[bad company]

On this board, you have probably 250 to 400 professional writers, three or four editors, at least a dozen illustrators, thousands of photographers. Start the paper, publish a few copies, and then set up reporters in every major city. Handle their credentials. And then you can actually go to press conferences and ask those questions the drive by media will never ask.

You can publish things, get it out there, even if it's just paper on a bar to catch slops. You'll have a resource that other papers and yes, websites, can mine. Most of it can be done on a volunteer basis, and publishing costs for a hundred thousand papers is about $10k a month. Less than what is raised to run FreeRepublic each month

I've been pondering something similar. My vision was to put a proper newspaper in a swing state with a dying newspaper, like kansas city and build from there, moving in where the old media is dying off. Whatever comes, I'm in.

[kingu]

I've been pondering something similar. My vision was to put a proper newspaper in a swing state with a dying newspaper, like kansas city and build from there, moving in where the old media is dying off. Whatever comes, I'm in.

The problem of mass distribution will kill you, I think, in any major market. This is not to say you can't go print up 2 million copies of it and then distribute it to a swing state, probably for less than the cost of one of those glossy mailers that goes into the trash five seconds after the postman delivers it (unless the postman tosses it himself.)

But there are plenty of small newspapers across the US that are always searching for content. If they nab one of yours (with permission, of course) and print it in their 50k daily, you save the costs of doing it yourself. There's college newspapers that might actually consider reprinting a well written article from another small paper vs from a dying major city publication.

I donno. I've been down this road before. It is a tremendous amount of work without financing or writers (my wife and I wrote everything, pretty much, though our articles were picked up around the world.) It felt incredible when an article of ours actually changed things - one of our articles on a swarm of tornadoes brought a million dollar donation to a small town.

Six years after we ceased publication, we still get people asking if there's a new issue. We were on the floor at the DNC in 2000, as well as the RNC - But it was about then that we just stopped.

[x_plus_one]

The kansas city star may be a communist rag but they also do a lot of local news, weather and sports. Small independent newpapers are given out for free and have thrived for years. Not enough revenue can be generated to fund a start up newspaper to compete head on with the conglomerates like McClatchey who just bought and owns the star. FYI the star has gotten even more leftist silnce they were acquired last year.