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For-profit businesses tend to get bloated and eventually succumb to their own growth, one way or another.

Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).

Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.

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How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area? That’s significantly below a living wage for one person in the US…

Maybe an incredibly lean organization could make it with 150,000 EUR? All digital, 3-4 really devoted employees.

> How many people would 15,000 EUR employ in your area?

3-4 people easily, probably closer to 5-6 in reality. Minimum salary in my country is around 1200 EUR/month, but we also have free health care for everyone and other anti-democratic things.

Ah, I had a brain-fart, was thinking yearly instead of monthly. Sorry!

I wonder if a newspaper co-op is a viable idea?

I do feel like there's a turn happening in the economy, or at least, some new scene growing. Or maybe I'm just finally becoming aware of it. That being, rejection of monopolized products.

I've never seen so much activity around Linux, for example. Or, I follow a content creator called SkillUp who just launched a videogames news site with revenue purely from subscriptions, and apparently they got way more subs than they expected. And as has been mentioned, lots of indie games have been getting funding lately, and a relatively small studio just crushed the game awards circuit.

Unsure about a newspaper per se, but there are a number of news blogs that are co-ops.

Examples I know of in Canada include:

- NB Media Coop: https://nbmediacoop.org/

- Pivot: https://pivot.quebec/

Also, here's a game dev co-op from Montreal that has been around since 2012 as a bonus: https://ko-opmode.com/

That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.

Yeah, as long as you remove the "for-profit" part, it's essentially that. Once it's a for-profit business, it perverses the incentives, and it'll be a race to the bottom or a race to see what subscribers can survive the highest prices, which is exactly what we wanna avoid :)

Non-profits don't really stop any of that. Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money, and use the non-profit status to pay employees less.

Maybe there's a third way. What about a company owned by a "perpetual purpose trust" - i.e. a trust with a defined purpose that is legally binding. It's the only shareholder, so no extracting value and all profits have to comply with the trust's bylaws in how they are used. Patagonia (US company) is one example of this; it's profits are legally bound to go toward environmental causes.

Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).

That sounds kind of like a B-Corp, innit?

That's a third-party certification that can be allowed to lapse, not a legal or legally enforceable status.

https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/

This is the business model of The Guardian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited

> Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money

Where is this specifically, in the US? Usually the laws of the country prevent this, since they're you know... Non-profits... But wouldn't surprise me there are a few leftover countries who refuse to join the modern world.

The US has this problem. There aren't really rules on paying executives as much as you want, or having bonus structures based on fundraising, as long as the board okays it and considers it as contributing to the mission. It is non-profit because it doesn't pay out profits to investors. This is a large way corruption happens in the US, ie a lot of those "X politician foundations" pay modest amounts of money to some cause, but a large percentage of the donations go to the executive as a salary for running the corp, the executive is the politician. Its a big shell game.

Yeah, seemingly a local problem rather than a problem with non-profits, unfortunately :/ Hope things get better over there over time!

What country do you live in and can you link to the laws regulating nonprofit employee pay so that we can compare and use them as a model?

You just find the optimal point for the most people if it's for profit.

I doubt that's true in practice, although I know many capitalists know that to be true in theory.

I think that only holds if company ownership is not close with company leadership. Is a "subscriber owned" newspaper model possible? Like how co-op stores are at least nominally owned by their customers.

I could also imagine a system in which a local newspaper was actually run as a public utility by an independent corporation, but explicitly chartered and subsidized by a town/city/county.

Modern-day patronage is kind of different from a subscription. It's a lot like a "pay what you want" subscription model, but people seem a lot more generous when you express it as a "donation with early access to premium articles" rather than payment for goods and services.

That's really fair. I think of my donations and support and usually higher than I would want to subscribe for!

The only reliable funding sources then seem to be local car dealerships and lawyers who want puff pieces / ads about themselves. I think we need to acknowledge that communities producing news about their region is a public good and thus should be funded with taxes.

Its almost like we should just publicly fund it from the tax people already pay.

That's a radical idea! Unfortunately, it gives a lot of ammo to the "anti-socialist" people who are vehemently against anything "public" funded by tax payers. Look at what's happening in the Nordics for example, where pretty much everyone supported public radio/TV at least when I was growing up, but nowadays a bunch of political parties are trying to have it removed/reduced.

Nordic public broadcasting is some of the lowest quality news media you can find. They're not a good example, unless the job of public service media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost (you know which ones).

Edit: Just an example. The funniest thing they've been doing regularly for decades now is when they go out on the streets with a camera to ask random strangers - the common man - about what they think about some recent development, like "What do you think about Trump?".

But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.

> Nordic public broadcasting is some of the lowest quality news media you can find.

Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?

> media is to only support one or two political parties at all cost

I've seen news on Swedish public media that disparages all sides of the political spectrum, exactly what I expect from public media not taking sides.

> But the "random stranger" common man on the street is actually a politician from the journalist's own party who has dressed up and showed up on a pre-agreed place and time.

Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.

> Compared to what? Have you seen what qualifies as "news" in other parts of the world?

Even compared to non-government funded media in their own countries, just to start with. Or public broadcasters in other countries, such as the BBC or PBS.

As for Swedish public media not taking sides, that is like saying Fox News doesn't take sides and isn't aligned with the Republican party. If you can convince yourself to believe that Swedish public media isn't politically aligned, then congratulations.

> Cherry-picking in journalism has absolutely nothing to do with public media or not, and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up here.

How do you not understand? When interviewing the "common man" out on the streets, you should do that, and not interview somebody who is a high level party functionary without telling people you are doing that.

That's like Fox News interviewing "random strangers" on the streets, but it turns out to be JD Vance in a wig.

> As for Swedish public media not taking sides

That's not what I said, I said that I've seen Swedish public media "disparages all sides of the political spectrum", which is way more realistic than "not taking sides". We all wish we can be perfectly impartial, but that's short of impossible, so the next best thing is that it pushes back no matter where it comes from. That's what I've seen, but I no longer live in Sweden, maybe this last decade it's been different than how it was when I lived up there.

Keep lying.

There's also issues when the watched are funding the watches. If the council funds the newspaper, then the newspaper reports badly on the council, then the council can reducing funding for the newspaper.

You need it to be independent, so how can you fund it. Perhaps a separate precept on the council tax bill which is set separately (say by national government)

The BBC funding model attempts to do this at a national level, but of course nowadays that's not sustainable - part of the failure of the old civic minded establishment in favour of the new edgy profit minded establishment

I bet we could come up with a list of things we don't like about adtech, tax those behaviors, and give the proceeds to their local competitors.

What issue from the listed above public funding would address? Public funding doesn’t prevent the entity to become bloated.

Quite the opposite!

It fact you absolutely shouldn't as this put them in huge conflict of interest.

how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?

The same argument applies to ad-sponsored media too. In fact, have you noticed that it was a very long time since a major paper did an exposé of the very sleazy online casino business? I wonder why.

>? how will you investigate corruption if your funding can be cut?

Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media? Plenty of examples out there in the world where those currently in power can't just cut funding to major institutions, I think that's the norm rather than the exception in fact.

>Don't make it possible for the current administration to cut the funding of the public media?

Surely laws are immutable system and cannot be changed ever. It is always perfectly designed without loopholes, and especially so when ones who design the system could benefit from them.

Absolutely not, no one claimed so either, and frankly, why continue discussing with you when you don't seem to be curious about a honest and straightforward conversation? Screw that noise.

Normally, in democratic countries, you have a process for changing laws. Enshrine your public media in those, or even better, in the constitution, and you've pretty much protected it short-term at least. Add in foundations or whatever concepts your country have, to add more layers of indirection, and it's even more protected.

You can really see how well such system works by observing USA right now.

Only way you could have any form of public financing of such endeavor without conflict of interest is to have multinational organization funded by every country.

Or you end up with BBC.

EDIT: to elaborate even further - you didn't even address the problem that ones designing this system would have to work against their own best interest. just wishy-washed that part away.

I'd say the US is a pretty shit example, given it's run by corporations right now, and lacks a judicial arm of the government that actually enforces the country's own laws. But to each and their own.

Again, with an open mind, go out and read about how publicly funded media works outside of the US (and UK, since you seemingly have a set mind about BBC too), and there is a whole rooster of different methods for funding these kind of things, yet letting them be independent. Some of these institutions are over 100 year old, yet still independent.

I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out how they made that work :)

>made it work

More like made it dysfunctional - i live in EU btw

Laws are system made by people who live within that system - it is a part of resource distribution system. Lawmakers do work in their own interest, and so far the only way we found to make a system work for benefit of everyone is by putting those vested interests at odds - hence non-bipartisan democracy.

This is basically a game theory problem, and when faced with prisoner dilemma you're saying 'it would all work if everyone chose to cooperate' If your solution to political problem is 'if only everyone did X' you don't have a solution but wishful thinking. Sure this can happen, but it is not a stable system, not one that can be moved from place A to B.

You keep saying i have set mind about those issues - yet you refuse to address underlying logical assumption by saying that (non-distinct) X made it work, without even providing an example of working solution - i don't think it's me who's arguing in bad faith here.

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