Current's The Pub

Surely one of the most effective arguments against the continued taxpayer support of public media is that public media serves a socioeconomically elite audience. What's the point of subsidizing media for rich people who should be able to pay for what they want themselves? There are any number of initiatives in the public media system to reach low-income people who currently aren't listening, watching or reading, but former Michigan Radio reporter Sarah Alvarez is skeptical about them. "I hear a lot more about projects to basically sell the same product to a slightly different group of people," she told me on The Pub. "I think if you really want to serve a low-income audience, you might have to change your product, and I don't know how willing folks are to do that." Now, Alvarez is running a new journalism nonprofit in Detroit called Outlier Media, which doesn't publish traditional reports to any kind of traditional platform. Rather, Alvarez offers renters in Detroit actionable information about their properti