Comment 71442

By Inky Wretch (anonymous) | Posted November 19, 2011 at 08:11:31

Nothing that pays contributors promptly ad at a professional grade will last for more than a year without either self-sustaining financing or a loopy philanthropist in the mix. It doesn't matter if it's open source journalism or not. (A more familiar alternative is the wannabe professional publication that promises payment but strings contributors along for months and months before payment is received, or simply screws them outright.) As such, I'm not shocked. T

The alternatives seem to be blogs/publications driven by advocacy or the self-interest of BIAs/commercial sectors. Whatever their achievements, they will always be somewhat compromised because of perception of bias (eg. promoting only those businesses that the publisher has a financial interest in, focusing light only on the areas of the city that serve to advance a defined agenda).

With everything increasingly boiled down to link love these days, I don't know that there's any clear avenue of escape from fast food media coverage. The theory around independent media is wonderful, but at some point you have to pay bils. That's why independents rise and fall on a regular basis. All examples of such locally are "extramural" ventures, viable mainly because of their creators' financial security and ready supply of spare hours. For all of its merits, a blog like RTH would have a hard time replicating its current content churn as a standalone private-sector publication that paid its contributors. (Apples an oranges, perhaps, bit The Huffington Post's whole business model seems to have amounted to selling a slave army of volunteer contributors to AOL... and that model was great for Ariana's bankbook but is riddled with holes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/06/huffington-post-aol-struggle )

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