There are two scenarios in which this could sustain itself: a) use common business models (CPM ads, donations, occasional grants) while innovating on the conte

There are two scenarios in which this could sustain itself: a) use common business models (CPM ads, donations, occasional grants) while innovating on the content side to attract an uncommonly large audience b) innovate on the business side (new products and services) while pumping out fairly traditional content I know a few of the people involved with this effort and from what I hear, it sounds like they're hoping to leverage some new content sourcing methods (graduate journalism students) to cut costs and stay lean. I'm not seeing anything particularly novel on the business side, though. To get to NPR territory, where you have an audience who likes you enough to give you money just to read/listen to you, you've got to provide a truly excellent service (e.g. provide something pleasant to listen to while driving to work). I have yet to see an online newspaper-type site do anything so incredible or novel that it's readers chip in to support it. Furthermore, why do people keep thinking the NPR model is a good one for a text-based medium? There are tech blogs with audiences much much larger than this site will likely ever be, and yet they don't see asking their readers for money as a viable business model...