Unlike other seemingly intractable problems, the demise of local news wouldn’t cost very much money to reverse. Journalists are not particularly well compensated. Assuming an average salary of $60,000 (generous by industry standards), it would cost only about $1.5 billion a year to sustain 25,000 local-reporter positions, a rough estimate of the number that have disappeared nationwide over the past two decades. That’s two-hundredths of a percent of federal spending in 2022…If more public or philanthropic money were directed toward sustaining local news, it would most likely produce financial benefits many times greater than the cost.
What do government officials do when no one’s watching? Often, they enrich themselves or their allies at the taxpayers’ expense.
– The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve, The Atlantic
Executive Orders: A Skeptic’s View of the President’s Actions
With a new authoritarian at the helm, banal summaries of executive orders don’t cut it. So I let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting: provide a brief analysis of each week’s presidential orders from a radical left perspective. No blind trust, no left-wing group think—just a bullshit detector wary of authoritarianism.