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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I don't know of any profitable way to provide local news without having it subsidized by classifieds, car ads, real estate ads, etc. Newspapers used to be profitable because they dominated all these things. But on the web, they become detached. Ebay and craigslist can efficiently serve many places and scale up effectively. But it's hard to watch the police in 100 major cities at once.

How much money would people pay to provide the service of watching the police? I'm afraid the answer is... not much. It has to be tied to something else, or to have a nonprofit structure.

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The structure for controls is there. It just needs a fix. Write your representatives.

Journalism backed by advertisement pushing consumerism isn't a valid democratic institution, IMHO. It doesn't represent anything. As a control system it is a travesty, you don't vote them and you have to pay for access. And then it forces candidates to be press-visible with the same marketing machine, with the same backers.

Full government transparency is required, not just rhetoric. The technology is available already.

It depresses me sometimes how almost everything in society can be be reduced to the question "but how will this generate money"? On the other hand, maybe the sooner people are honest with reality and start asking that question first, the sooner we'd get solutions to problems like this one. At least that seems to be the libertarian take on things. It just concerns me that the end result of the invisible hand given absolute power is something out of a William Gibson nightmare.

The reason we got all this great investigative reporting in the first place was because newspapers were making money.

Journalism needs to have its own source of power besides the government. You can't simultaneously depend on the government for funding and make it your mission to expose the government's shortfalls. Profit provides that power.

True, but is it better for a paper to be afraid of its sponsors and popular opinion than to be afraid of the government? The need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to maximize profit is what's brought us such gems like USAToday and 99% of the garbage on television. On the other hand, some of the only watchable programming IMO is on PBS, and we know where that money comes from.

I don't have the answer; papers funded by the government would be a disaster like you said. But I don't think profit is the panacea to the world's problems.

Yes and no; the BBC is perceived as independent even while publicly funded; so are NPR and PBS, to a much lesser extent.

Their "independence" doesn't mean that they'll investigate anything/everything. For example, while all of them are willing to quibble about specific aspects of specific govt programs, they're unwilling to go after govt programs in the large (with the small exception of military projects).

The money question is critical. It's how we get food/shelter/consumer electronics to those people who do this task? Money's just* liquefied labor, after all.

* Yes, I'm really, really simplifying here.

Money is the expected utilons of human existence. If society doesn't give something money, it doesn't care. If you don't give it money, you don't care either.

Unfortunately, people are often short-sighted when it comes to the use of their money. In earlier days, there were influences of culture and religion that were stronger than economic forces, and provided stability for a civilization. Today, these influences are mostly ignored in favor of money.

Motives are irrelevant. The only important question is whether outcomes are socially beneficial. I assume we evolved to look at motives because they're a good predictor, but today's society is somewhat more complex than the african savannah.

If something's not making money or breaking even, then it's losing money. It's taking something good - raw materials, capital, the effort of employees - and producing something less good. It's a drain on society, a parasite.

We produce enough surplus that society can survive a great many parasites (the entire public sector, and all the loss-making businesses) but every little is a brake on potential, particularly the potential for compounding growth. It retards the future.

The parasitic public sector also put us on the moon and built the bomb.

I did reply, but I realized it was a red herring, and deleted it. It doesn't matter if you like the public sector and I don't. It's parasitic, that's just a fact.

What part of my comment says I like the public sector? While it does seem to be a money burning machine nowadays, it has made unmatched contributions to mankind in the past; that's also just a fact. It thus does not inherently "retard the future".

It retards it relative to the future that would have been if the money had been spent by non-parasitic entities.

Personally I'd argue that it got us pay-every-trip-afresh ride to a space we couldn't afford to stay in, and a bomb humanity still cowers beneath, to use your examples. But that would be exactly the red herring I named. When I say it's parasitic, I'm saying it eats and obliterates some part of the value generated by society. It might also generate intangible goods, but they are things society doesn't value economically.

Valid points. I guess I just get hung up on the relationship between things society values economically, and things of intrinsic value to society. Personally I believe the relationship between the two is too loosely coupled to let the market make decisions for us.

Make the paper a weekly or a monthly. Eliminate fluff, abandon breaking news and provide deep insight.

That's the same model used by magazines like the economist and the atlantic, and I think they're doing well.

This would not be the end of the tabloid, the are so cheap to produce they can go on forever. It would not be the end of local news, it would not even be the end of local daily or breaking news. It would just be the end of of printed daily local news.

I would expect that many cities could support a dozen independent crime/police bloggers, either via ads or direct donations. Smaller municipalities probably wouldn't be able to support any full-timers, but they may only need part-time watching, anyway.

A friend and I had a long discussion about possible models for local investigative journalism online.

The best we could come up with was something along the lines of a modified subscription plan with a low yearly rate (n < $40 usd) funding automated collections of government data with a very small cadre of reporters writing stories and editing each other.

Either that or beg-a-thons like public radio.

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