Watching from Australia as American journalism tears itself apart, it’s hard not to feel a strange mix of recognition and regret. Each week brings another round of layoffs, another editorial board overruled by its owner, another reminder that the people who fund news are not the people it’s meant to serve. Dave Winer wants news to work. So do i. And reading his proposal for community news organisations, I found myself thinking: we’ve seen this model succeed before.
Just not in news.
We’ve done this with banks
This requires a brief detour into Australian banking history, which I promise is more relevant than it sounds.
As Australia’s Big 4 banks withdrew from rural and outer-suburban centres over the past two decades, communities didn’t simply accept the loss. They built their own banks. Local communities form a company, raise capital from shareholders, and partner with Bendigo Bank to operate a full-service branch. Professional standards, regulatory compliance, genuine community ownership. Profits split between Bendigo and the local company, with that local share flowing back into community projects.
There are now over 300 Community Bank branches across Australia, managing billions in deposits. These aren’t charity projects. They’re viable businesses built on a simple insight: when you align the incentives of the service provider with the community being served, you get better outcomes for everyone.
The structural parallels
Dave’s vision maps onto this almost perfectly.
Local ownership with modest equity stakes. Dave proposes readers buy shares “with maybe very little hope of getting a return in dollars, rather in a more functional community.” Community Banks work identically—you invest because you want the service to exist, not for financial return.
Professional expertise meets community governance. Dave envisions professional journalists working alongside bloggers under shared integrity standards. Community Banks blend professional banking knowledge from Bendigo with local governance from community directors.
Sustainable funding without extraction. Dave’s toll pass system—micropayments per article, no ads, no paywalls—creates revenue without perverse incentives. Community Banks operate on standard banking economics, but without pressure to maximise returns for distant shareholders.
No oligarchs pulling the strings. Dave is explicit: “As readers we know you’re often full of it because of who owns you.” Community Banks rejected decisions made by executives in Sydney optimising quarterly earnings. Distribute ownership among the people being served, and you eliminate that pathology.
Why this works
Community Banks have survived financial crises, regulatory changes, and competitive pressure from major banks and fintech challengers. What makes them resilient is aligned incentives. When the people making decisions are also the people using the service, you get rapid feedback and genuine accountability.
Community news would respond the same way. Ownership creates stakeholders, not just customers—people who use the service, recommend it, defend it. I don’t want to oversell this. Community Banks aren’t perfect, and community news wouldn’t be either. But the incentive structure is fundamentally healthier than what we have now.
The oligarch problem
When Bezos can kill Washington Post endorsements, when the LA Times owner overrules his editorial board, when Murdoch pushes agendas across his global media empire—readers see it. Trust erodes not because journalists are incompetent, but because we can’t be certain they’re free to do their jobs.
Community ownership doesn’t eliminate bias. But it eliminates owner interference driven by business interests or political ambitions unrelated to journalism. The interference mechanism simply doesn’t exist.
The technology piece
Dave’s offer here is crucial. Independent developers building editorial and publishing software for free, with no lock-in, supporting open standards. Community Banks use standardised systems from Bendigo—they don’t each build their own platform. This shared infrastructure lets communities focus on service and governance rather than reinventing technical wheels.
The key is these tools must be genuinely open. Communities can’t trade oligarch owners for platform lock-in. That would relocate the problem rather than solve it.
Why now
Mass layoffs. Declining trust. AI about to devastate what remains of traditional journalism economics. If you’re going to rebuild the model anyway—and at this point, the rebuilding seems inevitable—now’s the time to build it right.
Dave’s vision, grounded in the proven model of community banking, offers a path forward. It won’t be easy. Building 300 Community Banks took decades of patient work, community by community. Community news would require the same persistence.
But it could work. And that’s more than we can say for the status quo.
Sources:
- The reboot that news needs (daveverse.org)
- Bendigo Bank Community Bank model (bendigobank.com.au)