Photo By Potential Past (flickr)

En Español

So I turn on the television last night to catch Jon Stewart and end up transfixed by the commerce channel where a woman is selling shoes — for $19.95 a pair —  against time. The clock’s rolling over and it’s seconds to the end and already she’s sold more than 500 pairs of ordinary flats that you can probably buy on Mission Street for $5. I’m sure there’s a lesson there and maybe it’s just about asking.

It costs money to cover the news, even when it’s in your own backyard. Here are some ways you can support local reporting:

READ Mission Loc@l and contribute comments, stories, photos. (Comments turn into stories: evidence.)

PRESS the support button here. Three other local heroes have.

SHOP for useful things:
→ Mission Loc@l’s iPhone app on local history. (Yes, we want to make it available for all phones, but how many other local sites have created an iPhone history app?)
→ ML’s new T-shirt.

If you’re a local business, advertise.

Got other/better ideas on how to make journalism sustainable? We’d love to hear from you. Our e-mail is missionlocal@gmail.com.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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3 Comments

  1. Some of my favorite quotes from Jaron Lanier’s book “You are not a gadget” – that relate to “Free” media. In the end, I think if you value it, you should support it. Not by paying by advertising proxy, although that can be part of the solution, but with your wallet.

    “I believe most people would embrace a social contract in which bits have value instead of being free. Everyone would have easy access to everyone else’s creative bits at reasonable prices – and everyone would get paid for their bits. This arrangement would celebrate personhood in full, because personal expression would be valued.”

    “If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism, while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum. In fact, online culture increasingly resembles a slum in disturbing ways. Slums have more advertising than wealthy neighborhoods, for instance. People are meaner in slums; mob rule and vigilantism are commonplace.”

    “Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.”

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  2. Doctor Popular: Thank you–have taken all advice. Link problem fixed, going to tag problem now. Best, Lydia

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