Why the Public Can't Read the Press

Interesting article. However, at the end there is this idea that the government should fund news reporting. I grew up in Norway where the government did exactly that (the only TV channel when I was a kid was run by the government). Thing is, that government funded news outlet almost never said anything really critical about the government.

&quot;One of the highest-profile acquisitions came in 2011 when Bloomberg—already a behemoth in the business-intelligence sphere—bought a longtime employee-owned trade outlet, the Bureau of National Affairs. BNA, as it is known, went for $990 million. [...] Contrast that with the recent sales and acquisitions of more household names in journalism. The Washington Post was sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million. The Boston Globe sold in 2013 for $70 million. &quot;<p>Thing I learned from this article: There are real paying customers for the news, and --surprise surprise-- it&#x27;s the people whose jobs depend on it. The bulk of the American public doesn&#x27;t care enough to pay, and so won&#x27;t get the full news.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that there&#x27;s a way around this... ideas?

What about cities and counties funding newspapers? The author thinks that there&#x27;s at least some good DC reporting from national papers and non-profit media, but that what suffers are the local papers.<p>Funding at the local level could be provided by ballot initiatives that pull money directly from taxes instead of the general budget. That way local politicians can&#x27;t influence the news too much.<p>People are pretty passionate about funding libraries. I could see the same people accepting newspaper taxes.

Would be neat to see these outlets offer individuals non-commercial licenses at heavily reduced prices. I wonder if some parts of the geek population would enjoy access to good(better?) information.

Here is an idea:<p>First there is put up reddit&#x2F;quora mashup. List of questions submitted by people. Ranked by up-votes. And you can dismiss questions by clicking &quot;I have seen this&quot;. Only catch is that everything has to be a question.<p>Then put bounties and deadlines for the questions. Regular users can pay to increase the bounty. A week after the question is posted comes the deadline. Then every article written as answer gets posted to everybody who up voted the question.<p>Then the money is distributed so that 20% goes to the company running the website, 80% is shared among the authors, closely reflecting the up votes of paying users.

Fantastic, fantastic read.

Where&#x27;s the news&#x2F;political startup we need?