This research looks at the influence of three commonly cited features on the success of digital local news outlets: the background of the publisher, experimentation with different revenue streams, and the wealth of the surrounding community. Of the three, only the wealth of the community is statistically correlated with “success” (which we define... See more

All of these playbooks are at least partially written. You sometimes hear people say, “Nobody’s figured it out yet.” But this is all about execution. The two main sources of revenue are advertising and reader revenue — you may as well call it circulation. That was true a long time ago and it’s still true.

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.