If you don't support your writer friends, pretty soon there will be no one left to support you. None of those organizations routinely buy ads on the blogs, or do anything else to support, financially or otherwise, the blogs. None of them. But nary a day goes buy that they don't all ask the blogs for help. A former employee of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is now gone, writes:
As a kind of exorcism, I write this confession: I was in love with journalism, and it was an extremely complicated and torturous love affair that ended with tawdry efforts to please eclipsing the desire to do good. ...And our non-profit friends, don't think we haven't noticed your absence either. And you wonder why the blogs never seem to help you get your stuff out to the masses, when you never bother to help them in return.
I, like most bloggers and formerly employed journalists, am now writing for free, and that is not a sustainable social model for finding, investigating and sharing information about the powerful, the greedy and the downtrodden.
Unless local users conscientiously seek and support local substantive journalism with money, real local news will continue to be spotty at best, barely afloat in a sea of nearly-naked celebs.
