news media

It is said that objectivity is what we need more of, but that’s not what people want. What people want is advocacy.

Worker-owned outlets must still run a good business and serve their readers, said Schneider, who advises founders to “put the co-op on the bottom of your about page, not the front of your home page.”

Recognizing the challenges that come with fundraising, the founders of The 51st, a local news site in Washington, D.C., opted for a different approach. Instead of creating a worker-owned cooperative, they established a worker self-directed nonprofit. Workers make up the board of the organization, and its nonprofit status allows it to raise money mo... See more

Increasingly, only charismatic attention-hijackers can reach broad audiences in exhausting information environments. It might be the populist politician dismantling a decrepit party establishment, or a dynamic content creator outpacing stuffy professional newsrooms as a source of information.

We’re really trying to build a modern 2020s culture of how a news company operates, which is very engaged and fairly flat. We have a hierarchy in the newsroom to make news decisions, but it’s otherwise a fairly flat organization of mission-oriented, collegial people who actually work in an office.

Every story gets two reads from experienced editors, which I think is under-appreciated — the editing authority that needs to go into the rebirth of local journalism.

All of these playbooks are at least partially written. You sometimes hear people say, “Nobody’s figured it out yet.” But this is all about execution. The two main sources of revenue are advertising and reader revenue — you may as well call it circulation. That was true a long time ago and it’s still true.