That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers

I'm kind of curious how many people would pay a monthly or annual subscription fee for a "newspaper" that came out in electronic and/or premium print format only to subscribers, published an edition whenever the hell it had enough to publish it and contained hardcore journalism geared towards ending waste, fraud and abuse and informing the public of bad actors.

It would be pirated, but the pirates would always get it a little bit later and the print copy would be ad free. Some kind of premium channel blog service would let subscribers follow the work of the journalist, side notes, follow-up ideas, etc. up to the point where it's not compromising the integrity of the work.

Something like that. I'm eager for any ideas people have that will get the civic activism back in newspapers and kick the cruft out. I don't think they actually need to come out on a fixed schedule and I really don't think they need to cover lifestyle, sports and other things the way they do now. They need to focus on stuff that's not easily duplicated and they need to take their time really kicking some ass. The Internet can pick stuff up from there and expand the impact.

People don't like their labor going to someone else's profit.

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - Paul Graham - July 2008

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"#3: New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they've been slow to adapt to the web. It's more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives. "