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I don't know how the mechanics would work, but there's a case to be made that funding local newspapers would improve the quality of political discourse.
Every minute some would-be journalist is getting paid to write about potholes is a minute they're not writing nonsense.
Every minute some would-be journalist is getting paid to write about potholes is a minute they're not writing nonsense.
How to fund it? Honestly, there's good evidence that internet platforms, namely Craigslist but I would guess increasingly Facebook Marketplace, killed the business model of local news by publishing classifieds online.
One way to think about it is that local news coverage was always a positive externality of classified ad businesses. With the advent of the internet, that externality disappeared.
As a consequence, local news is essentially a public good now. The idea of taxing the social media platforms to fund the local institutions they killed has a certain appeal but isn't the only option.
The harder question is how you would allocate this funding. Traditionally, people just read whatever local newspaper they wanted, and presumably, they occasionally bought something through the classifieds or placed an ad themselves.
Since the funding source was decentralized, the mechanism for dispensing funding was decentralized as well. If we stipulate the necessity of a centralized funding source, crafting a decentralized mechanism for dispensing this funding is trickier.
The option that seems closest to the mark would be something like Yang's idea of giving everyone like a hundred bucks annually to donate to a nonprofit of their choice.
In the case of local news, you could maybe give everyone a voucher for a subscription and people could support the local news outlet of their choice.
This is just a thought experiment.
