Comment by embedding-shape
2 days 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.
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.
> 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.
Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!
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.
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/
- 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/
That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.
Modern-day patronage is kind of different from a subscription. It's a lot like a "pay what you want" subscription model, but people seem a lot more generous when you express it as a "donation with early access to premium articles" rather than payment for goods and services.
That's really fair. I think of my donations and support and usually higher than I would want to subscribe for!
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 :)
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.
8 replies →
You just find the optimal point for the most people if it's for profit.
2 replies →
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.
Its almost like we should just publicly fund it from the tax people already pay.
What issue from the listed above public funding would address? Public funding doesn’t prevent the entity to become bloated.
Quite the opposite!
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?
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.
>? 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.
5 replies →
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.
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.
There's also issues when the watched are funding the watches. If the council funds the newspaper, then the newspaper reports badly on the council, then the council can reducing funding for the newspaper.
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
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.
5 replies →