Publications need something between "No Access" and "Pay $10/month and hope you don't forget to cancel". Papers used to sell single issues you could peruse all day. The pursuit of subscriptions above all else is a detriment to me reading things like the Financial Times or The New Yorker
Yes, I know there are some workarounds, but I feel bad stealing from them just because I don't like their revenue model / pricing.
I think a big part of the problem is that local news is really boring. You read it if you don’t have any options but it is hard to compete for attention with hot button national issues let alone with social media and other entertainment. It used to be cheaper to produce and so you got it as filler which and it turns out to be good when people are forced to eat their “broccoli”.
Indeed there are parallels with this information diet and our super surplus of highly tasty and satiety real foods today. We have produced “better” products than is good for us. See also, bowling alone issues.
One way you could increase coverage of local news is bundling. Have a large reputable written news organization hire local correspondents in the big cities across America and then sell access to WaPo or NYT local that gives you the ability to read their local coverage from any city.
This is a much more compelling value proposition than subscribing to a local paper. Most of us now have connections to multiple locations -- we went to college in one city, grew up in another and have family in a third. Without this kind of bundling I have to pay, say, $5/month to have access to local news in just one of those cities. With bundling I can pay the same amount and get access to local news across the country (and often there will be art, pop culture or some weird event stories of interest in cities I don't even have a connection with.
Right now local news is basically like a cable company trying to sell access to channels a la carte. Each channel has to charge alot to fund it's content from the few subscriptions it gets and you end up with few profitable channels. You bundle the channels and the value proposition is compelling for lots of viewers and everyone wins.
(I know it's counterintuitive that consumers are made better off by removing their choices ...I didn't believe it myself until I tried working through some example math).
Spot on. We've said it before in this space: it was only in the mid-20th century that newspapers became large revenue generators due to advertising. It wasn't the case before that and we're clearly on the path to rich entities using them as propaganda organs again.
I know a lot of journalists and it really is notable the amount of denial in the business. I suppose that is common in declining businesses. But in addition to the "billionaires can fund us forever" point, there's a lot of people convinced that because the private equity people are buying local papers that must mean owners are all secretly making a profit and they are just laying people off to make even more money. You can see comments of that sort in one of the threads Matt links to here.
I don't have any great answers here. But it probably doesn't help that so many journalists are in denial about what is happening.
I find it incredible that a region of California/Los Angeles size and wealth can’t sustain an ambitious newspaper (similar to NYT, WaPo) when much smaller cities and countries can. What am I missing?
Read this article, skimmed it a few times, and I'm not sure what to immediately think, so I'll start by describing the news scene in Boise and see where this comment goes. We have our legacy paper that, while it's certainly gotten worse (the clickbaity headlines are a quick indication of this), it will still deliver good nuggets here and there. The real excellent publication that I talk about all the time is BoiseDev, a new upstart who runs a lean machine on diverse income sources to deliver the type of high level information on what's going on with development (their original beat) and the local and state government actions that gird that and other important things. There's also other specialty publications like the Idaho Press or IdahoEdNews that will deliver good coverage, and even one of the local TV stations (KTVB) will venture beyong typical local TV stuff. I don't feel like I live in a news desert at all, but who knows how much of an outlier this place is.
Or alternatively, how much of an outlier *I* am for seeking out this kind of information. I'm surprised Matt didn't talk much about the importance of the old bundling model, which is a fond topic of his--perhaps we can take for granted that we're all aware of this. But it seems like the lamented goal here is to get people that used to read the newspaper for stuff like sports, entertainment, weather, and classifieds to also peek over at stories deemed more important in the community. It's an unsolved puzzle that may remain so, but it also may be a challenge to ask ourselves how much attention the people in the past paid to things that didn't engage fun in them or benefited them personally.
Washington bureaus of provincial papers have very little value. Their core function-- documenting how the local delegation voted-- is easily replaced by computers. Only a few, especially dorky readers will care to read their legislaturors’ speeches, but if they do, the Congressional Record is on line and has been for thirty years.
Maybe this is vibes, but it *feels* like rich right-wing people are willing to lose money on media projects, and rich left-wing people are not. Why is there no center-left Sinclair?
After forty years of maintaining a subscription to the LA Times I reluctantly ended it recently. I wished I didn't have to and would have preferred to continue supporting a needed local institution. But I just got fed up with a newspaper that was clearly deteriorating.
It wasn't just staff cuts, the shrinkage of the paper and the disappearance of previously standard features. It was also some pretty bad choices. The arts and entertainment section was given over to writers with clear ideological agendas who decided that was more important than a focus on entertainment per se. They gutted the sports section, ripping all the kinds of things that are nice to have in one single place -- standings, box scores, even game scores! Instead, we got big splashy pictures and interminable "features" on whatever. Even the comics section! They dropped funny, clever strips and replaced them with the most bargain basement crap. And the price for this deteriorating product kept skyrocketing to absurd levels.
They just lost their way. It's sad because we need a good newspaper. But I decided that continuing to subsidize them would send the wrong message. We need some creative destruction.
It seems BLINDINGLY obvious to me that Pearlman meant "the only way to have a chance at survival in the industry is by going above and beyond," not "if you make yourself indispensable you are guaranteed to never be a victim of the industry," because not even the dumbest person in the world would believe the latter. Anyone freaking out about his comments are willfully misreading just so they can have another target to serve as an outlet for their anger and frustration.
I think one major problem for local news is there is genuinely a lot less to write about these days if you are interested in important local issues. Part of this is just that the demand shifts make it so that certain kind of stories get no viewership -- even a really juicy scandal about the police department or something is only going to get you so much readership before your lunch gets eaten by a national outlet deciding that particular story is worth repeating.
But I think part of it is literally that the quantity of events readers can parse is declining. With the decline of civil society in all its forms, that means that the majority of the time Americans are in a narrative relationship only with national events. They are not part of any organizations that might be in the news and thus create interest. They are not familiar with local politicians (who might be in the news and etc.).
All that's left is very simple things like "where should you get drinks/food", "what kind of stores and restaurants are supposed to open soon", and of course local fights over whether or not some building or other should be allowed, and those things do not require a newspaper to cover. In almost any city in America there are a handful of local instagram/tiktok people who will do at the very least the first two and sometimes even the third.
Are people in Baltimore better informed about international news? Are people in Philadelphia reading more movie criticism? It's certainly possible to be way better informed today than 30 years ago, but having some international news and some movie criticism and some local news altogether in the same publication that had the sports scores and the classifieds very plausibly led to people being better informed overall than when they get all that information via Google and Facebook.
I think it's interesting this post mentioned Philadelphia and the Inquirer a few times without mentioning that the Inky is one of the few old-school papers not especially on hard times. In Philly's case, a rich guy set up a nonprofit foundation that owns the paper, with an explicit aim to serve local needs. The rich guy is now dead and the nonprofit is specifically a subsidiary of one of those old-school community nonprofits, so it can't really be classified as a vanity project anymore.
It also seems to work, I know lots of people who pay for the Inquirer. (And no, they don't all work in local government like I do.) And so it's been able to do a lot of good coverage of local/regional issues. But the flipside is that their coverage is relatively neutral (liberal-leaning, but this is a big city with blue-trending suburbs), with a viewpoint best described as "civic wonkish". They can go hard, but it's in areas like government corruption/incompetence where *everyone* would have a problem (e.g. their recent vendetta against the Sheriff's Office).
Unlike real estate, medicine or law, journalism is a highly unregulated industry and one with no government mandated professional licensure. Journalistic labor has become vastly more productive over the past few decades, we have better content than ever even though the proportion of GDP captured by journalists has probably fallen by 50%.
Publications need something between "No Access" and "Pay $10/month and hope you don't forget to cancel". Papers used to sell single issues you could peruse all day. The pursuit of subscriptions above all else is a detriment to me reading things like the Financial Times or The New Yorker
Yes, I know there are some workarounds, but I feel bad stealing from them just because I don't like their revenue model / pricing.
Even at Slow Boring the roles of copy editor and researcher were merged into a single position after Claire and I left
I think a big part of the problem is that local news is really boring. You read it if you don’t have any options but it is hard to compete for attention with hot button national issues let alone with social media and other entertainment. It used to be cheaper to produce and so you got it as filler which and it turns out to be good when people are forced to eat their “broccoli”.
Indeed there are parallels with this information diet and our super surplus of highly tasty and satiety real foods today. We have produced “better” products than is good for us. See also, bowling alone issues.
One way you could increase coverage of local news is bundling. Have a large reputable written news organization hire local correspondents in the big cities across America and then sell access to WaPo or NYT local that gives you the ability to read their local coverage from any city.
This is a much more compelling value proposition than subscribing to a local paper. Most of us now have connections to multiple locations -- we went to college in one city, grew up in another and have family in a third. Without this kind of bundling I have to pay, say, $5/month to have access to local news in just one of those cities. With bundling I can pay the same amount and get access to local news across the country (and often there will be art, pop culture or some weird event stories of interest in cities I don't even have a connection with.
Right now local news is basically like a cable company trying to sell access to channels a la carte. Each channel has to charge alot to fund it's content from the few subscriptions it gets and you end up with few profitable channels. You bundle the channels and the value proposition is compelling for lots of viewers and everyone wins.
(I know it's counterintuitive that consumers are made better off by removing their choices ...I didn't believe it myself until I tried working through some example math).
Spot on. We've said it before in this space: it was only in the mid-20th century that newspapers became large revenue generators due to advertising. It wasn't the case before that and we're clearly on the path to rich entities using them as propaganda organs again.
I know a lot of journalists and it really is notable the amount of denial in the business. I suppose that is common in declining businesses. But in addition to the "billionaires can fund us forever" point, there's a lot of people convinced that because the private equity people are buying local papers that must mean owners are all secretly making a profit and they are just laying people off to make even more money. You can see comments of that sort in one of the threads Matt links to here.
I don't have any great answers here. But it probably doesn't help that so many journalists are in denial about what is happening.
I find it incredible that a region of California/Los Angeles size and wealth can’t sustain an ambitious newspaper (similar to NYT, WaPo) when much smaller cities and countries can. What am I missing?
Read this article, skimmed it a few times, and I'm not sure what to immediately think, so I'll start by describing the news scene in Boise and see where this comment goes. We have our legacy paper that, while it's certainly gotten worse (the clickbaity headlines are a quick indication of this), it will still deliver good nuggets here and there. The real excellent publication that I talk about all the time is BoiseDev, a new upstart who runs a lean machine on diverse income sources to deliver the type of high level information on what's going on with development (their original beat) and the local and state government actions that gird that and other important things. There's also other specialty publications like the Idaho Press or IdahoEdNews that will deliver good coverage, and even one of the local TV stations (KTVB) will venture beyong typical local TV stuff. I don't feel like I live in a news desert at all, but who knows how much of an outlier this place is.
Or alternatively, how much of an outlier *I* am for seeking out this kind of information. I'm surprised Matt didn't talk much about the importance of the old bundling model, which is a fond topic of his--perhaps we can take for granted that we're all aware of this. But it seems like the lamented goal here is to get people that used to read the newspaper for stuff like sports, entertainment, weather, and classifieds to also peek over at stories deemed more important in the community. It's an unsolved puzzle that may remain so, but it also may be a challenge to ask ourselves how much attention the people in the past paid to things that didn't engage fun in them or benefited them personally.
Washington bureaus of provincial papers have very little value. Their core function-- documenting how the local delegation voted-- is easily replaced by computers. Only a few, especially dorky readers will care to read their legislaturors’ speeches, but if they do, the Congressional Record is on line and has been for thirty years.
Maybe this is vibes, but it *feels* like rich right-wing people are willing to lose money on media projects, and rich left-wing people are not. Why is there no center-left Sinclair?
After forty years of maintaining a subscription to the LA Times I reluctantly ended it recently. I wished I didn't have to and would have preferred to continue supporting a needed local institution. But I just got fed up with a newspaper that was clearly deteriorating.
It wasn't just staff cuts, the shrinkage of the paper and the disappearance of previously standard features. It was also some pretty bad choices. The arts and entertainment section was given over to writers with clear ideological agendas who decided that was more important than a focus on entertainment per se. They gutted the sports section, ripping all the kinds of things that are nice to have in one single place -- standings, box scores, even game scores! Instead, we got big splashy pictures and interminable "features" on whatever. Even the comics section! They dropped funny, clever strips and replaced them with the most bargain basement crap. And the price for this deteriorating product kept skyrocketing to absurd levels.
They just lost their way. It's sad because we need a good newspaper. But I decided that continuing to subsidize them would send the wrong message. We need some creative destruction.
It seems BLINDINGLY obvious to me that Pearlman meant "the only way to have a chance at survival in the industry is by going above and beyond," not "if you make yourself indispensable you are guaranteed to never be a victim of the industry," because not even the dumbest person in the world would believe the latter. Anyone freaking out about his comments are willfully misreading just so they can have another target to serve as an outlet for their anger and frustration.
I think one major problem for local news is there is genuinely a lot less to write about these days if you are interested in important local issues. Part of this is just that the demand shifts make it so that certain kind of stories get no viewership -- even a really juicy scandal about the police department or something is only going to get you so much readership before your lunch gets eaten by a national outlet deciding that particular story is worth repeating.
But I think part of it is literally that the quantity of events readers can parse is declining. With the decline of civil society in all its forms, that means that the majority of the time Americans are in a narrative relationship only with national events. They are not part of any organizations that might be in the news and thus create interest. They are not familiar with local politicians (who might be in the news and etc.).
All that's left is very simple things like "where should you get drinks/food", "what kind of stores and restaurants are supposed to open soon", and of course local fights over whether or not some building or other should be allowed, and those things do not require a newspaper to cover. In almost any city in America there are a handful of local instagram/tiktok people who will do at the very least the first two and sometimes even the third.
Are people in Baltimore better informed about international news? Are people in Philadelphia reading more movie criticism? It's certainly possible to be way better informed today than 30 years ago, but having some international news and some movie criticism and some local news altogether in the same publication that had the sports scores and the classifieds very plausibly led to people being better informed overall than when they get all that information via Google and Facebook.
I think it's interesting this post mentioned Philadelphia and the Inquirer a few times without mentioning that the Inky is one of the few old-school papers not especially on hard times. In Philly's case, a rich guy set up a nonprofit foundation that owns the paper, with an explicit aim to serve local needs. The rich guy is now dead and the nonprofit is specifically a subsidiary of one of those old-school community nonprofits, so it can't really be classified as a vanity project anymore.
It also seems to work, I know lots of people who pay for the Inquirer. (And no, they don't all work in local government like I do.) And so it's been able to do a lot of good coverage of local/regional issues. But the flipside is that their coverage is relatively neutral (liberal-leaning, but this is a big city with blue-trending suburbs), with a viewpoint best described as "civic wonkish". They can go hard, but it's in areas like government corruption/incompetence where *everyone* would have a problem (e.g. their recent vendetta against the Sheriff's Office).
Unlike real estate, medicine or law, journalism is a highly unregulated industry and one with no government mandated professional licensure. Journalistic labor has become vastly more productive over the past few decades, we have better content than ever even though the proportion of GDP captured by journalists has probably fallen by 50%.