Her Dad, my wife's Hubs, recovering journalist, JSK '18 fellow, NAS CCF-er, transplant Maconite, rehabbed evangelical, former child. I do what I can when I can.
Dec 9, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Wednesday thoughts:
I'd put it all into community-ownership of local news.
A.) Establish a worker-reader-producer co-op to fund, train, support and connect people who want to start community-owned news outlets and/or acquire failing legacy outlets for community ownership. /1
B.) Put half of that $1B into an endowment to staff the nat'l co-op and feed substantial start-up grants to seed new local news co-ops. Use the rest for a revolving loan fund to support next stage growth for co-ops ready to grow.
These numbers are not precise.
Apr 13, 2020 • 20 tweets • 9 min read
An idea to build a brighter future for local news instead of applying band-aids to the moment:
Create a revolving loan fund to start, support and expand local news co-ops and nonprofits.
I think $300M would work. But why should the feds? And how? A long thread... /1
Misunderstanding this basic fact is why journos think "Local news is dying/dead" instead of evolving into something better. The former means saving big ass companies and their problematic scale model, as Dr. Littau describes it. But if... /1
If we embrace "Local news is evolving" then we can, essentially for the first time in our history, build the business of local journalism to align with our values (truth, justice, democracy) as a practice that is holistic in its service to the communities we cover. /2
