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Martha's Vineyard, where I live, has 2 quality weekly newspapers (Vineyard Gazette; MV Times) full of quality writing, the occasional long-term 'investigative' piece, and LOTS of local coverage. Town meetings, school boards, select boards, school sports, etc. Reporting on issues like the nitrogen that's threatening all of our ponds & lagoons, ocean health & strees in the fishing industry, Coast Guard futures, the impact of a wave of immigrants on the school system, etc. For an island with a year-round population of ~20,000.

I think part of the reason for this kind of unusual success is that many off-island ("summer") people with a strong connection to the island have paid subscriptions. Local advertisers support both papers, of course. The Times used to be freely distributed to local mailbox holders, but went to a subscription-only model a few years ago. Both papers sell for a dollar a copy and you can find them for sale all over the place.

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This perfectly articulated the oddity of Axios. Every time I see one of their articles, I keep waiting for the actual piece to start. In DC, at least, they are doing a lot of local coverage albeit in their weird bullet points style, and their reporters are popping up in lots of local podcasts, which is cool.

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May 16, 2023Liked by Hamilton Nolan

A guilty confession here. I was one of those incurious Americans who never read the local newspaper's serious stories. It was only when I started getting my news from the likes of the alt-weeklies and Pacifica Radio that I started taking an interest in serious news.

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i guess it was bad that everyone ‘scaled up’ fun blogs to become same-y news sites (chasing shrinking facebook traffic), but i liked the part where they hired freaks like me off the street just to get warm bodies in chairs posting Content

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May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023

Who actually wants to consume “real” journalism?You’re making the case that there’s a demographic that wants to produce it, but everyone wants to consume either fluff or dumbed down ideas. Is the fundamental argument here that we need an obscenely profitable news sector so that they can overproduce hard journalism on the off chance that once in a while someone will accidentally read it? Attention is scarce and satisfying garbage is superabundant.

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Patreon and substack - thoughts? Also the levee and or defector? Also can you mention defector as similar new initiative that hopefully thrives? Also podcasts like majority report, chapo trap house. All new and exciting becuade spread by word of mouth, so literally all that matters is that the journalism or god knows what is good and its recommended. The flip is you get like matt taibbi who made serious serious errors in his reporting on censorship at twitter. No accountability there.

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