Well, that’s just fucking super.
Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
Obviously, there have always been audiences, and always been audience members willing to pay a little extra for a creator to keep kith and kin together between gigs. There have always been writers trying to piece together a livelihood by appealing to deep-pocketed friends.
But over the past decade, especially the past five years, several corrosive trends converged, and now an unprecedented number of individual journalists are trying their hand at earning a living, one $8/month subscriber at a time.
I think you misunderstood, that was not a summary. There is a news channel called “TLDR News” on YouTube that is funded via Patrons: https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews
There are several examples of successful independent journalism ventures.
The point the story is making is the situation for journalists striking out on their own is that work ends up being way more on the back end, such that the reporting itself is a fraction of the time as cultivating the site and keeping subscribers happy with your interaction level, lest they bolt.
What legacy media provided was a premade audience, legal cover and no pay reduction with each lost subscriber. Slim offerings, to be sure, but we’re really learning as we go that as shitty as working conditions were, you could be doing all of that and having to moonlight in marketing.
You missed the point of my comment. The comment you commented on was not giving a summary of anything which I explained in my comment to you.