It’s interesting that property ads, and classifieds more broadly, benefit from a centralized platform but journalism itself does not. It’s an uneven impact of the technology shift from printing presses to digital. Why didn’t the drop in publishing costs make local journalism MORE accessible?

Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.

Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.

Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.

The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?

Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.

Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.

You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.

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mywittyname 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What you're describing is a lot like NPR. Which was great, until the people in power decided to pull that funding.

The problem with the government is it doesn't like oversight. So in this situation, you need to devise a scheme where the government is forced to pay something, but also has no control over that money. Which is a hard problem.

	▲	coredog64 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know that I would describe NPR as "great". One specific example that sticks in my mind was a story they did about firearms. The host kept using the word "automatic". Knowing something about firearms, it was apparent to me that it was being used as shorthand for "not a revolver", but the host was implying that it meant "machine gun". Revolvers are so uncommon that there's really not any useful value being passed in attaching the word "automatic" when describing a gun unless you're describing something that is subject to the NFA. Or, more recently, there was a deep dive into the Chicago parking meter deal. I don't think anyone needs convincing that it was a bad deal, but one thing that they said was that the new owners have "already received back all the money they paid out". Okay, but please expand. This was for an economics show, so is the recovery just a gross dollar comparison (e.g. they've received back more than $1.1B), is it inflation adjusted, does it exceed the time value of the money that was given to the Daley administration? It wouldn't have taken but another 30 seconds to make it clear, but by not saying I'm 99% certain they were focusing on gross dollar comparison and ignoring the value of 2008 dollars vs. 2025 dollars. In turn, that sounds like it's playing towards the audience members that don't understand why the total of payments for their mortgage is so much more than the purchase price of the house.