One of their former content creators, Dave Jorgenson, was making great shorts and getting wapo into tik tok feeds and Instagram/yt/etc
He left to pursue his own content with the audience he’d gained through wapo.
They should band together, he has a solid reach on his personal accounts already.
Serious question: What would be the funding model? It seems like the number of people willing to pay for journalism is fairly small, though nowhere near zero.
When the Denver Post got bought out by a private equity company (you know how that goes), a bunch of journalists from there got together to create the Colorado Sun. It operates on a model similar to NPR/PBS, except federal/Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding was never a thing to begin with.
I’m not sure how well it’s working, but well enough that they’re still around after several years!
Some kind of micro transaction model sounds appealing to me. I‘d pay 5 to 25 cents to read articles from different sources. I already subscribe to local newspapers but can’t afford to subscribe to the many I read from here on Lemmy.
Maybe crowdfunding and donations perhaps?
I’m a bug fan of Dave Jorgenson. He used to work for the Washington Post making short form content, but he quit so he could continue without their control and censorship.
“Bug fan”?
🐛
What?
🐛
Why the worm?
It’s a big bug.
What
I could not agree more. It’s pretty cheap to spin up a site, the content is what’s expensive (and the legal coverage.) A co-op would allow the reporters to distribute risk and revenue.
A journalist who left the post a few months before the layoffs created an independent news organization called local news international https://lni.media/ maybe some of the laid off journalists will join him.
Shuttering the big news orgs is a permanent damage. It further fractures the shared reality and we are all left in our private chambers, accurate or not
we are simply entering a new era where truth is an expensive and rare thing while hallucinated slop is force fed to almost everyone
Forming a cooperative would be great for their professional lives and maybe benefit a few subscribers but society has otherwise completely lost
I’ve referred to this as the death of the expert, apparently there’s also a book similarly titled that covers the same concept.
I highly recommend anyone interested to look up Operation Mindfuck, how it worked and where some of the Discordians that took part ended up going later in their lives. I would also argue removing sources of authority like news organizations, or at least ruining their legitimacy, is a part of pushing the population towards chapel perilous.
As for the concerns about funding a news coop, I wonder if the relative success of Dropout tv would be a good model? The only other successful organization in an unsuccessful format I can think of is The Onion, but they had a major investor save them.
Does socialism provide solutions to truth being expensive and rare?
Truth is still expensive but if the public intelligently funds to uncover and disseminate it then at least it will be accessible
