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 workload, 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.)

> 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.

This is something that - for whatever reason - takes a surprising amount of time for ppl to understand.

I think this is great, and I'm glad to hear that there are people out there doing this kind of work.

The main thing you need to watch out for in this kind of situation is corruption of the news filtering process on the local level. It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom. Editors are helpful for vetting sources, providing guidance on how to follow up on leads, etc.

>It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom.

Except the problem in the US now is that newspapers are owned by corporations that own a bunch of newspapers, or very rich individuals/families - and a single individual can dictate what an entire newsroom says.

I don't see much of a difference when it comes to corruptibility.

parent poster is saying a healthy newsroom is much better than one guy. You're disagreeing by saying one guy is not better than an unhealthy newsroom.

if, there are healthy newsrooms

I don't want to nitpick, but they didn't say "healthy", and I think the current situation wrt news ownership should be called out at every opportunity, because not everyone is aware of it.

The problem with "one guy" is the potentially high standard deviation. The one guy can potentially be a careerist good old boy club protecting special interest facilitating jerk in the same way that any of the dozens of the barely accountable bureaucrats in your town can be.

I'd still prefer that "one guy" if the alternative is nothing. My Ontario town has a similar character. Lord knows he has his biases, but frequently the alternative to a loud curmudgeon is just no accountability at all.

Accountability to whom and on what axis? My city's apparent "we're poor AF and can't in good conscience say yes to any boondoggle expenditure or no to anyone who wants to invest anything" soft policy is a Karen's nightmare.

In this case, I meant accountability to the municipal tax payer.

Most people just don't have the time or motivation to read town council notes or attend meetings, just having one person in town who's willing to bring these topics to the public square (Facebook, usually) is often a net positive.

Totally agree though, this mechanism is far from foolproof.

If one guy can make it, then another guy could probably too. That's how cities used to have sometimes 3 or 4 competing papers.

My town as two newspapers and two TV new stations. They employ more than a dozen journalists, including an old friend of mine.

If you want any actual important news, you go to Facebook and make sure that you’re following the right people and you’re in the right groups, because that’s where the news about local governance and politics actually comes out. The papers and TV stations almost always run bland human interest stories, business propaganda, press release reprints, a huge selection of national and sports news, etc. After a few months or sometimes years if a local story has become big enough, they’ll deign to cover it, usually without crediting the people who actually broke the story to everyone paying attention.

I think that's great!

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.

>Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, piss off the wrong person, etc.

Reporting does have some dangers.

I believe it's important for you to show up at the meetings too, not outsource political action like you do sewing of your clothes.

Consistent displays of comity would go a long way to kowtowing the politisphere.

How is that disagreement with what they are saying?

I disagree that there is not enough value in local journalism that people are willing to pay for it. I used to pay for my local paper, I stopped when they stopped doing local reporting. Now I pay another guy who is doing that.

There may be a question as to whether enough people will do this to make it sustainable, but so far it's working at least in this case.

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.

My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board primaries. This experience has given me insight you would never get on national news but lots of people blindly argue about: voter ID requirements, how provisional ballots work, why higher-population counties take longer to report results on election night, what election night "calls" actually mean, entirely mundane failure modes that can slow down the line, etc.

You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.

The roots of the current situation in US politics, arose from concerted actions taken at local levels.

Basically everything the feds do winds up getting implemented state or locally in a backhanded national drinking age sort of way.

When you get into the minutia of policy changes and "yeah we'll just enforce what the feds say and let the official rules be wrong until someone sues" type behavior that comes about as a result it'll have you shopping for bulldozers on FBMP.

We have this also. https://coppellchronicle.substack.com/

Article about it: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/this-local-newsletter-cove...

40%+ conversion rate on substack.

> 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

Where I live we have like 6 people doing that, and they all post summaries on Facebook for free.

That sounds neat, but I wonder how they pay their bills.

I guess it depends on the depth of analysis and quantity of reporting. It's one thing to write a summary of the school board or town council meeting. That probably isn't a full time job. If there's more detailed reporting, fact checking, etc, involved I begin to worry about the implicit bias that creeps in when only certain people can afford to do it.

They have day jobs or are retired. We have a local newspaper, which we performatively fundraise for (it's doing fine), and it staffs full-time reporters; the people doing it for free out of interest, on Facebook, crush them newspaper.

> The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

I find this approach superficial and dangerous.

Maybe local journalism has been superseded or looks like not important to the locals. The lack of local journalism IMO will end up costing a lot more to any community in the long run for obvious reasons.

I think the nuance is that is doesn't produce what it's worth - it's that it's value to society is more than what people are willing to pay for it (and also more than what it costs to produce).

Of course there will be exceptions to the rule, but these dynamics seem pretty strong.

Absolutely.

And as someone who’s seen some condo boards, I can tell you that when presented with “we all need to pay a small amount of money now to avoid a big bill later” the response will generally be “no way!”

It’s a tragedy of the commons issue, mixed with people who don’t agree on the value of it in the first place.

Sure, but the community has to somehow decide to pay the people doing that good thing. There are a lot of projects that would likely be a net benefit not being paid for.

Externalities, coordination failure...

It's simultaneously worth vastly more to the community as a whole than the cost of producing it, and yet, to any single individual, the marginal benefit of having it is not enough to justify paying for it.

The naïve solution might be to collectively subsidize it, but then that creates its own moral hazards and perverse incentives.

...It's a bit scary how much of democracy relies on institutions that were only able to form because we lucked into social conditions making them sustainable.

There probably is sufficient demand to pay for it, the issue is that there is no mechanism for orchestrating such funding while remaining uncompromised. If you split out the cost of salary for 1 or 2 people, you'd likely end up with individual citizens paying pennies to have people sit in and provide this information. If you look up the average population of a small city, where such an operation would be the least efficient, its about 50,000 to 100,000 people. That would pan out to maybe a dollar per year to cover the salary - I don't think many people would be opposed to that if they actually trusted it and the money was allocated efficiently.

However, there is no way to actually get that payment consistently. It would have to become a government subsidized operation in order to actually extract that payment at a consistent distribution, at which point a huge conflict of interest is introduced, and faith is lost in the independence of such individuals. As soon as this becomes a government apparatus, costs grow heavily to account for administrative overhead, and there becomes heavy incentives to provide more favorable coverage to political figures who are responsible for budgets.

The answer is never to have government pay, obviously it then becomes biased as you point it.

If it doesn't justify a human salary then the right answer is usually to eliminate the need for a full salary with tech. Current LLM models do a sufficiently good job of meeting summarization and will only get better. Those could be published and even reviewed by human influencers for newsworthy bits.

Definitely one of the best options. I think the biggest obstacle here is actually getting that information public so it can be analyzed and summarized. Local government meetings often have no recording to analyze, and in the cases where it is most important, there is often incentive to keep it private from the public. Additionally, government moves extremely slow, with local government being one of the worst offenders. Mandatory public recordings of government functions would probably be the biggest step towards solving this issue.

Perhaps humanoids or robodogs will be so cheap in the future that we can send a few to sit at the meeting and listen.

I don't know what you think "worth" means but if "the money we make from this product covers the cost of producing the product" then it is worth it.

That was the case until, as you noted, advertisements became drastically less valuable.

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.

Public funding is not the solution. Too many conflicts of interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds them?

Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...

You may say that things won't go that way but since there is no way to check then we need to rely on trust and the trust in the mainstream media for good or bad reasons has plummeted in last decade.

And don't take this comment as an endorsement of paid news media, they have the same exact problems.

Currently the most succesful method of assaulting the "marketplace of ideas" is by overwhelming channels with content. Most of our guard rails and fears were around government over reach, not through the attrition of attention and via the production of overhwelming amounts of content.

As a result, more competition (more speech) has been defanged as a solution.

Producing Local news is never going to be more interesting and attention grabbing, and thus revenue generating, than pure dopamine stimulation.

To keep local news alive, it needs money.

A public news option may seem sub ideal, but the option is on the table because the other avenues have been destroyed. Hell - even news itself is losing. The NYT is now dependent on video game revenue to keep itself afloat.

The common ground of the eralier information ecosystem was a result of chance. New factors are at play, and if we want it to survive, then we need to address the revenue issue, some how.

> Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...

This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. It is possible to do, though given the current state of US politics it doesn’t seem remotely likely.

> This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration.

That is a very nice solution but it doesnt work in practice. If the budgets are decided by the government then there is always the possibility that neutrality on some subjects may be missing or that some amount of pressure will be applied in order to get some stories buried or on the contrary exacerbated.

Since there is no way to know which is which then how can you trust it? Personally I don't.

It's as if many of you have never really understood the concept behind separation of powers. There is a very clear reason why the branches of government are constructed in partial opposition to each other, and the validity of that reason is readily demonstrated every day. Who cares if one branch of the government doesn't want to fund a particular story or slant: another branch should be happy to write that check to provide a counterbalance.

Have you ever listened to NPR and not been subject to Gell-Mann amnesia?

> Have you ever listened to NPR and not been subject to Gell-Mann amnesia?

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Personally, I support public funding of journalism, but there needs to be a lot more of it. Enough to support competing outlets in most markets.

Isn't the whole idea of freedom of the press to act as a check to governmental power? With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news.

Personally, I support a ban on public (taxpayer) funding of journalism. Keep it independent.

This position is suitable, for the 1990s. Even then, the BBC showed that public journalism != propaganda.

In fact, the evidence is that if you build institutions, you can actually have very effective public options.

However, in the current era, news is simply being outcompeted for revenue. Even the NYT is dependent on games for relevance.

And the attack vectors to mould and muzzle public understanding have changed. Instead of a steady drip of controlled information, it is private production of overwhelming amounts of content.

Most good people are fighting yesterdays war, with yesterdays weapons, tactics and ideas when it comes to speech.

The real reporting now comes from individual creators often with a gopro or cellphone camera and a youtube/tiktok channel.

It's cheap to make, doesn't require state/institutional funding. It's also quite hard to buyout all the creators and thus at least slightly resilient against the usual attack vectors.

Just government power? Corporate media is no less afflicted by this problem. Small-time journalism is just as capable of being tendentious. Advertising also shapes coverage, as subscriptions and reader purchases never cover operating expenses.

In any case, this is not a problem to be solved. I do think the media should stop concealing or misrepresenting their political leanings. They will always be there. Everyone has a POV. You might as well openly advertise what that POV is. Then it is up to readers and viewers to draw from multiple POVs (which they might not do, but that's just life).

> With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news

I think the BBC are a good counter to that argument. No, they’re not flawless but over the decades they’ve delivered plenty of journalism that’s held government to account.

The BBC just like any other news organization is not neutral. It sometimes leans left and it sometimes lean right. The problem is that this "leaning" is never disclosed.

If a newspaper is comfortably right-wing/left-wing and so on, I don't care about their biases because at least you know that if you read it, you are going to get a "version" of a story that fits the overall narrative of the outlet.

When it comes down to publicly funded news outlet though, their neutrality is disputable and on top of that you end up paying through your taxes for "news" that have either been downplayed or exaggerated depending on who is reporting on it.

So as a tax payer, what is there to gain from being manipulated (at best) or lied to (at worst) by an organization who is supposed to be neutral but who isn't?

I wish it wasn't the case but there has been too many stories in the past in the mainstream media that turned out to be either misrepresented or made up and there was rarely any retraction/apologies on the subject.

And just in case you think that only right wingers have problem with the BBC (for example), the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.

You don't seem to offer a better solution only a reason why you don't like this one.

Of course the BBC is unavoidably propaganda - even just unconsciously - that's why this Hafler Trio track from 1984 exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIobKBy8XOs

I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.

But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.

† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.

  > the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right
  > of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.

It's impossible for any media outlet to be considered truly neutral. Reporting that doesn't align with your own (biased) partisan viewpoint is, to you, biased.

It's often said that when both sides accuse a media outlet of being biased towards the other side, they're probably being pretty objective. It shows they're reporting accurately rather than pandering to one side over the other.

By contrast, nobody is accusing the Daily Mail of left-wing bias, nor The Guardian of being right-wing.

The current government of the USA could not create a similar vehicle. Washington State would hand it off to some donor (like previously Inslee appointed a donor to ESD which then lost a billion dollars to scammers when covid hit) and the federal government, uh, goes without saying?

And, yet, that reporting is better than what 99% of the public have in their brains on a subject.

Want an interesting discussion? Talk about "AI" to your non-technical family members. You'll take the NPR Gell-Mann effect any day over what they've gotten from other sources.

Came here to say this. Journalism is increasingly seen as part of the commons (public good), like utilities. Under free market forces, it turns into propaganda for capitalists (moneyed interests - not workers), the same way that private utilities charge extortionary prices because people have little alternative.

So the litmus test I use is that if a politician works to undermine public funding of journalism, then they're the product of lobbyists, or at least beholden to moneyed interests in some way, and not a public servant.

I know plenty of Patreon or Substack supported individual journalists that sit in council meetings and report what’s going on. Honestly with much better signal to noise that the local paper.

Local journalism, at its best, is part of a feedback loop. Council makes decision -> local reporter writes about it -> public reacts -> council changes its mind.

Can a Patreon or Substack journalist play that role?

Absolutely yes. It’s happening every week of the year with the better Substack-style startups in the UK (London Centric, Manchester Mill etc.).

When coupled with “posts it on local subreddit”. Yes.

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.

We can shake our head at how wild superstition could be in ancient times.

"Everything needs to be a business model." Maybe the future generations will be more advanced.

When a business doesn’t have a business model, I worry it might be an investor-funded startup or something like that.

  > When a business

My point.

You are conflating two things here - business models and sustainable operations.

Even NGOs can be said to have "business models" in the sense that it was being used here. It doesn't have to be profitable, but it has to at least match operational costs.

Reporters have to eat, and pay costs, its not free. That money has to come from somewhere.

And we are only talking about the production of news copy.

The production of good quality local journalism is itself in the service of a more informed polity and information economy. An information economy that is currently using every trick in the book to suck attention out of the polity.

So you will need even more money to ensure you can compete effectively at scale.

Someone needs to pay for this, and ideally it would be a self sustaining manner, which allows local news agencies to remain independent.

  > You are conflating two things here - business models and sustainable operations.
  > Even NGOs can be said to have "business models" 

The narrative force is strong here. I will let you free. A public service doesn't need a business model. They don't do business. Anyone dealing with a budget isn't automatically a business.

The principle of a public service is that it focuses on its service, given its budget constraints. Completely different from a business, they don't have a model in common.

  > Someone needs to pay for this, and ideally it would be a self sustaining manner

Yeag, you end up with a niche. Too small to be relevant to function as the Fourth Estate. These things exist already. Your average citizen isn't going to pay for it. You are basically proposing Fox News, that is the consequence. It is about the whole of society that needs to be informed.

Government funding allows public services to be independent. This is a matter of judicial oversight. "But government bad, market good". It will take a generation of detoxing from the cultural memes and sponsored narratives, to reverse decades of cultural programming.

I'm not trying to beat you over the head with a dictionary, but I can understand when business models is used in places where it is not strictly accurate. I wouldn't personally say the Army or Government (providers of public goods) have a business model, but in the discussion of new agencies, there is enough overlap and history for the term to still hold its meaning.

Even then, using your definition, does not help us escape the point - there needs to be a source of funds for local news. I am perfectly fine with government money being used to pay for it.

Ok! I want to steer people away from the historic model, because that has been a problem and weak point since its inception. I am happy you are open to that.

Eh, even when journalism exists, it is generally just ignored by the public.

Sure, it's generally ignored, but when something important emerges, having the historical record is incredibly useful.

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'.

> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it

Utility provided is not equal to willingness/ability to pay.

We should stop thinking of journalism as a product to be sold and more of it as a public good. That's kind of the point of the article.

I live in a city of one and half million. There are two "local" newspapers with histories that, in one case, reaches back over a century. One used to have offices across the street from city hall and regularly broke stories when somebody stumbled out of city hall and into their offices to report dirty deeds. The other paper was of an opposing political slant and the two papers used to fight like cats and dogs. People would read both papers to get a handle on local political winds.

Today, both papers are owned by the same Toronto-based, American-owned media conglomerate. Both papers have lost their local offices. Some work-from-home types produce localized content. Just enough to make the papers look somewhat local. Much of the local content is lazily scraped from reddit, showing up in the city's subreddit one day and appearing in the papers the next. However, 99% of the content is the same as the "local" paper in Toronto runs. The former disagreements over politics are over, and both papers run the same ranting opinion columns.

And yet... You can still walk into any convenience store in town and buy a paper copy of these two "local" papers. My parents still have both papers delivered, and haven't seemed to clue into the fact that they're both the same, American owned paper.

It's not just a loss of ad revenue that have killed local news. It's media conglomerates who are hoodwinking people into thinking they still have local news coverage when they really don't.

Consumerism has eaten the world.

It seems to me that the media should have its own non-profit designation and should be prohibited from becoming objects of market transactions.

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 can still donate to PBS, and even to your specific local station.

And I do, but I'm not individually capable of solving a collective problem

Alas I haven't yet hitched to the right unicorn to be able to fund every rural public radio either

What I am reading here is "Democracy doesn't come free of charge"

Digital production has lowered the cost, and the Ghost platform in particular is a great value for small publishers, bundling together the blog, newsletter and subscriptions in one package, even now including ActivityPub federation.

And Ghost themselves a non-profit org that doesn't mark up the Stripe transaction fees!

One local news outlet recently switched to that, saving about %5 on Patreon fees and a second is switching now.

https://ghost.org/

That's Ghost, at ghost.org!

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.

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.

> "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.

Yep. There is some network effect nonsense that comes into play when it comes to news. Only stuff which carries at the largest, broadest, most simplified level survives.

> The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

That's not true: you're forgetting positive externalities. The product is worth the cost, but the straightforward capitalist revenue streams aren't enough to cover those costs.

So if you rely on capitalism in 2026, that value get destroyed and the community is worse off for it.

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.

How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area? That’s significantly below a living wage for one person in the US…

Maybe an incredibly lean organization could make it with 150,000 EUR? All digital, 3-4 really devoted employees.

> 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.

Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!

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.

That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.

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.

That's really fair. I think of my donations and support and usually higher than I would want to subscribe for!

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.

Yeah, seemingly a local problem rather than a problem with non-profits, unfortunately :/ Hope things get better over there over time!

What country do you live in and can you link to the laws regulating nonprofit employee pay so that we can compare and use them as a model?

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).

That sounds kind of like a B-Corp, innit?

That's a third-party certification that can be allowed to lapse, not a legal or legally enforceable status.

https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/

This is the business model of The Guardian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited

You just find the optimal point for the most people if it's for profit.

I think that only holds if company ownership is not close with company leadership. Is a "subscriber owned" newspaper model possible? Like how co-op stores are at least nominally owned by their customers.

I could also imagine a system in which a local newspaper was actually run as a public utility by an independent corporation, but explicitly chartered and subsidized by a town/city/county.

I doubt that's true in practice, although I know many capitalists know that to be true in theory.

I wonder if a newspaper co-op is a viable idea?

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.

Unsure about a newspaper per se, but there are a number of news blogs that are co-ops.

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/

Its almost like we should just publicly fund it from the tax people already pay.

It fact you absolutely shouldn't as this put them in huge conflict of interest.

how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?

>? 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.

>Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media?

Surely laws are immutable system and cannot be changed ever. It is always perfectly designed without loopholes, and especially so when ones who design the system could benefit from them.

Absolutely not, no one claimed so either, and frankly, why continue discussing with you when you don't seem to be curious about a honest and straightforward conversation? Screw that noise.

Normally, in democratic countries, you have a process for changing laws. Enshrine your public media in those, or even better, in the constitution, and you've pretty much protected it short-term at least. Add in foundations or whatever concepts your country have, to add more layers of indirection, and it's even more protected.

You can really see how well such system works by observing USA right now.

Only way you could have any form of public financing of such endeavor without conflict of interest is to have multinational organization funded by every country.

Or you end up with BBC.

EDIT: to elaborate even further - you didn't even address the problem that ones designing this system would have to work against their own best interest. just wishy-washed that part away.

I'd say the US is a pretty shit example, given it's run by corporations right now, and lacks a judicial arm of the government that actually enforces the country's own laws. But to each and their own.

Again, with an open mind, go out and read about how publicly funded media works outside of the US (and UK, since you seemingly have a set mind about BBC too), and there is a whole rooster of different methods for funding these kind of things, yet letting them be independent. Some of these institutions are over 100 year old, yet still independent.

I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out how they made that work :)

>made it work

More like made it dysfunctional - i live in EU btw

Laws are system made by people who live within that system - it is a part of resource distribution system. Lawmakers do work in their own interest, and so far the only way we found to make a system work for benefit of everyone is by putting those vested interests at odds - hence non-bipartisan democracy.

This is basically a game theory problem, and when faced with prisoner dilemma you're saying 'it would all work if everyone chose to cooperate' If your solution to political problem is 'if only everyone did X' you don't have a solution but wishful thinking. Sure this can happen, but it is not a stable system, not one that can be moved from place A to B.

You keep saying i have set mind about those issues - yet you refuse to address underlying logical assumption by saying that (non-distinct) X made it work, without even providing an example of working solution - i don't think it's me who's arguing in bad faith here.

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.

What issue from the listed above public funding would address? Public funding doesn’t prevent the entity to become bloated.

Quite the opposite!

I bet we could come up with a list of things we don't like about adtech, tax those behaviors, and give the proceeds to their local competitors.

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.

> As for Swedish public media not taking sides

That's not what I said, I said that I've seen Swedish public media "disparages all sides of the political spectrum", which is way more realistic than "not taking sides". We all wish we can be perfectly impartial, but that's short of impossible, so the next best thing is that it pushes back no matter where it comes from. That's what I've seen, but I no longer live in Sweden, maybe this last decade it's been different than how it was when I lived up there.

Keep lying.

Sorry for blaspheming against your god.

There's also issues when the watched are funding the watches. If the council funds the newspaper, then the newspaper reports badly on the council, then the council can reducing funding for the newspaper.

You need it to be independent, so how can you fund it. Perhaps a separate precept on the council tax bill which is set separately (say by national government)

The BBC funding model attempts to do this at a national level, but of course nowadays that's not sustainable - part of the failure of the old civic minded establishment in favour of the new edgy profit minded establishment

  > 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.

1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?

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.

I don't know too much about PBS specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not immune to Elite Capture¹

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture

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.

effort.

"Andersen et al. 2022 found that about 7.5 percent of foreign aid is diverted by elites." etc

One problem is the billionaires themselves. It's too much power and influence in the hand of a single person. They can fun newspapers at loss and have them spread any kind of lies or narrowly biased news for decades.

Billionaires would be less of a problem in a world where we'd all be multi millionaires.

Our local paper put up a paywall so subscriptions help subsidize the reporting along with the advertising. I'm sure it's a losing battle but you don't get into local news for the money.

The problem with that is it reduces the visibility of public news even further. You can have a pulitzer prize winning report onto council corruption, but if only 50 people read it it doesn't really matter.

this is what taxes are for

If you are fine with your taxes also funding the news channels you hate the most, then sure.

Not really true. I live in Portland, local journalism is very alive here.

Maine? Because in Portland, OR:

- the Oregonian's newsroom is in all but open conflict with its editorial board, its credibility for breaking hard news was already in the shitter before it sold to ADVANCE, and for several years it stopped publishing a broadsheet edition and shuttered its print facility to cut costs

- the Merc sold out to a Seattle-based group run by a former Washington state legislator in July 2024 that's been buying out alt-weeklies in Seattle and Chicago

- Pamplin/Trib and EO groups got bought out by Carpenter, a Mississippi-based conglomerate, in June 2024 with a rep for cutting everything but sports coverage. Layoffs hit both in July 2025

Only the WWeek is still locally owned, and it started a non-profit and seeking donations in 2024. Maybe 20 full-time employees there, at best, and as of 2024 barely above water financially.

I live in Portland, OR. The Oregonian/Oregon Live actually broke the story that the mayor was quietly pushing shelters out. Their news broke before I got the city mandated postcard I should have received living next to the proposed shelter.

KGW broke that the shelter process was occurring without community involvement and feedback processes. Frankly, the Mayor and three district councilors came to our neighborhood meeting. That just doesn't happen in East Portland and was not possible without the involvement of local news.

Willamette Week is a gem, I agree. They broke the Shamaya Fagan story as well as numerous others. I'm saying it's not all bad, especially compared to other localities.

Imago Dei? KGW didn't break anything that the Oregonian hadn't run two weeks prior on Dec. 3, and they got scooped by OPB on it in November. The best coverage KGW (owned and operated by Virginia-based TEGNA, which TIL is in the process of getting Nexstar'd) has had of homelessness was covering their news van getting broken into by a homeless couple and stealing their gear.

Yes that one. They definitely did. I know the people who were interviewed and I know what they said. That neighborhood meeting was because the neighborhood learned that the Mayors office had side stepped the public input process. The mayor admitted it that night. Reporting can be better but my point was that politics does not move East of 205 and for the first time I saw it. The reporter and the photojournalist both lived in Portland. The difference was local media regardless of who they're owned or operated by.

A lot of these comments are indexing on ownership. While I agree ownership plays a factor I think whether the actual journalist is from here plays a more outsized role in how they present and investigate the news.

I mean I'd be more than willing to pay/donate/support a local paper if we had any that weren't just tailing the narratives of power. Our local "paper of record" (Salt Lake Tribune) is basically a platform for the powerful to launder their actions as well as a police stenography platform.

I do subscribe to some larger papers, specifically the Guardian, and they're far from perfect. I would happily support a local paper with even those same compromises.

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)

Compare:

1. https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

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.

Because people have bills to pay.

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.

> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

The product is not priced at what it costs to produce it. Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

Why is it priced too low for its value? IMHO a major reason is people not rejecting the 'post-truth' era, but embracing it - devaluing truth. For example, they way overvalue information on social media, because its lack of truth is not a consideration.

Journalists personally are on the scene, talk to key people, read the documents, interview experts, and are trained professionals in gathering and reporting information accurately. Somehow hot takes from someone who hasn't left their basement is seen as valuable. Imagine someone on social media who did all that work.

I agree with you on the value > price, but disagree about why. If you take out classified (and later internet) Ads, almost no newspaper and no TV news in the US was _ever_ profitable.

It might sound crazy but as a percent of revenue, news was actually moving more towards subs and away from ads even by the 1980s and 1990s. I used to work with a very long tenured editor who told me that in the 1970s north of 70% of most newspapers revenue was from ads.

Back then overhead was massive due to printing presses and delivery infrastructure, now it's dominated by labor costs, but the point stands that doing good journalism isn't cheap. Even people who care about the product don't want it enough to pay its production cost, and never have.

There are still plenty of local papers that run based on subscriptions and ad placements. They're not the big names, but I am willing to bet you could find at least one in your county if you're in the US. There's going to be a relatively small newsroom and a few reporters who do go to public meetings and the like to get the news.

The problem is about 25 years ago, a few main outlets bought up a lot of publications, from small-town papers to larger regional papers, and loaded up on debt to do so, thinking that there would be a good way to get that money back. My regional paper, the KC Star, built a huge printing press building in the middle of downtown, thinking that of course, they'd need this extra capacity. This coincided with the rise of the internet in popular use, and a lot of the traffic went to social media.

These main outlets, and their investors, of course, wanted to make a profit off of their purchase of these publications. You can absolutely run one of those publications in the internet era and cover all of the costs, but if you're expecting unending/ever-increasing growth in returns every 90 days forever, you're going to have a problem. Naturally, that's exactly what the investors expected, and instead of just taking the haircut, they started to gut their investments.

There are classes of institutions in societies that need to exist and can cover their own expenses for the most part. Not everything needs to be a unicorn. That's where we screwed ourselves on local journalism.

One of my favorite blogs is a curmudgeon from a city I used to live in reporting on the gangs there. It’s his entire life and he’s been at it for probably 20 years now.

Even subjects that aren’t local interest are usually produced at a loss. Forums can often attract subject matter experts who discuss issues like this effectively altruistically (vs. platforms like YouTube where it almost always a commercial interest). The general trend is for these communities to fall apart as new users alienate the subject matter experts by being uneducated, presumptuous, and impolite (usually in that order).

Given the comparatively lax moderation of Hacker News, I’m surprised it has held out as long as it has. It’s nowhere near as good as it was even five years ago, but it’s still one of the only online spaces I visit everyday. There are a lot of people here (older guys especially) who could be doing anything else with their time, but spend at least a portion of it providing the discussion that makes this place so interesting to visit.

This is a dynamic you also see in education; anyone qualified to work as a journalist could probably make more money doing something else (“Those who can’t do, teach,”), so you select for a group that is either incompetent to be reporting on the stories they are covering, technically competent but unreliable because they grift to subsidize the field’s lower earning potential, or are technically competent but independently wealthy and thus potentially unaware of certain issues.

I suspect there's still some potential for it as a business, but people need to work out a new pitch to customers. I don't really see anyone trying.

Some newspapers are still resisting the internet it seems. My parents tried getting an online only subscription to a paper, and were told no, they had to take Sunday delivery. Someone is still paying for those printed Sunday ads.

We can't support full newspapers, with multiple editorial staff, printing presses, daily deliveries, etc.

But blog-style pages that report news from local council meetings? This is definitely within reach. Perhaps with a podcast channel on Youtube.

Local governance is the most important level for the democracy. It sounds weird, but it's absolutely crucial:

1. You can personally see the effects of decisions made.

2. They affect your daily life.

3. You can see that democracy _works_.

4. It's a good training ground for people with ambitions for higher-level elections.

The product that it (co-)produces is democracy. Are you saying that democracy is not worth that cost?

Wasn't one of the shit coin flavors supposed to fix this? I'm quite happy we're past all that nonsense.