Have you noticed that the entire business model of the American media has been reduced to one simple strategy? Harassment.

That’s it. Pure, unadulterated harassment. They don’t want to inform you. They don’t want to entertain you. They want to irritate you until you hand over your credit card just to make the noise stop.

I mentioned this last week—that we’re running a fundraiser for the Free Venice Beachhead specifically to prove you don’t have to treat your community like an enemy combatant just to keep the lights on. And apparently, I pissed off a journalist. A “very serious” journalist who works for a billionaire. Which billionaire? Pick one. They’re like cockroaches; you turn on the kitchen light and they scatter back to their yachts.

This guy tells me, “Eric, you don’t understand economics! The only way to make money is to annoy the hell out of people! It’s the only way!”

Bullshit.

It’s the same thing the record companies did twenty years ago. Remember that? They treated their biggest fans like criminals. They sued grandmothers for downloading songs. They thought if they screamed loud enough, people would respect them. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.

But now the news business is doing the same thing. They put up paywalls. They track your data. They want your mother’s maiden name and a blood sample just so you can read a weather report. It’s hostile. It’s anti-human. And it’s unsustainable.

And you know what the saddest part is? The only people who aren’t actively spitting in their audience’s face right now are the guys running the outrage factories. The conspiracy nuts. They’re crazy, sure, but they figured out one thing the “legitimate” news forgot: Don’t piss off the people who support you.

We think there’s a better way. We think you can have a newspaper that actually respects the people reading it. A paper that doesn’t hide behind a paywall. A paper that doesn’t want to sell your browsing history to an insurance company.

But to do that, we need you. We need you to prove that “voluntary support” isn’t a fantasy.

Here’s the deal: We’re minting these commemorative challenge coins. It’s a piece of metal that says, “I supported independent media and all I got was this coin and the satisfaction of not being owned by a hedge fund.”

No harassment, but please send us some support.  You can scan the graphic below. 

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