And how are they to 'go pro' if there is no business model to be a professional journalist / researcher / reporter / documentarian? I think you believe we can

And how are they to 'go pro' if there is no business model to be a professional journalist / researcher / reporter / documentarian? I think you believe we can get all our content from local, interested bloggers. We can't. There is no filtering and no curation. There are no stakes in telling the truth because no one has a business to defend. Pulling information together and filtering out the rubbish is long and arduous and it's work. That's what journalism actually entails, not the writing part, which is fairly trivial. But yours seems to be a typical HN response. "People feel this is important to do without being paid, therefore we should not support them as a society". It is an attitude I cannot comprehend. Something is important to our civil society - why not make doing it a viable living?