Local News Works When Cost Structure Isn't Screwed Up

But there is a lot of work ahead of us on the operational side. We need to continuously deliver an amazing product to consumers worth paying for. No one balks at paying for a cell phone, gym membership, Netflix, BabyYoda+, Peloton and every other subscription. Why should they balk at paying for news if the product is actually important to them?

Here we see a rift that will appear in virtually every information industry, the fault line between the virtues of centralized and of decentralized decision making, between the imperative to produce at scales that justify production costs and the desire for variety.

The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.

None of the issues have changed much: newspapers had an oligopoly of attention and an oligopoly of a certain kind of advertising reach, and the internet removed both of these.