Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

I have a strong interest in these areas but not really in the zone for building a team to apply for YC. Increasingly interested in a career pivot towards working with an organization in these areas however. Where should I look?

Dear YC: I wholeheartedly support this and strongly recommend these books as required reading for anyone seeking to change how media works in our society.

1. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky & Ed Herman[1]

2. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty by Alex Carey[2]

I realize these have an "anti-corporate" bent to them but they are truly good analyses and well worth reading with at the very least a critical eye. As Carey documents, it is the corporate sector that has developed much of the modern tools of manipulating mass opinion.

More than mere fact checking, I think you will find that the chief challenge to achieving sustainable independent media is the business model. Advertising necessarily biases media towards at least the class interests of advertisers (if not any particular one), or else it would go out of business. Meanwhile it has trained readers to not pay the full price of quality content. This is a fundamental problem.

Another challenge is that companies have business models that support their own PR and lobbying while ordinary citizens do not. That is unless they are organized and combined resources, but with the dissipation of unions there is no strong popular economic counterpoint to corporate PR. This is part of our news system as well.

I very much hope some good work can be done here, with a sober and clear understanding of the fundamental challenges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Risk-Out-Democracy-Communicati...

The only lasting solution will be to allow true market competition for education to replace the centralized top-down system we have. Yes, it's a libertarian pipe dream. No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system. You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.

Note: The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middle class wealth. Here's a quick not fully vetted interpretation of this finding: When the middle class is relatively rich, they start businesses. When it is relatively poor, they don't. The aspirational income inequality that Graham posits doesn't immediately jump out when looking at year by year new startup numbers on a graph. I'm currently analyzing these numbers, but it's pretty clear that they don't support Graham's assumptions.

Note 2: The FRBoSF analysis isn't perfect for answering this question, but at least it's a good start, unlike the pure logic approach (despite the easy availability of good longitudinal Census data on the subject) that Graham published.

Note 3: The Graham essay is an essay on income inequality that came out before the atomic bomb that Picketty dropped on the subject. It really shouldn't be dragged out now because the research landscape on the field has been completely changed since it was written.

Final Note: I know that every time the word startup is used on HN, it spurs a 'No True Scotsman' debate about what qualities invalidate a new business from the label startup. Not remotely important. The FRBoSF article notes that new businesses have faster job growth than older businesses and that's the larger subject in question. Trying to throw companies out only serves to move the conversation from fact based to conjecture based by throwing out a perfectly good source of facts relevant to the matter.

[1] http://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/bds/