This has _always_ been true, but for generations classified ad revenue neatly subsidized it. Once the internet came along and blew up that revenue stream, the industry was in trouble.
I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. Everyone will go on the internet and talk about how valuable people sitting in city council meetings is, but not enough people want to pay the monthly bill to enable that.
You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.
I stopped subscribing to our local traditional newspaper because it's nothing but lightweight feature stories, local sports, and reprints of news from USA Today.
In a market where "mostly one guy" can cover the beat that might work for awhile, with all the caveats that come from depending on an individual, versus an organization, to do a job.
In a larger market, where multiple people would be needed to cover the 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.)
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.
Maybe that's the answer, hope your town gets one or two good journalists who can live off the pool of people who do care. Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, etc.
I do wish there was a more systematic market for it though, it's crazy how much value a few reporters can provide just by providing the check on power of asking basic questions to those in power.
Reporting does have some dangers.
This is something that - for whatever reason - takes a surprising amount of time for ppl to understand.
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.
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.
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.
Consistent displays of comity would go a long way to kowtowing the politisphere.
Article about it: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/this-local-newsletter-cove...
40%+ conversion rate on substack.
The federal government decides the limits within which your local government must operate. A good chunk of your taxes go to wars in the middle east, and a good deal of the politicians in that federal government self-professedly care more about a middle-eastern country than the one they were elected to represent [1].
To rephrase a saying - you may not care about federal politics, but federal politics cares about you.
[1] "if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel." - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I
I 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.
Of course there will be exceptions to the rule, but these dynamics seem pretty strong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I support a ban on public (taxpayer) funding of journalism. Keep it independent.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me that the media should have its own non-profit designation and should be prohibited from becoming objects of market transactions.
That was the case until, as you noted, advertisements became drastically less valuable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can a Patreon or Substack journalist play that role?
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.
Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).
Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.
Maybe an incredibly lean organization could make it with 150,000 EUR? All digital, 3-4 really devoted employees.
3-4 people easily, probably closer to 5-6 in reality. Minimum salary in my country is around 1200 EUR/month, but we also have free health care for everyone and other anti-democratic things.
Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).
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.
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 do feel like there's a turn happening in the economy, or at least, some new scene growing. Or maybe I'm just finally becoming aware of it. That being, rejection of monopolized products.
I've never seen so much activity around Linux, for example. Or, I follow a content creator called SkillUp who just launched a videogames news site with revenue purely from subscriptions, and apparently they got way more subs than they expected. And as has been mentioned, lots of indie games have been getting funding lately, and a relatively small studio just crushed the game awards circuit.
Examples I know of in Canada include:
- NB Media Coop: https://nbmediacoop.org/
- Pivot: https://pivot.quebec/
Also, here's a game dev co-op from Montreal that has been around since 2012 as a bonus: https://ko-opmode.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
Edit: Just an example. The funniest thing they've been doing regularly for decades now is when they go out on the streets with a camera to ask random strangers - the common man - about what they think about some recent development, like "What do you think about Trump?".
But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?
> media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost
I've seen news on Swedish public media that disparages all sides of the political spectrum, exactly what I expect from public media not taking sides.
> But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.
Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
Even compared to non-government funded media in their own countries, just to start with. Or public broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC or PBS.
As for Swedish public media not taking sides, that is like saying Fox News doesn't take sides and isn't aligned with the Republican party. If you can convince yourself to believe that Swedish public media isn't politically aligned, then congratulations.
> Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.
How do you not understand? When interviewing the "common man" out on the streets, you should do that, and not interview somebody who is a high level party functionary without telling people you are doing that.
That's like Fox News interviewing "random strangers" on the streets, but it turns out to be JD Vance in a wig.
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.
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.
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?
Billionaires would be less of a problem in a world where we'd all be multi millionaires.
"Andersen et al. 2022 found that about 7.5 percent of foreign aid is diverted by elites." etc
- 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.
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 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.
Britannica was the shining example of capitalism, being sold door to door. Encarta was done by Microsoft. Both got disrupted real quick by a million people making little edits to an open encyclopedia. An open-source gift economy with many contributors seems to beat capitalistic systems. Linux. Wordpress. MySQL. In general, science / wikipedia / open source projects also feature peer review before publishing, a desirable trait.
Everyone has a cellphone. It's not like we need professional cameras to capture things. What we really need is a place to post clips and discuss them in a way that features peer review. It would be better and strictly healthier than the current for-profit large corporations like Meta or X. That's one of the projects I'm building using our technology. Anyone interested, email me (email in my profile)
Compare:
1. https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
The most dedicated Wikipedians in specific domains often tend to be academics in that space and whose day jobs tend to be adjacent to the niche they edit.
It's difficult to find the equivalent for local government, because the most knowledgable are already active, in the loop, and in the same circles so social ostracism is a real risk that they might be viewed as airing dirty laundry.
The number of people in a Chamber of Commerce, PTA, City Council, School Board, Rotary Club, local Library Foundation, Church Board, Teachers Union leadership, City Workers Union leadership, Police Union leadership, and a couple family offices may number in the 50-100 range, so no one is anonymous.
And finally, most local news groups are now owned by the 3rd generation of that family, and most of them have either already or are in the process of getting out of the local news business.
The reality is, if you want to make an impact in your local community (especially politically) you will have to build local relationships and become extremely active in existing cliques - playing golf at the private golf club, attending church or temple, becoming a member of the rotary club, contributing to library foundation fundraisers, become a junior member of the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
Finally, your pitch is the exact same one NextDoor back when they were a much smaller startup. Look at how that turned out. Making a Wikipedia type organization in 2026 would be nigh impossible given how decentralized the Internet has become, and how it isn't a niche platform anymore.
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.
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.
Haven't used Nextdoor, maybe its similar?
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.
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
Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.
Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.
Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.
The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?
Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.
Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.
You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
The problem with the government is it doesn't like oversight. So in this situation, you need to devise a scheme where the government is forced to pay something, but also has no control over that money. Which is a hard problem.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
For more or less a nominal amount of money to him He's able to shape much of our public discourse.
I suspect a volunteer non profit news organization could emerge. But even then, how many skilled journalists are going to be able to work a "real" job too.
This could maybe be done with retirees or those who are mostly financially independent, as well as those who want to help run the nonprofit.
The problem is that in the current climate, it is harder both to retire and to become financially independent.
If you want the labor of skilled journalists beyond a trickle of content from the ivory tower type, you either need to set up an intentional community or simply pay people enough to live on. I don't see any clear shortcuts. Quality output requires sufficient energy inputs.
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-...
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Newspapers_published_...
Local online forums dedicated to a locality produce more representative content and everyone can participate as long as their isn't a similar controlling clique in charge of moderation. See /r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA for how moderation manipulates outcomes. Both perspectives are important, but each clique tends to omit what others deem important; leading to topic over-representation/under-representation problems.
There's clearly a loss on long forum informational pieces, but your community is misinformed or misrepresented if those pieces only support the motives of the clique.
https://westseattleblog.com/ is run by a single person (formerly a husband and wife team) and she attends huge numbers of local events and city meetings providing hyper-local coverage on things that are happening in the area.
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.
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.
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.
What's really needed is journalism done by professionals who are paid like professionals. That's a 100x better than any Facebook Group.
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.
https://buckscountybeacon.com/2025/08/journalist-jordan-gree...
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.
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.
There are many parts of the US where the local government is 100% controlled by Democrats, so they are in power in those areas.
This is also why I'm not convinced about public owned or funded journalism that isn't a cooperative, because that only gives additional power to the incumbent who holds the purse strings.
Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Reality has a left wing bias because reality is fact-based.
To take a "neutral" political position in this environment is to accept blatant lies. Journalism should be a pursuit of truthful information, thus being "neutral' politically is untenable if you want to do actual journalism.
It's true that might not always be the best for your subscriber numbers. But some folks do, actually, care about the truth.
Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.
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.
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
This is a "reader" submitted article and not written by the staff at the paper. I'm surprised they didn't give it more due diligence though.
The supreme court disagrees
> The Court recognized that "uninhibited, robust, and wide open" political debate can at times be characterized by "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."