[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Newspapers_published_...
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 love Rightmove as a shopper, but it's 2nd-4th order effects have been disastrous.
There have been attempts to unseat Rightmove (e.g. boomin) but it's such a behemoth in it's industry that is tantamount to wanting to unseat Google.
Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.
Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.
Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.
The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?
Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.
Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.
You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
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.
And yes, the bias is heavily to the left. I am very centrist in my views so a left or right leaning bias would be upsetting.
We live across the river from Bucks County PA in NJ, Bucks County journalism and the NJ equivalent are just shills.
This is also why I'm not convinced about public owned or funded journalism that isn't a cooperative, because that only gives additional power to the incumbent who holds the purse strings.
The supreme court disagrees
> The Court recognized that "uninhibited, robust, and wide open" political debate can at times be characterized by "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."
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.
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.
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.
how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?
Patagonia (US company) is one example of this. Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).
> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
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.
1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?
I work adjacent to an online publication business and freelancers are getting ~$750 for a 1500 word article. I don't know how you get actual journalism at that price. Increasingly we're just going to get people dropping concepts into GPT and editing whatever comes back for 30 minutes. I fear that the only way out would be a single one of the dozens of billionaires to step up and donate a self-sustaining grant towards long term journalism excellence. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have shown that they don't care about the world and just want to make their number go up at any cost necessary.
"Everything needs to be a business model." Maybe the future generations will be more advanced.
Britannica was the shining example of capitalism, being sold door to door. Encarta was done by Microsoft. Both got disrupted real quick by a million people making little edits to an open encyclopedia. An open-source gift economy with many contributors seems to beat capitalistic systems. Linux. Wordpress. MySQL. In general, science / wikipedia / open source projects also feature peer review before publishing, a desirable trait.
Everyone has a cellphone. It's not like we need professional cameras to capture things. What we really need is a place to post clips and discuss them in a way that features peer review. It would be better and strictly healthier than the current for-profit large corporations like Meta or X. That's one of the projects I'm building using our technology. Anyone interested, email me (email in my profile)
Compare:
1. https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
The most dedicated Wikipedians in specific domains often tend to be academics in that space and whose day jobs tend to be adjacent to the niche they edit.
It's difficult to find the equivalent for local government, because the most knowledge are already active, in the loop, and in the same circles.
Furthermore, people know who's who in local government and local businesses, and people do get frozen out.
You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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