The True Costs of Journalism
Just wanted to highlight this exchange we had with one of our newest paid subscribers. Journalism is expensive! This post is not meant to complain or to beg but just to give people a peek into the expenses involved in trying to create the content we’d like to share with you at the highest level possible. This is in addition to the regular costs of living like food and a place to live.
When you file a FOIA (or similar open records request), you have to pay for the files. These fees add up, even when they’re low, and sometimes the fee is relatively low - for instance, the Israel Keyes interviews we recently shared for free on the Viktoria Evans YouTube channel cost us about $50.
However, sometimes the fee is extremely expensive. The reason the Israel Keyes interviews only cost us $50 is that the redaction expenses had already been paid by someone else. We know who paid them, and we know that those fees were close to $2,000 USD. There are dozens of record requests we have waiting for the funds to pay for them, and only you can make that possible.
These files also require extensive work once you get them. The Israel Keyes files, for instance, arrived as a series of meaningless and seemingly random file names that took several days just to download via a confusing government portal - we’re still not totally sure we actually got all of the files, although we believe that we did.
Then we spent months combing through, organizing, listening to and reviewing them to spend several more months taking the time to annotate, timestamp, and edit them so that they could be shared in a meaningful way.
Besides the fees we pay to have files redacted by government employees who earn a salary from the taxes we all already pay, a lot of equipment is also required to do this work, even in this new digital era where everyone’s an influencer using just their phone.
We have two professional level PCs that we use to do everything from research and write to editing the audio and video that we put out - the total cost of those, including decent monitors, was close to $6,000. We have an old mac we’d love to replace, and another PC laptop that we’d like to repair, but haven’t been able to budget those costs yet.
We have about a dozen microphones that all serve different purposes, several different cameras, two audio interfaces, two high quality audio preamps, and a pair of audio monitors (pro audio speakers) that all together probably cost us close to $10,000, and some of which we’d like to upgrade down the line when it makes sense to do so.
We strive for continuous improvement, and a higher level of quality, and would love to improve the acoustics of the space we use for recording. There’s only so much engineering you can do to fix a boomy box of a spare bedroom with parallel walls and big windows.
We’d also like to add another audio interface, as one of ours is a Zoom H4N field recorder that does not work spectacularly as an interface. We’d also like to add some more preamps and mics which would make aspects of our media production work easier, and increase the quality of some of our content… but haven’t been able to budget for that yet.
We have close to another $10,000 invested in various audio and video software. Much of this equipment is dual purpose, and was originally purchased to make music in our home studio, and we’d like to do more of that as well.
We are also working to expand the capabilities that we have to produce the kind of content you want to see - for instance, we’d love to get to a point where we can easily conduct interviews which will require us to pay for a service like Google Meet.
There are costs to travel - to investigate things, to create documentary content, and to try and secure outside funding from corporate sponsors to investigate things and create documentary content. And so far, we are doing all of this ourselves, just the two of us. Murder Pop is a small American family owned business, and has no employees besides its two co-owners.
We regularly solicit requests asking what you’d like us to cover, and we try to reply to every single comment we get, although we know we miss some. We share as much as we can for free, and we have given away a lot of complimentary subscriptions to fans who can’t afford to subscribe as well, which we’re happy to do. We consider access to high quality news media that serves the public interest something like a human right.
We do not believe in gatekeeping or censoring information that is in the public interest. Freedom of the press and the public right to information that is in the public interest trumps the phony moralisms of content marketers masquerading as journalists; the ability of independent investigators and internet sleuths to have full access to the information that they need to search for additional victims so that justice can be done and their families can put them to rest is more important than pretending we’re being noble in choosing not to share things with you.
As of Tuesday, May 21, 2024, including lifetime members who bought our Bound to Kill: The Untold Story of Delia Day pre-sale which came with a lifetime membership to Murder Pop, we have 100 paid subscribers. It will take thousands and thousands of subscribers to get to where we need to be, but we know that together with your help we can turn Murder Pop Media into a powerhouse of high quality, censorship free, fact based journalism. Two years in, we’re still just getting started, and we’re grateful to have you with us.
Thank you for supporting our work. You are the only reason that we can make this content. Every subscriber, every $9.99 a month, it all helps, and it all adds up. We work very hard to deliver as much value as we can, and your paid subscription makes it all possible.
I filmed the silly video below as a funny thank you skit for subscribers, and as always, our paid subscribers here get a sneak peek before it goes out on the Viktoria Evans Youtube Channel…