[bicknergseng]

I've been thinking about 2 as a potential path forward for journalists/journalism. Is there a reason to continue the monolithic paper over directly funding individual journalists?

I think there's a cool idea in a platform designed like this... somewhere in between Kickstarter, Patreon, and NPR, but with a whole bunch of tools for news consumers to discover, read, and support both journalists and stories they're interested in. Things like supporting and discovering topics like "local region politics", "travel", or "technology", while allowing journalists to describe their backgrounds, political leanings, etc, might be a way of addressing trust and transparency in journalism and journalistic leanings while also allowing a range of opinions and perspectives on one platform, rather than being driven solely by editorial control.

[scriptkiddy]

I love this idea. I'd honestly be really excited to take it on as some sort of side project. The company/application itself could be an extension of the idea. Open source the whole thing and let the community help improve it while using a patreon-esque model to support the core developers/maintainers.

[bicknergseng]

I think that's pretty clever. Spent 15 min talking about it with coworkers today though, and IMO the challenge with something like this is identifying and specifically addressing the problems it would be trying to solve rather than boiling the ocean and hoping it does the "right thing".