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The media becomes an activist for democracy
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Archives: August 2018

The newspaper tariffs are dead. How big a difference will that make to those whose businesses still depends on dead trees?
“Instead of reducing political polarization, our intervention increased it.”
Rupert Murdoch owning the New York Daily News? A McCormick controlling the Chicago Tribune again? The L.A. Times pulling a Washington Post, aiming to run the industry’s underlying infrastructure? A lot of change is coming soon.
“If the Post is like Amazon, happy to sell individual slices of its vertically integrated whole, the Times is perhaps more like Apple, bringing its ethos and voice to a more diverse array of products.”
The three sites together are “just south of 1,500 paying customers,” 60 percent of whom are signed up as recurring contributors (of these, the average annual contribution is around $115 or $120). Denverite, which launched its program first, has around 900 members.
“I was sensitive to saying, ‘Here I am, an outsider, a non-expert going to these places and saying I’m here to explain this.'”
What’s the kind of story worth putting outside a hard paywall? The kind of civic storytelling that shows that you’re “covering the city like no one else.”