[mantas]

There's already a model for this. Crowd-sourced journalists via Patreon etc.

Even in my small country (~3mio pop), people manage to make a cushy living on this. E.g. covering iffy cases of corruption and neglect that ain't reported much (if at all) on mainstream media. In many cases because media if afraid to loose advertisement money from related business structures.

[chaps]

Hah! No way would that work in any industry-changing way. Maybe some journalists here and there make that work, but it's not a model that scales to many, and it would be unbalanced in a way that promotes the already promoted while leaving those just starting out to traditional freelancing of 200 (maybe) per-piece until they build enough reputation to get patreon followers. In other words -- the same system we have now.

[mantas]

Yes and no. It certainly won't employ the army of want-to-be-a-journalist. But is that a problem if too many people want to work a fancy job and community cannot employ as many? Many people want to be cosmonauts, but we have few seats. Is that an industry problem? Probably not...

However, it can fix the trust issue in journalism industry. Once community is paying journalist wages rather than advertisers, quality should go up.