[UncleMeat]

Not scalable. This is like saying medical bills are under control because of GoFundMe. Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited and it requires tons of work for zero pay while you build a follower base large enough.

"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.

Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.

[dexen]

>Not scalable

Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.

The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].

The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.

--

[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.

[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.

[samirm]

Why does news have to be scalable? I don't understand your comparison to medical bills or gofundme either.

>Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited

isn't that true for all industries?

>Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.

lol wat. you got a source for that?

[UncleMeat]

The NYT has like 4,000 employees. There are 40,000 journalists in the US (just journalists). All of patreon has 100,000 creators.

The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.

How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.