When you pay a fraction of the wages of most reporters, newspapers can remain open

NY Times:

When the Student Newspaper Is the Only Daily Paper in Town

As more than 2,000 newspapers across the country have closed or merged, student journalists from Michigan to Arizona have stepped in to fill the void.
When I was Sports Editor of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas in the mid-sixties I think I made $50 a month.  Even with inflation that is not a large amount.  When I worked as a reporter for a now-defunct Washington DC newspaper the top scale was a little over $10,000 a year.  I made more than that my first year out of law school in the early seventies. While there are some reporters who receive celebrity status and pay, they are in a very small minority.  Even with paying low wages it is hard for most papers to stay solvent.  Their ad revenue has been sucked up by Google and online want ad services. 

The other problem with most media outlets is that they are more liberal than most of the population.  Conservatives see no reason to subsidize people who hate them.  The constant Trump paranoia and pushing of things like the Russian collusion hoax and the current Ukraine coup attempt, further alienates readers.

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