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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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 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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Social media groups should have a role to play in local journalism, or at least debate of local issues. Would love to see the passion and information sharing of a gaming Discord server, but focused on my county.
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.
If you are selling a house you have to list on rightmove. You're not going to choose to list on fewer sites. The question then comes if you're selling, why list anywhere else.
As a buyer it's terrible - I want to be able to see size of property (from the EPC, as I trust that more than the estate agent), the sale history, the EPC data, the council tax band, the map of the plot.
I can find that all out manually by hunting for the real address and going from there, but it should be there directly (and filterable)
As a seller you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the buyers are
As a buyer you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the sellers are
As a competitor how can you argue to an estate agent they should spend money with you as well as rightmove
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.
I don't know that I would describe NPR as "great". One specific example that sticks in my mind was a story they did about firearms. The host kept using the word "automatic". Knowing something about firearms, it was apparent to me that it was being used as shorthand for "not a revolver", but the host was implying that it meant "machine gun". Revolvers are so uncommon that there's really not any useful value being passed in attaching the word "automatic" when describing a gun unless you're describing something that is subject to the NFA.
Or, more recently, there was a deep dive into the Chicago parking meter deal. I don't think anyone needs convincing that it was a bad deal, but one thing that they said was that the new owners have "already received back all the money they paid out". Okay, but please expand. This was for an economics show, so is the recovery just a gross dollar comparison (e.g. they've received back more than $1.1B), is it inflation adjusted, does it exceed the time value of the money that was given to the Daley administration? It wouldn't have taken but another 30 seconds to make it clear, but by not saying I'm 99% certain they were focusing on gross dollar comparison and ignoring the value of 2008 dollars vs. 2025 dollars. In turn, that sounds like it's playing towards the audience members that don't understand why the total of payments for their mortgage is so much more than the purchase price of the house.
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).
Small team does local journalism, motivated locals donate to keep it running. It's that simple. Some people are happy to donate $20 a month to their favorite Twitch streamer or open source project, and other people are happy to do the same for their local newspaper.
The failed model is trying to run it like a journalism factory: producing articles at some marginal cost and selling them at a fixed price that exceeds marginal cost.
Just look at NPR and member stations. The federal government ended their funding, but they kept right on going because of donations.
From here you can see there's various references and entry points to hyperlocal journalism in the US, Canada, etc, all working to fill the void of local newspapers departing, or local newspapers increasingly only providing national or state level news.
Instead of ads alone, its a sponsorship model, one from the readers side (optional), and one from the local organizations who are outright sponsoring the local news to be created, maybe in different categories, etc.
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.
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.
> Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
Has he though? The Washington Post has actually been a leader in primary reporting in Amazon's union busting activities [1]. He may have pressured them to not endorse Kamala Harris, but he likely would have better standing with Trump had he had never bought the Post in the first place.
For all the shit that mainstream media gets, much of which is deserved, alternative media is order of magnitudes worse with regards to manipulating public discourse.
I don't think the Washington Post really would of made a difference in terms of the election, but I have no faith in them having any editorial independence.
My boss also lets me criticize parts of the business, but he's still my boss
Can you tell me what exactly about the Washington Post differs from any other center left American news source and how those differences benefits Bezos?
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.
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.
I’m guessing I know the local newspaper/newsletter you speak about being in Chicago. I was a very early supporter of them when they started up, but canceled a couple years back when it was clear they care far less about reporting and more about pushing personal beliefs and vendettas. To the point of outright destroying local businesses over petty ideological driven things.
I still think they do good work here and there, but their editorial standard is such that when faced with evidence of a reporter ignoring facts their response was to double down much less post a retraction. A conversation with one reporter I had basically summarized to “we will report what we want to how we want to, it’s our organization and we don’t get paid enough to be objective”. Fair enough, I suppose.
At that point random people with a blog is better since at least there is not an aura of neutral fact-based journalism behind it.
Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement for knowing the general happenings in my neighborhood and city. I’ve made an attempt to get more involved with local meetings and events the alderman holds, etc. but it seems far too little to keep up on anything in a major way.
> Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement
I really resent having FB pushed on me. I don't have an account and don't plan to, even if it's to be a member of one FB group. My HOA tried that and I pushed back hard. There are many other options over FB. We just use email.
Our local newspaper is the Wednesday Journal. I don't know that I'd call it petty so much as a status-quo amplifier staffed with people who aren't really engaged with what's going on here.
I understand people's distaste with Meta, but at least where I live, if you're avoiding Meta, you're avoiding basically all the important civic discourse. I poasted my way to getting a law passed... on Facebook Groups.
Oh, Groups sucks ass. I dream of figuring out a way to move the discourse even just to Reddit. But people talking to each other and keeping each other up to date on what's happening, with electeds and staff participating, and with decent moderation is going to trounce anything professional journalists can accomplish in this setting.
That's not true of regional and national journalism. We need someone doing that work in Springfield, the state capital. We'd all be better off if we pooled the money that was going to suburban local newspapers and sent it there.
We're plausibly one of the 10 most progressive munis in the country (we are the most progressive in Chicagoland, which should put us easily in the running nationwide), and this argument has zero (0) suction here, which means it presumably has zero suction anywhere.
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!
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).
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.
I think that supporting a wide spread of newspaper on the local level will alleviate all these issues in aggregate. This is what we do in Norway and I think it works quite well to be honest. My municipality of around 250k inhabitants has 4 newspapers that I am aware of, none of which feels very overtly influenced by activists nor political or financial pressures.
There are quite a few newspapers who are political and receive subsidies, but overall I think our system works quite well at providing high quality local reporting at affordable prices.
There's no such thing as an "activist class", just people with opinions. But people with opinions are enough to kill good journalism if they can't keep them in their pants.
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?
never been on Nextdoor but probably similar. Perhaps purpose would be the main difference - Nextdoor is residential and problem orientated, whilst our idea (we actually had it to MVP) was more like foursquare meets old twitter - basically verified local recommendations, news, updates from folks who were actually local to the area, rather than transients who know little. Our attempt then the limit the transients to read only translates really well today to online trolls / bots etc
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.
I figured that was the semantic game he (and you apparently) are playing.
1. The Democratic Party represents the left in the US, so the left is in power when they are in power.
2. In other parts of the world, parties and individuals who are further left on the political spectrum than the US Democratic Party (either nationally or in any location under discussion here) obtain power. As those are generally repressive regimes, their media is generally highly biased in their direction, making them biased towards both the left and the people on power.
If you want to have a meaningful discussion, feel free to stop being coy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Or they'd have no paying subscriber base because everyone is pissed off at them.
I prefer sources that just report on local happenings (including the activities of our local government) and am fortunate to have at least one that is non-partisan, but I don't think their success is assured, especially in an area that leans far in one specific direction.
In this case, the area in question very much does not lean in one specific direction. Which makes it unclear what journalists that do lean far in one direction are trying to accomplish in such an area.
One of the greatest failings of journalism over the last bunch of decades has been that it takes too much of a neutral (or capital-oriented) position. You can follow this from the scores of puff pieces on the Vietnam War being, like, totally under control, dude, straight through to the modern endless refrain of "well, Steve says the Earth is round and Bob says the Earth is flat, but it's up to you to decide :)". Incuriosity and hypercredulity of access-journalists saving up trivia for their book deals, all with the "noble" goal of appearing "neutral" - it's been the death spiral of Western democracy.
How else would you suggest communicating to a population that fundamentally does not share your views, other than with neutrality?
As a Bucks County native, the Beacon is not at all representative of the median voter. Oh, certainly there are some aligned with it, but there are just as many with the opposite views, and most are in between. Journalists that don't respect those people in the middle, that disagreement, have no chance of being listened to by them. They have every right to voice their opinions, but if journalists only respect the people who already agree with them, then we're all just going to stay in our bubbles.
The person you are responding to doesn't acknowledge that the Democratic Party represents the left wing in US politics, presumably because they aren't beholden to the small far left portion of its constituents.
I wouldn't spend time trying to justify your stance to him, which is a very reasonable one IMO.
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.
Congratulations, you've bought into the fascists' framing.
Whenever the media doesn't present the fascists' narrative unchallenged, it's declared that they're being biased. Doesn't matter what the facts are, the accusations still come.
There's this idea that Democracy and Journalism are intrinsically linked (thanks John Milton), but they're not. Look at the history of Democracy (by that of course we mean representative democracy): it has existed long before, and independent from, Journalism. Then look at the history of Journalism: it has always been a partisan affair, funded, written, and published by people who want to get their own point across. The idea that truth emerges from freedom of speech ignores the fact that the speaker can lie, or that different people view different things as true.
The romantic idea of Journalism as a bastion of Democracy conveniently ignores the facts. Democracy is a form of Government, and Government is power exerted on people. You don't get more power or influence because you heard about a thing happening. And most people will never do anything about what they hear. The real purpose of Journalism is to galvanize the public's feelings based on a selective viewpoint towards a specific aim. An article is written, using selective information, presented in a particular way, in order to effect a change the writer wants. If effective, the writer gets what they want, or something close to it.
Journalism is just another form of power. But it's not power of the people. It's power using the people. You and the rest of the people have no power of your own. But as a group, the people are wielded by institutions (Journalism, Religion, Party, Industry, Culture, etc) to act on behalf of those institutions. The group can try to push back on power. But without organization, leadership, clear goals, and strong motivation, there's no effective opposition. So occasionally the group will take on these qualities, and becomes... another institution, wielding power to get its way. And as a group with power, the results are not always positive for everyone (see: Anti-Saloon League, National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, etc)
On the contrary, I think we are entering a new golden age of local journalism in the US, but it does not look like the old one, so we do not recognize it yet.
What is collapsing is the legacy institutional model. What is emerging is a procedural one: individuals showing up locally, documenting power directly, publishing primary evidence, and forcing accountability through visibility rather than prestige.
Projects like Honor Your Oath, Long Island Audit, Guerilla Media, and even single-person operations with a camera and FOIA literacy are doing real journalism. They attend meetings, record encounters, publish receipts, and focus on consequences that are immediate and specific.
The cost of presence is now low. The cost of obscurity for local officials is higher. Credibility increasingly comes from raw evidence rather than narrative authority. These outlets are not trying to inform everyone. They are informing the people affected directly.
It feels messy, personal, and sometimes abrasive because it is not professionalized in the old sense. Historically, that is what journalism looked like before it was institutionalized.
For example, Jeff Gray quietly stands in public with a “God Bless Homeless Vets” sign. People often assume he is homeless and attempt to violate his rights, frequently including police officers. The resulting interactions, all on camera, expose how poorly basic constitutional rights are understood or respected at the local level. https://youtu.be/-um41lMH3c4
Ronald Durbin of Guerilla Media is a muckraker in the classic sense, repeatedly confronting local power structures in person. He recently had a gun drawn on him at a town council meeting. https://youtube.com/@guerrillapublishing
Sean Reyes from Long Island Audit has been arrested multiple times for filming inside police station lobbies despite clear New York law allowing it, and has been physically attacked and had firearms brandished at him while attempting interviews, all documented on video. https://youtube.com/@longislandaudit
There are so many others. This is what local journalism looks like now.
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.
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.
Elon Musk is a walking talking advertisement for the dangers of social media rotting your brain. But now I'd like to talk to you about white genocide in South Africa ...
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Where I live we have like 6 people doing that, and they all post summaries on Facebook for free.
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.
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.
The roots of the current situation in US politics, arose from concerted actions taken at local levels.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
What I am reading here is "Democracy doesn't come free of charge"
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.
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.
> 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!
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/
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.
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).
This is the business model of The Guardian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
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/
> 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!
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
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 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.
> "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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Social media groups should have a role to play in local journalism, or at least debate of local issues. Would love to see the passion and information sharing of a gaming Discord server, but focused on my county.
Haven't used Nextdoor, maybe its similar?
Facebook groups tend to have this, at least in the USA. Reddit too in bigger cities/towns.
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.
Yeah I remember going through those pages as a kid; my local "chronicle" had loads in.
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.
If you are selling a house you have to list on rightmove. You're not going to choose to list on fewer sites. The question then comes if you're selling, why list anywhere else.
As a buyer it's terrible - I want to be able to see size of property (from the EPC, as I trust that more than the estate agent), the sale history, the EPC data, the council tax band, the map of the plot.
I can find that all out manually by hunting for the real address and going from there, but it should be there directly (and filterable)
As a seller you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the buyers are
As a buyer you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the sellers are
As a competitor how can you argue to an estate agent they should spend money with you as well as rightmove
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.
I don't know that I would describe NPR as "great". One specific example that sticks in my mind was a story they did about firearms. The host kept using the word "automatic". Knowing something about firearms, it was apparent to me that it was being used as shorthand for "not a revolver", but the host was implying that it meant "machine gun". Revolvers are so uncommon that there's really not any useful value being passed in attaching the word "automatic" when describing a gun unless you're describing something that is subject to the NFA.
Or, more recently, there was a deep dive into the Chicago parking meter deal. I don't think anyone needs convincing that it was a bad deal, but one thing that they said was that the new owners have "already received back all the money they paid out". Okay, but please expand. This was for an economics show, so is the recovery just a gross dollar comparison (e.g. they've received back more than $1.1B), is it inflation adjusted, does it exceed the time value of the money that was given to the Daley administration? It wouldn't have taken but another 30 seconds to make it clear, but by not saying I'm 99% certain they were focusing on gross dollar comparison and ignoring the value of 2008 dollars vs. 2025 dollars. In turn, that sounds like it's playing towards the audience members that don't understand why the total of payments for their mortgage is so much more than the purchase price of the house.
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).
Are you based in Alaska? I’d love to hear more if so; I have contact info on my website. (I grew up there).
There are crowd and community funded models doing hyperlocal journalism sustainably.
Can you give some examples?
Small team does local journalism, motivated locals donate to keep it running. It's that simple. Some people are happy to donate $20 a month to their favorite Twitch streamer or open source project, and other people are happy to do the same for their local newspaper.
The failed model is trying to run it like a journalism factory: producing articles at some marginal cost and selling them at a fixed price that exceeds marginal cost.
Just look at NPR and member stations. The federal government ended their funding, but they kept right on going because of donations.
NPR member stations in many communities have _not_ made up lost federal funding through donations, in fact many are at risk of closing: https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/rural-alaska/2025/07/22/kotz...
Donations are definitely a piece of the puzzle but local journalism will never reach the level it was in the early 2000s without a new revenue stream.
I thought about the best way to share it and realized it might vary in different countries and regions.
As a general introduction to hyperlocal journalism: https://www.google.com/search?q=hyperlocal+journalism
From here you can see there's various references and entry points to hyperlocal journalism in the US, Canada, etc, all working to fill the void of local newspapers departing, or local newspapers increasingly only providing national or state level news.
Instead of ads alone, its a sponsorship model, one from the readers side (optional), and one from the local organizations who are outright sponsoring the local news to be created, maybe in different categories, etc.
I really don't understand this pathetic grovel and prostrate at the feet of the rich, thing.
Why are the masses, the majority, obliged to kiss ass and suck up to what, a half million politicians, a million cops, and 1%ers?
Why do you see others as court jesters that must dance for modern equivalent of barons and baronesses?
What an antiquated and childish cult behavior.
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.
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.
I would love to read some of the ideas you have (even if they aren't fleshed out). Maybe a blog post or something?
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.
> Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
Has he though? The Washington Post has actually been a leader in primary reporting in Amazon's union busting activities [1]. He may have pressured them to not endorse Kamala Harris, but he likely would have better standing with Trump had he had never bought the Post in the first place.
For all the shit that mainstream media gets, much of which is deserved, alternative media is order of magnitudes worse with regards to manipulating public discourse.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/09/amazon-...
Controlled opposition is great.
I don't think the Washington Post really would of made a difference in terms of the election, but I have no faith in them having any editorial independence.
My boss also lets me criticize parts of the business, but he's still my boss
Can you tell me what exactly about the Washington Post differs from any other center left American news source and how those differences benefits Bezos?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Newspapers_published_...
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.
I’m guessing I know the local newspaper/newsletter you speak about being in Chicago. I was a very early supporter of them when they started up, but canceled a couple years back when it was clear they care far less about reporting and more about pushing personal beliefs and vendettas. To the point of outright destroying local businesses over petty ideological driven things.
I still think they do good work here and there, but their editorial standard is such that when faced with evidence of a reporter ignoring facts their response was to double down much less post a retraction. A conversation with one reporter I had basically summarized to “we will report what we want to how we want to, it’s our organization and we don’t get paid enough to be objective”. Fair enough, I suppose.
At that point random people with a blog is better since at least there is not an aura of neutral fact-based journalism behind it.
Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement for knowing the general happenings in my neighborhood and city. I’ve made an attempt to get more involved with local meetings and events the alderman holds, etc. but it seems far too little to keep up on anything in a major way.
> Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement
I really resent having FB pushed on me. I don't have an account and don't plan to, even if it's to be a member of one FB group. My HOA tried that and I pushed back hard. There are many other options over FB. We just use email.
Our local newspaper is the Wednesday Journal. I don't know that I'd call it petty so much as a status-quo amplifier staffed with people who aren't really engaged with what's going on here.
I understand people's distaste with Meta, but at least where I live, if you're avoiding Meta, you're avoiding basically all the important civic discourse. I poasted my way to getting a law passed... on Facebook Groups.
Facebook Groups are garbage, but everything is in such a degraded state that they might look OK in 2026.
What's really needed is journalism done by professionals who are paid like professionals. That's a 100x better than any Facebook Group.
Oh, Groups sucks ass. I dream of figuring out a way to move the discourse even just to Reddit. But people talking to each other and keeping each other up to date on what's happening, with electeds and staff participating, and with decent moderation is going to trounce anything professional journalists can accomplish in this setting.
That's not true of regional and national journalism. We need someone doing that work in Springfield, the state capital. We'd all be better off if we pooled the money that was going to suburban local newspapers and sent it there.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg continues to embrace the current administration.
We're plausibly one of the 10 most progressive munis in the country (we are the most progressive in Chicagoland, which should put us easily in the running nationwide), and this argument has zero (0) suction here, which means it presumably has zero suction anywhere.
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!
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).
They had a solid podcast interview with journalist Jordan Green on the raise of far-right extremism in the US.
https://buckscountybeacon.com/2025/08/journalist-jordan-gree...
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.
I think that supporting a wide spread of newspaper on the local level will alleviate all these issues in aggregate. This is what we do in Norway and I think it works quite well to be honest. My municipality of around 250k inhabitants has 4 newspapers that I am aware of, none of which feels very overtly influenced by activists nor political or financial pressures.
There are quite a few newspapers who are political and receive subsidies, but overall I think our system works quite well at providing high quality local reporting at affordable prices.
There's no such thing as an "activist class", just people with opinions. But people with opinions are enough to kill good journalism if they can't keep them in their pants.
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?
How does this differ from services like NextDoor? I'm not familiar with it but it sounds similar.
never been on Nextdoor but probably similar. Perhaps purpose would be the main difference - Nextdoor is residential and problem orientated, whilst our idea (we actually had it to MVP) was more like foursquare meets old twitter - basically verified local recommendations, news, updates from folks who were actually local to the area, rather than transients who know little. Our attempt then the limit the transients to read only translates really well today to online trolls / bots etc
100% and yes, now the time has come for sure.
somebody go build it!
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.
If the bias is towards power, why would it ever be towards the left?
Because they live in NJ, generally a Democratic stronghold and particularly in the area he described.
There are many parts of the US where the local government is 100% controlled by Democrats, so they are in power in those areas.
Thunderfork's question stands: if they are biased towards power (democrats), how can they also be biased towards the left?
I figured that was the semantic game he (and you apparently) are playing.
1. The Democratic Party represents the left in the US, so the left is in power when they are in power.
2. In other parts of the world, parties and individuals who are further left on the political spectrum than the US Democratic Party (either nationally or in any location under discussion here) obtain power. As those are generally repressive regimes, their media is generally highly biased in their direction, making them biased towards both the left and the people on power.
If you want to have a meaningful discussion, feel free to stop being coy.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301
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.
Further reading on this, very worthwhile IMHO: Paper Girl by Beth Macy, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Girl
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.
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?
> 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.
Or they'd have no paying subscriber base because everyone is pissed off at them.
I prefer sources that just report on local happenings (including the activities of our local government) and am fortunate to have at least one that is non-partisan, but I don't think their success is assured, especially in an area that leans far in one specific direction.
In this case, the area in question very much does not lean in one specific direction. Which makes it unclear what journalists that do lean far in one direction are trying to accomplish in such an area.
One of the greatest failings of journalism over the last bunch of decades has been that it takes too much of a neutral (or capital-oriented) position. You can follow this from the scores of puff pieces on the Vietnam War being, like, totally under control, dude, straight through to the modern endless refrain of "well, Steve says the Earth is round and Bob says the Earth is flat, but it's up to you to decide :)". Incuriosity and hypercredulity of access-journalists saving up trivia for their book deals, all with the "noble" goal of appearing "neutral" - it's been the death spiral of Western democracy.
How else would you suggest communicating to a population that fundamentally does not share your views, other than with neutrality?
As a Bucks County native, the Beacon is not at all representative of the median voter. Oh, certainly there are some aligned with it, but there are just as many with the opposite views, and most are in between. Journalists that don't respect those people in the middle, that disagreement, have no chance of being listened to by them. They have every right to voice their opinions, but if journalists only respect the people who already agree with them, then we're all just going to stay in our bubbles.
Perhaps my choice of the phrase "neutral political position" was not what others would have chosen.
I am trying to take a fact-based perspective in what I say and do.
Facts don't belong to either dominant political party in the United States.
The person you are responding to doesn't acknowledge that the Democratic Party represents the left wing in US politics, presumably because they aren't beholden to the small far left portion of its constituents.
I wouldn't spend time trying to justify your stance to him, which is a very reasonable one IMO.
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.
Congratulations, you've bought into the fascists' framing.
Whenever the media doesn't present the fascists' narrative unchallenged, it's declared that they're being biased. Doesn't matter what the facts are, the accusations still come.
There's this idea that Democracy and Journalism are intrinsically linked (thanks John Milton), but they're not. Look at the history of Democracy (by that of course we mean representative democracy): it has existed long before, and independent from, Journalism. Then look at the history of Journalism: it has always been a partisan affair, funded, written, and published by people who want to get their own point across. The idea that truth emerges from freedom of speech ignores the fact that the speaker can lie, or that different people view different things as true.
The romantic idea of Journalism as a bastion of Democracy conveniently ignores the facts. Democracy is a form of Government, and Government is power exerted on people. You don't get more power or influence because you heard about a thing happening. And most people will never do anything about what they hear. The real purpose of Journalism is to galvanize the public's feelings based on a selective viewpoint towards a specific aim. An article is written, using selective information, presented in a particular way, in order to effect a change the writer wants. If effective, the writer gets what they want, or something close to it.
Journalism is just another form of power. But it's not power of the people. It's power using the people. You and the rest of the people have no power of your own. But as a group, the people are wielded by institutions (Journalism, Religion, Party, Industry, Culture, etc) to act on behalf of those institutions. The group can try to push back on power. But without organization, leadership, clear goals, and strong motivation, there's no effective opposition. So occasionally the group will take on these qualities, and becomes... another institution, wielding power to get its way. And as a group with power, the results are not always positive for everyone (see: Anti-Saloon League, National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, etc)
On the contrary, I think we are entering a new golden age of local journalism in the US, but it does not look like the old one, so we do not recognize it yet.
What is collapsing is the legacy institutional model. What is emerging is a procedural one: individuals showing up locally, documenting power directly, publishing primary evidence, and forcing accountability through visibility rather than prestige.
Projects like Honor Your Oath, Long Island Audit, Guerilla Media, and even single-person operations with a camera and FOIA literacy are doing real journalism. They attend meetings, record encounters, publish receipts, and focus on consequences that are immediate and specific.
The cost of presence is now low. The cost of obscurity for local officials is higher. Credibility increasingly comes from raw evidence rather than narrative authority. These outlets are not trying to inform everyone. They are informing the people affected directly.
It feels messy, personal, and sometimes abrasive because it is not professionalized in the old sense. Historically, that is what journalism looked like before it was institutionalized.
For example, Jeff Gray quietly stands in public with a “God Bless Homeless Vets” sign. People often assume he is homeless and attempt to violate his rights, frequently including police officers. The resulting interactions, all on camera, expose how poorly basic constitutional rights are understood or respected at the local level. https://youtu.be/-um41lMH3c4
Ronald Durbin of Guerilla Media is a muckraker in the classic sense, repeatedly confronting local power structures in person. He recently had a gun drawn on him at a town council meeting. https://youtube.com/@guerrillapublishing
Sean Reyes from Long Island Audit has been arrested multiple times for filming inside police station lobbies despite clear New York law allowing it, and has been physically attacked and had firearms brandished at him while attempting interviews, all documented on video. https://youtube.com/@longislandaudit
There are so many others. This is what local journalism looks like now.
https://youtube.com/@lacklustermedia
https://youtube.com/@audittheaudit
https://youtube.com/@amagansettpress
https://youtube.com/@susanbassi
Many, many others.
Here are lawyers giving their perspectives on these interactions:
https://youtube.com/@southerndrawllaw
https://youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer
https://youtube.com/@americasattorney
https://youtube.com/@legalbytesmedia
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.
If local journalism doesn’t exist in your town or city, start it.
...and the more government is local, the more local journalism means a damn thing.
"Unless the journalism is too critical, then they're far-right/far-left agitators"
Liberal values can't be preserved in the midst of a Pharaonic distribution of wealth. The only way to defend liberal values is to fight for socialism.
The murder of Twitter seems to be a part of a greater scheme of things.
You make it sound like it was involuntary for some reason? Twitter was more of a suicide than anything.
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.
Twitter was a dumpster fire of hateful leftist echo chamber activism. X is much better and way more balanced.
. . . toward what?
CSAM and revenge porn, apparently
Elon Musk is a walking talking advertisement for the dangers of social media rotting your brain. But now I'd like to talk to you about white genocide in South Africa ...