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You are so accurate and correct.

Thank you for writing this.

I don't demand 100% agreement, but I do draw lines, and I get plenty of info from sources I disagree with. The loss of the Washington Post & NY Times for reliable national reporting has been devastating, and the RW owns the billionaires. So the system IS broken. Wish I had an answer for you.

This is also an excellent article about the economy writ large. I identify , but as an artist who used to make a decent income but now give away my creations because there is no market for them anymore. Corporate capitalism ate up all the smaller venues, while destroying our purchasing power.

On its face I’ve always liked the micro-payment notion where readers pay per-item. Obviously no idea if it pencils out, what price would need to be, and assumes it’s frictionless enough to appeal. No getting around the economics of subscriptions maxxing out fast. I don’t recall a serious attempt.

Spot on. I was a news reporter before my daily closed 30 years ago. Wound up good for my career but there's no way for news to survive anymore and society is paying the price. We are flooded with propaganda and few know the difference.

❤️

Until and unless someone does what they did with BlueSky and invests in a serious alternative, we will remain in a system where the attention economy rewards a small handful whilst wringing the life out of those that we need to nurture and grow into the next generation of voices.

Thank you for writing this. The sooner it sinks in, the better.

Plus, Substack is the platform for Nazis (they send nazi push notifications ffs!). Ideally everyone would move off the platform but because the readership is siloed, as you say, moving is extremely risky. Slightly less so if you have your own domain, of course.

Something like Nebula, but for writing, maybe? Not as tightly curated as a digital magazine, but still a collective of creators with some minimum threshold of quality and likely audience overlap. Maybe add in a tip feature for one-off thanks or something.

@defector.com @flaminghydra.com @404media.co and more

My optimism died last November. I’m working on it, but I’m old, sick, & tired. Living with HIV for 41 years - and a fascist uprising for the past decade- I apologize for my cynicism and despair in the waning years of my life. Been reading & listening to you since Wonkette -when we were all bloggers.

The current model doesn’t work for readers any better than it works for writers. I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time and have an idea for a potential solution that I’d like feedback from someone more experienced in the ecosystem. Would it be ok to dm a brief description to you?

Why some people get wilding sucessful is never easy to provide an answer. In the software world my company built a product just like Groupon, but before them. We did not survive. Why.. I put it up to luck and timing. Not features or advertising.

You may not have enjoyed writing it, but I wish I could bottle my gratitude for your having written it and send it to you in crates. Thank you 🙏🏻

We need to find financiers who invest solely in liberal media projects. We need more liberal investors

Oh cool, I'll follow that

My pleasure!

Our news outlet @thexylom.com is fiscally sponsored by the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, which allows us to take tax-deductible donations, memberships, and grants. From my POV, the downside of Wikimedia Foundation is that Wikipedia is susceptible to anonymous vandalism and "edit wars"

A group funded non profit is not the same as a billionaire's vanity project. You are going to have to have some sort of recognized and sanctioned financial reporting. So if not a non profit what structure would you suggest.

As immediate next steps, maybe this is fine, but is there any actual systemic change here? Or is it just hiding from the precarity around us?

Please add @indepthnh.bsky.social to the list as well. Indispensable!

I've been saying since last Trump administration at least, that we need public money to bring back the local paper, and local TV stations. There needs to be some level of local indendence, but tasked with Federal standards for being actual News and not Opinion.

Amazing read!

Some form of journalistic cooperative which allows readers access to a wide pool of content on the basis of a single flat fee is the model I think journalists should be looking at.

They haven't consolidated, but I feel like there will be instances of consolidation on Substack as time goes on.

And one problem I've found is that several newsletters I *want* to pay for have only "pay nothing" or "pay way more than I can afford" as options. I appreciate the need to set a floor for any kind of survivability, but from my end the effect is that I'm paying nothing at all rather than *something*.

Yep. That's indeed what we need. UBI and UHC.

might I suggest @flaminghydra.com ?

And I say this as someone who is nobody’s idea of a “writer”: I have my blog, and I do some writing as part of my day job, but when I looked into potentially making it a paid gig (or even doing it for beer money) I ran away screaming. The system is broken for everyone right now.

I can see a path to success in urban areas, in particular, through the establishment of Local Journalism Development Authorities charged with creating public-private partnerships, nonprofits, grants, and other mechanisms similar to housing assistance for journalism of local interest/benefit. 4/4

> average monthly payout per creator Similar to housing prices and salaries, the variance is so great that the interesting number would be "median" payout. As a news consumer on a fixed income, I set a strict budget and have to figure out the best way to parcel out my subscription fees. :(

Thx for writing this. I understand that a small (in the hundreds) of reporters / commentators have successfully gone to solo newsletters, but the ecosystem becomes so small. A recent person got fired, started a newsletter: it's $70/yr. I'm supposed to pay that for 1 person's views in just 1 area?

Whoa you're at TPM? Nice one @joshtpm.bsky.social