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“ I can’t help but think that this idea that ‘patrons’ will allow reporters to maintain their special status as heroes of democracy is a kind of self-delusion. We’ve lost the audience, we don’t have the marketing smarts to win it back. We don’t even have the editorial product to win it back. We’re not a particularly creative bunch. I’m sure that the Pacific garbage patch story will please enviros, but it’s a story that’s been reported in one form or another over the last ten years, and I hardly think that we will reach a tipping point because of it. Rather than looking for one great grant to pay our salaries, we ought to bring same intensity to the search for a real market solution: one that pays actual salaries over the long term; one that rewards creativity rather than earnestness, and the social values of one foundation or another, one billionaire or another.
Clay Shirky’s “second great age of patronage,” foundations, and journalism. « Maimonides’ Ladder
