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Comment by aleph_naught | Hacker News Reader

I really like the wikipedia model, but I know it wouldnt work for every outlet. I’ve contributed more to public radio and wikipedia than any other news service subscription.

Ideally, nytimes/wapo/economist would be completely open, and one would be able to ‘donate’ with a single press of the apple pay button.

I prefer that over yet another username password combo + subscription + app echo system I need to maintain.

Or best of both worlds: single click of apple pay button sets a cookie for 30 days of access; sends a courtesy reactivation email with a link in case you clear your cookies.

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The big worry is that this doesn't work for local news at all. The nitty gritty details of governance happen at the local level - municipal and state/provincial legislatures. Journalism on that stuff doesn't scale.

Where's the proof that it doesn't scale to local level?

but local ads on local content are legitimately useful and the only type of display ad i’ve ever clicked on.

It is working in my community. http://www.berkeleyside.com/ has run a (very modest) profit for the last two years and continued to expand. Their focus is the greater Berkeley area; a population of about 350,000. It is a more educated and well-off population than national averages. The revenue split is 65-35% between supporters and advertising. They've also recently done a direct public offering of stock allowing for $800K in investment.

Local news, supported locally is possible.

Berkeley is profoundly out of the norm for American communities. Berkeley has money. Other places don't. This problem is not solved by the way things work where the money flows freely.

Berkeley has 350,000 people in it. It's also eighteen square miles in size. The entire Portland-South Portland-Biddeford MSA in Maine is about half a million people and it's two thousand square miles in size. And it certainly wouldn't in my hometown in the Lakes Region of Maine, with a population across four towns in the school district of about 15,000 people across a little under two hundred square miles.

The problem devolves to income inequality and the unsustainable nature of community-driven efforts because of it--nobody can afford it!

Why are they mutually exclusive? Newspapers have always had a local section.

But it doesn't need to scale. It needs to be as big as the area it services.

Hubris can be a powerful motive force. You get as big as the area you service, you think "I could do more than this", you get bigger, you service a larger area, you think "hey, is this enough..?" - and before you know it, the Manchester Guardian is a worldwide media company.

Arguably it works better. Minnesota Public Radio has 127,000 members [wikipedia], which is a bit over 2% of the population of MN. They do a far better job covering stuff like city politics than any other news organization in town.

The Guardian has 300,000 members [this article], which is 0.4% of the population of the UK. (And arguably, the better denominator would be the entire anglophone world.)

The Guardian was so like the Wikipedia model that Jimmy Wales was a board member of the trust. I would add a link to his wiki entry but it seems a bit recursive

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