Well, that’s just fucking super.
Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
Obviously, there have always been audiences, and always been audience members willing to pay a little extra for a creator to keep kith and kin together between gigs. There have always been writers trying to piece together a livelihood by appealing to deep-pocketed friends.
But over the past decade, especially the past five years, several corrosive trends converged, and now an unprecedented number of individual journalists are trying their hand at earning a living, one $8/month subscriber at a time.
Good read that got me thinking. Donation supported journalism works well for NPR.
I can imagine an ecosystem in which enough people give their $50/month streaming subscriptions directly to artists and journalists.
For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).
Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).
TLDR News has been going strong for over 8 years.
That’s an interesting – if wildly incorrect – summary.
I think you misunderstood, that was not a summary. There is a news channel called “TLDR News” on YouTube that is funded via Patrons: https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews
There are several examples of successful independent journalism ventures.
The point the story is making is the situation for journalists striking out on their own is that work ends up being way more on the back end, such that the reporting itself is a fraction of the time as cultivating the site and keeping subscribers happy with your interaction level, lest they bolt.
What legacy media provided was a premade audience, legal cover and no pay reduction with each lost subscriber. Slim offerings, to be sure, but we’re really learning as we go that as shitty as working conditions were, you could be doing all of that and having to moonlight in marketing.
You missed the point of my comment. The comment you commented on was not giving a summary of anything which I explained in my comment to you.
Patron-funded news doesn’t work in the combination of post-scarcity news (i.e. when anyone can have a platform because there’s no limit to entry, like owning a printing press) and economic recession where people’s disposable income drops sharply.
Even the first point is enough to kill all but the largest patron-funded news services. The two combined? Guaranteed death sentence.
