I’m a bug fan of Dave Jorgenson. He used to work for the Washington Post making short form content, but he quit so he could continue without their control and censorship.
I could not agree more. It’s pretty cheap to spin up a site, the content is what’s expensive (and the legal coverage.) A co-op would allow the reporters to distribute risk and revenue.
Best of all, they would not have to work for Bezos anymore.
(I tried staying a subscriber to support the genuinely good investigative journalism they do, but Bezos’s changes to it were got to be too much for me to swallow; what finally drove me over was the incredibly congratulatory editorial that the editorial board posted in response to the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela.)
Exactly. What’s stopping these dis enfranchised journalists from massing together to form a new news organization?
They don’t need WaPo or NYT. Call it The Amendment or some such.
One of their former content creators, Dave Jorgenson, was making great shorts and getting wapo into tik tok feeds and Instagram/yt/etc
He left to pursue his own content with the audience he’d gained through wapo.
They should band together, he has a solid reach on his personal accounts already.
The former Vice crew (404, Remap, probably others) have talked about this in their various podcasts and blog posts and so forth:
My take is that there are two big, but linked, problems:
The first is… there is a reason all these news media outlets are shuttering. People don’t want to read. They also don’t want to watch a documentary that isn’t over-dramatized trash. And any form of monetization model mostly just antagonizes the audience who were never going to consume it in the first place but will GLADLY derail every single discussion to say how much they hate a paywall. So you become VERY dependent on your hardcore subscribers and that is an incredibly dangerous tightrope to walk. Do you prioritize your coverage based off what your patrons (because that is what they are) would want? Do you NOT cover something because it might make subscriptions go down? What do you drink when you realize you are literally the person who fired you a year back?
And the other is that legal representation costs a lot of money. Last Week Tonight have covered SLAPP Suits a few times over the years but that is also the reality of it. Any form of investigative journalism pretty much guarantees you are getting, at the very least, a C&D. If not a full blown lawsuit. A good lawyer can make the vast majority go away but… a good lawyer costs money.
The former Vice crew were pretty much all in a special case. 404 came out of Motherboard which was pretty much one of the most trusted and respected “tech” news sites out there. Aftermath has some of the Motherboard crew and but also is basically a who’s who of games media as a whole (arguably everyone who was keeping Kotaku alive). And Remap is mostly the people who were at Waypoint until Vice realized they were still getting paid and that audience is one of the most rabid and faithful out there when it comes to subscribing to content we love.
Whereas most outlets actively try to prevent people from getting enough popularity/notoriety that they could get their own funding for a new start. Like… think about who the big names in traditional news are? MAYBE you remember whatsherface’s name from PBS? But it is almost entirely going to be the anchors/commentators like Anderson Cooper because they are the ones you see night after night and they are the ones who present the stories written by the “normal” journalists. And zero shade to Mr Cooper, but that is very much intentional. Because if some third party wanted to pay him to spin up a new outlet? That’s great, but they ALSO need to hire like three or four more journalists to have anything for him to say.
As opposed to a Jason Schreier who, with sufficient lawyers and a contracted editor, can be more or less a one person show.
Is there a solution to all this?
Don’t know about the second point, but on the first, there’s a online newspaper here that does it pretty well. It’s like 240$ a year, but with the option to pay however little/much you want. the articles can be shared freely (no paywall, though i think since a year ago you need to enter your email to read, used to be completely free to share), but can’t be discovered/found unless you’re subscibed. it’s split into two legal entities, the newspaper that employs the journalists and a second non-profit that actually collects the payments and that every subscriber is allowed to vote in, elect leadership for etc. that works out guidelines for the newspaper part to follow.
has been working pretty well for several years now and it’s one of the last few places of quality, independent journalism in my country
I mean, it is the fundamental problem of art/science/knowledge.
It costs money/stability to create. That money often comes from either the wealthy or the state.The wealthy CAN be good but means you are catering to a specific audience and the problems can range from “We aren’t going to talk about the BDS movement because our fans like xboxes” to “We aren’t going to talk about the multiple wars and genocides facebook have supported because zuckface pays for our electricity”.
As for the state? Under a just government, that is awesome. Moving on.
As for us individually? Probably the biggest thing we, as individuals, can do is to actually permit-list websites that we like/trust on the adblocker. Ads are a genuinely awesome way to generate “passive” income which goes a long way towards keeping said lights on.
But also? If you have the cash, consider actually subscribing to news/media outlets you like. Get a newspaper subscription. Look at the independent media outlets and pay for a month or three every so often. Because the broader the subscriber/patron base, the less temptation/need there is to cater to the whales.
This. There are a lot of plays I’ve seen recordings of where all I can think at the end is “I wonder how different it would be if their target demo wasn’t the upper middle class?” I remain convinced that if “Rent” wasn’t geared towards that demo Mimi would not have lived, for instance.
We can say “Do what you want, your audience will follow” all we want, but while some forms of art do well as passion projects (not to say you shouldn’t pay your artists, you should, but not the point), journalism is not. It takes a lot of consistent time focussing on it, and you can’t do that on your nights, and weekends off.
Cooperative, decentralized, atomized journalism that starts small, stays small, spreads liability and is not for profit.
Alternatively, money. Lots and lots of money.
Serious question: What would be the funding model? It seems like the number of people willing to pay for journalism is fairly small, though nowhere near zero.
When the Denver Post got bought out by a private equity company (you know how that goes), a bunch of journalists from there got together to create the Colorado Sun. It operates on a model similar to NPR/PBS, except federal/Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding was never a thing to begin with.
I’m not sure how well it’s working, but well enough that they’re still around after several years!
Some kind of micro transaction model sounds appealing to me. I‘d pay 5 to 25 cents to read articles from different sources. I already subscribe to local newspapers but can’t afford to subscribe to the many I read from here on Lemmy.
The pirate bay guys tried to spin up somthing called flattr a decade or two back. You put in a fixed amount per month, then when you engage with media you like you click a “flattr” button and that media gets a slice. You coule alao setup different people to always get a cut. Say you put in $10/month and flattr 100 things? Everyone gets 10 cents. $100/month? $1 each.
It didnt catch on, likely due to processing fees, but I always liked that idea. Signing up for dozens or hundreds of patrons/ghosts/etc is just too hard to manage and fund, but if I and several million other people could hand out pennies a month, it might really matter to small artists/journalists.
Maybe now with some countries that allow payments with no fees, it might work.
Maybe crowdfunding and donations perhaps?
Shuttering the big news orgs is a permanent damage. It further fractures the shared reality and we are all left in our private chambers, accurate or not
we are simply entering a new era where truth is an expensive and rare thing while hallucinated slop is force fed to almost everyone
Forming a cooperative would be great for their professional lives and maybe benefit a few subscribers but society has otherwise completely lost
Does socialism provide solutions to truth being expensive and rare?
Truth is still expensive but if the public intelligently funds to uncover and disseminate it then at least it will be accessible
I’ve referred to this as the death of the expert, apparently there’s also a book similarly titled that covers the same concept.
I highly recommend anyone interested to look up Operation Mindfuck, how it worked and where some of the Discordians that took part ended up going later in their lives. I would also argue removing sources of authority like news organizations, or at least ruining their legitimacy, is a part of pushing the population towards chapel perilous.
As for the concerns about funding a news coop, I wonder if the relative success of Dropout tv would be a good model? The only other successful organization in an unsuccessful format I can think of is The Onion, but they had a major investor save them.
A journalist who left the post a few months before the layoffs created an independent news organization called local news international https://lni.media/ maybe some of the laid off journalists will join him.
