11 ms·

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

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.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
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.
- DonnyV 9mo ago
  Its almost like we should just publicly fund it from the tax people already pay.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    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.
    - carlosjobim 9mo ago
      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.
      - embedding-shape 9mo ago
        > 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.
        carlosjobim 9mo ago
        > 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.
  - __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
    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.
  - reliabilityguy 9mo ago
    What issue from the listed above public funding would address? Public funding doesn’t prevent the entity to become bloated.
    - philipallstar 9mo ago
      Quite the opposite!
  - Xelbair 9mo ago
    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?
    - bjourne 9mo ago
      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.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      >? 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.
      - Xelbair 9mo ago
        >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.
        embedding-shape 9mo ago
        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.
        9mo ago
- zeagle 9mo ago
  That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    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 :)
    - ecshafer 9mo ago
      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.
      - TimTheTinker 9mo ago
        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).
        chrisweekly 9mo ago
        That sounds kind of like a B-Corp, innit?
        TimTheTinker 9mo ago
        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/ https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
- komali2 9mo ago
  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.
  - jszymborski 9mo ago
    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/ https://nbmediacoop.org/ - Pivot: https://pivot.quebec/ 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/ https://ko-opmode.com/
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  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.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > 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.
    - bee_rider 9mo ago
      Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!
- glaslong 9mo ago
  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.
afavour 9mo ago
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.
- coredog64 9mo ago
  Have you ever listened to NPR and not been subject to Gell-Mann amnesia?
  - palmotea 9mo ago
    > 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.
    - aeternum 9mo ago
      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.
      - intended 9mo ago
        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.
__MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
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.
suddenlybananas 9mo ago
this is what taxes are for
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  If you are fine with your taxes also funding the news channels you hate the most, then sure.
exceptione 9mo ago
> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it. Media are the fourth estate. As such they are indispensable in a democratic state based on the rule of law. How to kill it: 1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a. 2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment > I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. I am not sure if it is still possible to mention public broadcasting because of dominant narratives ("public service bad, billionaire company good")¹, but left alone they will do a very good job usually. 1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?
- snarf21 9mo ago
  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.
  - exceptione 9mo ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
    - pksebben 9mo ago
      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.
      - exceptione 9mo ago
        effort. "Andersen et al. 2022 found that about 7.5 percent of foreign aid is diverted by elites." etc
snarf21 9mo ago
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.
- throwawaysleep 9mo ago
  Eh, even when journalism exists, it is generally just ignored by the public.
  - macintux 9mo ago
    Sure, it's generally ignored, but when something important emerges, having the historical record is incredibly useful.
- exceptione 9mo ago
  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.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    When a business doesn’t have a business model, I worry it might be an investor-funded startup or something like that.
EGreg 9mo ago
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/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ 2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  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.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
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.
- showerst 9mo ago
  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.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >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.
- EvanAnderson 9mo ago
  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.)
altilunium 9mo ago
> "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.
joebe89 9mo ago
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.
oooyay 9mo ago
Not really true. I live in Portland, local journalism is very alive here.
- starkparker 9mo ago
  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.
  - oooyay 9mo ago
    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.
    - starkparker 9mo ago
      Imago Dei? KGW didn't break anything that the Oregonian hadn't run two weeks prior on Dec. 3, and they got scooped by OPB on it in November. The best coverage KGW (owned and operated by Virginia-based TEGNA, which TIL is in the process of getting Nexstar'd) has had of homelessness was covering their news van getting broken into by a homeless couple and stealing their gear.
DarkNova6 9mo ago
What I am reading here is "Democracy doesn't come free of charge"
glaslong 9mo ago
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.
- Esophagus4 9mo ago
  You can still donate to PBS, and even to your specific local station.
  - glaslong 9mo ago
    And I do, but I'm not individually capable of solving a collective problem Alas I haven't yet hitched to the right unicorn to be able to fund every rural public radio either
boelboel 9mo ago
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'.
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
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.
- iso1631 9mo ago
  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.
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palmotea 9mo ago
> 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.
monkaiju 9mo ago
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.
markstos 9mo ago
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/ https://ghost.org/
- bpt3 9mo ago
  That's Ghost, at ghost.org!
nerdponx 9mo ago
> 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.
beloch 9mo ago
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.
- lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
  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.
shuntress 9mo ago
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.
atmosx 9mo ago
> 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.
- showerst 9mo ago
  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.
- nazcan 9mo ago
  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.
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  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.
- Intralexical 9mo ago
  Externalities, coordination failure... It's simultaneously worth vastly more to the community as a whole than the cost of producing it, and yet, to any single individual, the marginal benefit of having it is not enough to justify paying for it. The naïve solution might be to collectively subsidize it, but then that creates its own moral hazards and perverse incentives. ...It's a bit scary how much of democracy relies on institutions that were only able to form because we lucked into social conditions making them sustainable.
softwaredoug 9mo ago
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.
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  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?
  - Doctor_Fegg 9mo ago
    Absolutely yes. It’s happening every week of the year with the better Substack-style startups in the UK (London Centric, Manchester Mill etc.).
  - softwaredoug 9mo ago
    When coupled with “posts it on local subreddit”. Yes.
intended 9mo ago
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.
bartilg 9mo ago
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.
- aeternum 9mo ago
  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.
  - bartilg 9mo ago
    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.
mmooss 9mo ago
> 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.
- showerst 9mo ago
  I agree with you on the value > price, but disagree about why. If you take out classified (and later internet) Ads, almost no newspaper and no TV news in the US was _ever_ profitable. It might sound crazy but as a percent of revenue, news was actually moving more towards subs and away from ads even by the 1980s and 1990s. I used to work with a very long tenured editor who told me that in the 1970s north of 70% of most newspapers revenue was from ads. Back then overhead was massive due to printing presses and delivery infrastructure, now it's dominated by labor costs, but the point stands that doing good journalism isn't cheap. Even people who care about the product don't want it enough to pay its production cost, and never have.
lenerdenator 9mo ago
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.
lurk2 9mo ago
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.
nitwit005 9mo ago
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.
cyberax 9mo ago
We can't support full newspapers, with multiple editorial staff, printing presses, daily deliveries, etc. But blog-style pages that report news from local council meetings? This is definitely within reach. Perhaps with a podcast channel on Youtube. Local governance is the most important level for the democracy. It sounds weird, but it's absolutely crucial: 1. You can personally see the effects of decisions made. 2. They affect your daily life. 3. You can see that democracy _works_. 4. It's a good training ground for people with ambitions for higher-level elections.
tremon 9mo ago
The product that it (co-)produces is democracy. Are you saying that democracy is not worth that cost?
1970-01-01 9mo ago
Wasn't one of the shit coin flavors supposed to fix this? I'm quite happy we're past all that nonsense.

embedding-shape 9mo ago

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.

DonnyV 9mo ago
Its almost like we should just publicly fund it from the tax people already pay.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  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.
  - carlosjobim 9mo ago
    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.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      > 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.
      - carlosjobim 9mo ago
        > 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.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
  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.
- reliabilityguy 9mo ago
  What issue from the listed above public funding would address? Public funding doesn’t prevent the entity to become bloated.
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    Quite the opposite!
- Xelbair 9mo ago
  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?
  - bjourne 9mo ago
    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.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    >? 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.
    - Xelbair 9mo ago
      >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.
      - embedding-shape 9mo ago
        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.
        9mo ago
zeagle 9mo ago
That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  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 :)
  - ecshafer 9mo ago
    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.
    - TimTheTinker 9mo ago
      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).
      - chrisweekly 9mo ago
        That sounds kind of like a B-Corp, innit?
        TimTheTinker 9mo ago
        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/ https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
komali2 9mo ago
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.
- jszymborski 9mo ago
  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/ https://nbmediacoop.org/ - Pivot: https://pivot.quebec/ 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/ https://ko-opmode.com/
bee_rider 9mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!
glaslong 9mo ago
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.

afavour 9mo ago

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.

coredog64 9mo ago
Have you ever listened to NPR and not been subject to Gell-Mann amnesia?
- palmotea 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - aeternum 9mo ago
    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.
    - intended 9mo ago
      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.

__MatrixMan__ 9mo ago

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.

suddenlybananas 9mo ago

this is what taxes are for

carlosjobim 9mo ago
If you are fine with your taxes also funding the news channels you hate the most, then sure.

exceptione 9mo ago

> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it. Media are the fourth estate. As such they are indispensable in a democratic state based on the rule of law. How to kill it: 1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a. 2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment > I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. I am not sure if it is still possible to mention public broadcasting because of dominant narratives ("public service bad, billionaire company good")¹, but left alone they will do a very good job usually. 1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?

snarf21 9mo ago
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.
- exceptione 9mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
  - pksebben 9mo ago
    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.
    - exceptione 9mo ago
      effort. "Andersen et al. 2022 found that about 7.5 percent of foreign aid is diverted by elites." etc

snarf21 9mo ago

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.

throwawaysleep 9mo ago
Eh, even when journalism exists, it is generally just ignored by the public.
- macintux 9mo ago
  Sure, it's generally ignored, but when something important emerges, having the historical record is incredibly useful.
exceptione 9mo ago
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.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  When a business doesn’t have a business model, I worry it might be an investor-funded startup or something like that.

EGreg 9mo ago

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/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ 2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

alephnerd 9mo ago
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.

SoftTalker 9mo ago

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.

showerst 9mo ago
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.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >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.
EvanAnderson 9mo ago
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.)

altilunium 9mo ago

> "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.

joebe89 9mo ago

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.

oooyay 9mo ago

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

starkparker 9mo ago
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.
- oooyay 9mo ago
  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.
  - starkparker 9mo ago
    Imago Dei? KGW didn't break anything that the Oregonian hadn't run two weeks prior on Dec. 3, and they got scooped by OPB on it in November. The best coverage KGW (owned and operated by Virginia-based TEGNA, which TIL is in the process of getting Nexstar'd) has had of homelessness was covering their news van getting broken into by a homeless couple and stealing their gear.

DarkNova6 9mo ago

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

glaslong 9mo ago

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.

Esophagus4 9mo ago
You can still donate to PBS, and even to your specific local station.
- glaslong 9mo ago
  And I do, but I'm not individually capable of solving a collective problem Alas I haven't yet hitched to the right unicorn to be able to fund every rural public radio either

boelboel 9mo ago

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'.

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

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.

iso1631 9mo ago
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.
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palmotea 9mo ago

> 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.

monkaiju 9mo ago

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.

markstos 9mo ago

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/ https://ghost.org/

bpt3 9mo ago
That's Ghost, at ghost.org!

nerdponx 9mo ago

> 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.

beloch 9mo ago

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.

lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
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.

shuntress 9mo ago

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.

atmosx 9mo ago

> 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.

showerst 9mo ago
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.
nazcan 9mo ago
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.
nitwit005 9mo ago
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.
Intralexical 9mo ago
Externalities, coordination failure... It's simultaneously worth vastly more to the community as a whole than the cost of producing it, and yet, to any single individual, the marginal benefit of having it is not enough to justify paying for it. The naïve solution might be to collectively subsidize it, but then that creates its own moral hazards and perverse incentives. ...It's a bit scary how much of democracy relies on institutions that were only able to form because we lucked into social conditions making them sustainable.

softwaredoug 9mo ago

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.

shermantanktop 9mo ago
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?
- Doctor_Fegg 9mo ago
  Absolutely yes. It’s happening every week of the year with the better Substack-style startups in the UK (London Centric, Manchester Mill etc.).
- softwaredoug 9mo ago
  When coupled with “posts it on local subreddit”. Yes.

intended 9mo ago

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.

bartilg 9mo ago

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.

aeternum 9mo ago
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.
- bartilg 9mo ago
  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.

mmooss 9mo ago

> 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.

showerst 9mo ago
I agree with you on the value > price, but disagree about why. If you take out classified (and later internet) Ads, almost no newspaper and no TV news in the US was _ever_ profitable. It might sound crazy but as a percent of revenue, news was actually moving more towards subs and away from ads even by the 1980s and 1990s. I used to work with a very long tenured editor who told me that in the 1970s north of 70% of most newspapers revenue was from ads. Back then overhead was massive due to printing presses and delivery infrastructure, now it's dominated by labor costs, but the point stands that doing good journalism isn't cheap. Even people who care about the product don't want it enough to pay its production cost, and never have.

lenerdenator 9mo ago

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.

lurk2 9mo ago

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.

nitwit005 9mo ago

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.

cyberax 9mo ago

We can't support full newspapers, with multiple editorial staff, printing presses, daily deliveries, etc. But blog-style pages that report news from local council meetings? This is definitely within reach. Perhaps with a podcast channel on Youtube. Local governance is the most important level for the democracy. It sounds weird, but it's absolutely crucial: 1. You can personally see the effects of decisions made. 2. They affect your daily life. 3. You can see that democracy _works_. 4. It's a good training ground for people with ambitions for higher-level elections.

tremon 9mo ago

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

1970-01-01 9mo ago

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