i'm going to start telling people i'm a rapporteur of actualité

"local news and information" polled better, apparently, and to be fair we should be able to tell audiences what specifically we do for them rather than appealing to them using the abstract worth of ~*journalism*~

but also idk maybe one day "news" itself will end up on the euphemism treadmill

(w alt text)

Not every newsroom can do this, clearly. And it's worth noting Civil Eats has only done this one year so far: we'll have to see how lasting the foundation support is long-term.

But for me, it is an interesting case study suggesting, maybe, The Guardian's model could work for smaller publishers too!

And one of the reasons Civil Eats succeeded here was also that it spent years communicating to its audience how expensive news is to create and how difficult it is to fund.

Weirdly, this mirrors the way The Verge successfully *launched* its paywall (ie after years covering Google's effect on news)

Between the very values-driven Civil Eats and The Guardian, which makes its supporter pitch "keep this liberal journalism free by voluntarily contributing toward it," it seems like this strategy works best for news outlets with a political/social mission.

A few things to note: first, Civil Eats did a lot of reader research before getting rid of its paywall and could be pretty confident its supporters would keep paying.

Second, they got some philanthropic foundations to agree to match their supporter revenue, so they had some security.

the difficulty is not that many people go to any medium *just* for news. I kinda worry that most people will only ever encounter news incidentally, like a modest amount of vegetable smuggled into a meal

maybe the future will be 5 minutes of govt-mandated news during your Netflix ad breaks lol