Blogroll Addition

The Informant, a site that covers hate groups.

For now, it's free. But I'm skeptical how smaller players can make much money trafficking in online news. The big papers do, to some extent. Google and Facebook make money by vacuuming up free content and then selling ads that go along with them.

I had a brief chat with a publisher as to why they offer so many free stories on their website. The response was that the paper gets enough subscribers from doing that, so between that and the online ads, it's worth it to them to give away shit.

It's popular, now, to talk about how Facebook and Google are decimating local newspapers. But it's not just them. Craigslist wiped out the classified ad market a long time before Facebook Marketplace jumped into the game.