When the Student Newspaper Is the Only Daily Paper in Town

It was the local counter culture weekly, The City Pulse, that first broke the story of Dr. Naser, the MSU sexual predator. The City Pulse was also the only press that reported Sparrow Hospital had failed a federal inspection and was in danger of losing their certification. Sparrow execs went out and confiscated every paper they could find in a ten mile radius of the hospital to prevent the story from spreading.

Personal note Ed Vielmetti quoted in the article is a friend who helped me write the the open data legislation we're trying to pass here in Michigan.

Here’s a twitter thread from Crains Detroit which talks about how the quality of this article is kind of crappy.

https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904...

1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those potential voters by going back to their lives.

2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username/password from local government with ID.

Both of these require that the government recognise that some information is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc). Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely available', you guessed it, evil.