Local News Works When Cost Structure Isn't Screwed Up

The economy is interconnected. There are a lot of reasons newspapers have died off. Some were out of their control. I imagine a future where there are plenty of local publications that serve their communities with smart reporting, structured data sets around important issues and great ad products for marketers.

But it’s also because newspapers were an oligopoly, and they lose that oligopoly online. Newspapers are, yes, a content business, but they were also a light manufacturing business, and it was the replacement of light manufacturing and trucking with bits that removed the barrier to entry and unbundled their attention.

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.

Meanwhile, publications, still burdened with relics of a bygone era, like copy desks, fact checkers, human resource departments, and health care plans, find themselves locked in a losing battle against a nimbler opponent, one with none of the checks and balances that gum up the production of hot takes.

At a time when Google, Facebook and Amazon capture up to 70% of all ad dollars generated in the US and newspapers across the country have shed half their journalism jobs since 2008, you may think only a masochist would make a career in ad-supported media right now.

That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human i... See more