platform https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/on-london-co-uk (Edit to add link to fundraising, disclaimer: also I personally know the main jornalist, but not finally connected)

> Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.

Yes. Along with the model of paying people to access information. We should get used to the model of paying people to produce information that we support, even information that we don't consume ourselves. An overtly propagandistic model, rather than the covert propaganda by advertisers/political actors model that we use now.

Seriously: how much of a burden would it be for 500 people to cover a single journalist's salary, and the medium through which they publish? Patreon is a working example; there just need to be better tools, models, and expectations other than conning 2% of internet browsers with deceptive ads as the only thing holding our democracy together.