Save Seattle News
Local news is in trouble. We can help.
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Journalism is the lifeblood of any free society
It informs us, it empowers us, it creates the conditions and the shared knowledge necessary for us to self-govern.
Local journalism's contributions to a city’s civic vitality have been confirmed repeatedly in study after study… It gives us a greater understanding of how the world works. It clarifies how public power is wielded, and how our institutions are either succeeding or failing to serve us. At its best, it fosters and connects us as community.
Despite its essential significance, local journalism is under extreme duress
In the last several years alone, we’ve witnessed several newspapers closing or being cut to the bone—including the Seattle Chinese Post, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, and the Seattle Globalist.
The main culprit leading journalism on a death march, locally and beyond, is lack of revenue, as advertising revenue – historically the bulk of news companies’ revenues—has been diverted by major Internet search and social media platforms.
This leaves local media in the predicament of trying to raise revenue either by attracting eyeballs however they can, or building out a robust paid-subscriber base when people have grown to expect journalism to be free. With budgets cut to bare survival, serving historically marginalized communities, especially those of lesser means, becomes nearly impossible. There is simply not enough incoming revenue to fund the work, nor an economic incentive to serve readers who cannot afford subscriptions.
Everyone, everywhere in Seattle, regardless of their economic means, background, race, or orientation, deserves media that is multidimensional, humanizing, and tells an authentic story of the community it covers.
Fact-based, accurate, high-quality journalism is essential public infrastructure. But it is costly to produce.
What if there was a way to publicly fund media while keeping journalistic independence?
We propose this:
A Local News Dollars program, modeled on our city’s existing Democracy Voucher program, would provide individual residents of Seattle with vouchers they can assign to qualifying local news outlets. In turn, the outlets would collect money directly from our city government for each voucher received.
A Local News Dollars program would direct financial support to local news media outlets in proportion to the public’s desire to support them—all of the public, not just those who can afford to buy a subscription. It would provide essential funding to sustain news operations, and potentially startup funding to a new news organization that the community wants to support. It would strengthen the production of high-quality news, increase the number and diversity of news outlets, and connect people more closely with politics, events, and others within their communities.