A 10-point plan for the government to shore up local newspapers (From The Seattle Times' publisher)

The question remains: How do you mass-produce online journalism where people consume the vegetables, too?

You hunted through the paper for something to read. Sometimes you landed on an interesting topic or a really good writer. You learned about things.

Now you just click on a link on Twitter and there's not a lot of room to expand your knowledge.

 

Public radio can help solve the local news crisis — if it will expand staff and coverage

https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/p...-crisis-if-it-will-expand-staff-and-coverage/

 

Are people going to donate enough money to public radio stations to make that happen?

Also public radio stations cater to their donors, who aren’t single moms with four kids living in a “bad” part of town.

 

The British TV license model should be explored a bit, IMO, but the freedumb types would never allow for it. Perhaps a $2 or $3 fee added onto your high-speed bill.

 

How likely would it be the Congress would approve that? Which state legislatures?

 

The government is like the mafia. They're not giving you money with no strings attached. One day they'll call in the favor, and you cannot refuse.
I don't know what the answer is for saving newspapers and making them profitable again. If I did, I wouldn't be toiling away at a microscopic daily. But I sure as hell know that the idea of any kind of government subsidy should send chills down the spine of any journalist.

 

Probably by making them non-profits. Depends on the size of the market.

Per the link I posted, hedge funds aren't helping.

 

While I agree with this in principle, in practice it's not black and white.

NPR, PBS and the BBC are all editorially independent and do pretty swell journalism.

I think the question of funding small town journalism in the manner of a public utility depends on how it's done.

I'm further not sure Colonel McCormack or Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos or William Randolph Hearst had anyone's interest in mind but their own; or that corporate advertising money from Ford or Anheiser-Busch or Microsoft is any better for our national debate than money distributed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

 

I don’t see why we couldn’t add $50 to the price tag on a cheap Chinese-made TV and call it a day. The BBC license fee is around $200/year if I remember correctly, but it also doesn’t do pledge drives.

 

I believe the BBC license fee is optional, which folks forget.

So I think you can opt out if you don't want BBC programming.