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

https://twitter.com/thensim0nsaid/status/1336457906200469509

2/

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.

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

https://twitter.com/dlboardman/status/1249360020652900352

Let's say that $300M funds 500 news co-ops and nonprofits, starting to offset the 2,100 newspapers @businessofnews says we've lost since 2004.

A revolving loan fund means that money goes out then comes back to fund another 500 and so on. /2 usnewsdeserts.com/#1536248669354…

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

https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1198306933364731905

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