Spot on Matt. I'm increasingly of the opinion we will just end up with trade publications, the NYT, WSJ, a handful of billionaire vanity outfits and then just straight up party organ publications like we had in the 19th century. Local news just doesn't have a viable business model, and in the future to the extent there is any coverage at all it will probably come from civic minded citizens doing patchwork amateur work like volunteer fire brigades did before you had professional first responders. I kinda wish that instead of focusing money and time on one publication, one (or several) of these billionaires would do an Andrew Carnegie for the 21st century and setup a philanthropic local news chapter funding model that would disperse a few hundred thousand or million dollars per vetted local non-profit or registered reporter per specific area all over the USA and at least try to put some kind of floor in place for keeping local governments, companies and schools accountable. Sure it wouldn't be the same as when dozens or 100's of local beat reporters existed per city/region but it I have to think that $10-20 billion in a trust throwing off $500million-$1 billion per year in cash flow would help.
I wonder if a business model like The Athletic, where you have one site investing in local coverage (of sports, in their case) could be viable. I’m a Chicago sports fan in the DC area, but I also like any kind of baseball news, and will occasionally read other long form sports stories. The subscription is similar to many Substack prices, but I can get all sorts of interesting stories with a few new ones I really want to read each day. I understand The NY Times isn’t expecting The Athletic to make a profit until 2025, but a very broad, growing paid subscriber base that resulted from building out high quality reporting market-by-market seems like a model worth considering.
As an LA resident and LA times subscriber, it's endlessly frustrating to see the paper put so many resources into national news coverage and opinion, which frankly has never been differentiated from other outlet, when their California reporting is excellent and extremely needed given the housing dysfunction in our city (shout-out to Liam Dillon who is an excellent housing reporter). I would be willing to pay far more for the paper if it exclusively covered local issues
"I don’t read Italian, but Chat GPT tells me this article is about the Brothers of Italy Party trying to get its leaders to improve their English-language skills."
I clicked the link and the Chrome browser on my Chromebook instantly translated the article to English, like it does for every non-English-language webpage.
In Seattle, in the year 2000, we used to basically have 8 viable local news services. The Seattle Times, the Seattle PI, Seattle Weekly, Seattle Stranger, three local television stations, and KUOW (our public radio station). Since then the Seattle PI and the Seattle Weekly have both gone out of business. The Seattle Times is a newspaper that has been owned by the same family since the 1800s. It takes what would be a politically centrist position in a State that leans left and a city that leans heavily left. It has even gone for far as to provide free advertising for Republican candidates in statewide races. They still didn't win. It's news coverage priorities and editorials reflect this and so a lot of the city of Seattle takes it with a grain of salt since they know it's slant is more conservative than their own. KOMO TV news was bought by Sinclair and runs its ultra-conservative "Seattle is dying narrative" seemingly primarily for a national audience that wants to see negative press about Seattle as much as for anyone local. Neither of the other two television news stations appear to do much serious investigation other than fluff stories, crime stories, and repeating national news with little obvious editorial content. The Stranger is a weekly paper, now online only, that was primarily a venue for advertising concerts, movie reviews, personals, and sex columns. It's news coverage was generally just alternative snark. But as the only news service whose perspective matches the majority of the residents is now the most trusted news source even though it isn't really set up to be a serious news source. It's political endorsements are the most impactful for local races but are mostly a serious of hot takes and jokes. So KUOW seems to be doing the best job of covering local topics that locals care about through a lense that prioritizes what locals value and it is publicly funded. I am inclined to think that without a monopoly we are likely to see the best objective news coming from these publicly funded news sources. I think PBS is the best source for TV news at the National level. Otherwise to survive news seems to need to be entertaining in a way that isn't necessarily consistent with great coverage, a vanity project that reflects its owners' biases, or polarizing propaganda. I think that begs the question of how much folks are willing to fund local public broadcasting. They need it but we don't always want to pay for what we need.
I am not sure that it does given the very low turnout. It seems like when a lot of people vote - the Stranger endorsements almost always win. With low turnout the Seattle Times endorsements win most races (although there were races like Dan Strauss where the Stranger endorsement seemed to carry the day despite the Seattle Times' intense hostility.) I vote the way the Stranger endorses about 75% of the time, but not because of the Stranger. I do think they can get things very wrong in part because their political analysis is as much snark and thoughtful reasoning. But when I don't vote the same way it is generally because I am a high information voter and have experience or information that contradicts their opinion. Whether the Seattle Times endorses someone carries very zero weight with me. (I do think this is somewhat generational. My parents and their friends are much more likely to give the Seattle Times opinions weight even if they take them with a grain of salt and less likely to even know who the Stranger is endorsing unless they hear that from someone under 60 years of age.)
The thing I really want is the print version but in a digital format. Something I can set as a goal to get through and then be done with news. I don’t want to be on top of the very latest events and I don’t want to be part of “the conversation”.
I just want it in a format I can get on an e-ink device. Preferably in bed.
I work at the Washington Post as an engineer and we had a kind of a town hall of sorts with our new CEO. A question about local journalism as it relates to our over-representation on the coasts came up and basically, he said that we need to fix fundamentals before we get into serving geographic segments. Matt’s post has me reconsidering the challenges to local journalism.
Has there been talk about creating non-profit local news? Maybe they could operate like NPR and get money from a variety of sources. I don’t know if this has been tried.
I appreciated the link to Jeff Pearlman's advice. He himself makes the connection to publishing ("It's the same way you survive as an author selling books), and, yeah, it's really similar to what I hear in those spaces. Someone like novelist/satirist Leigh Stein (links below), for example, has been banging on for a while now about the imperative to build your audience in the places where readers are: i.e., online. I'm ambivalent, because neither making money nor building a readership are what i want out of writing, but I get the hard realities for people who wish they could sell their writing in the old way. Unlike the local news beat, there are new business models that seem to be working in the book world. But they're unfamiliar, engagement-driven, and, to my disaffected Gen X eyes, grossly commercial. Anyhow, I do like the challenge from practically-minded writers who are in the trenches.
Back in the day political scientist Jonathan Ladd wrote a great piece pointing out that throughout American history a majority of the public hasn't been very interested in what media and political elites would call "hard news" and so historically the news had to be subsidized by someone. In the Antebellum Era early newspapers were often funded by political parties via cash or things like patronage jobs or lucrative government printing contracts. In the second half of the 19th Century the "broad sheets" or "penny press" covered everything but serious "political content" or foreign affairs. Indeed the New York Sun once quipped once quipped that they never wrote about Congress because "our readers aren't interested in that. The 20th Century "bundling" model of newspapers worked to subsize newsrooms because journalists thought covering "the news" was important but it was always build on local monopolies of things like the classifieds and movie times.
So yes subsidies have always been there and finding new ways to make it work. I'd suggest making super rich private universities help fund joint local news projects as new growth area, newsrooms get funding and Harvard et al helps to work on their bad reputations among middle Americans. Same with trying to guilt and shame the New York Times into doing something similar. Instead of their reporters going "on safari" every few years in fly over country during presidential elections for after a police shooting, why not do something more long term?
This is great analysis, but I think Matt is missing one angle: local TV news.
Local TV news has picked up the slack where newspapers have weakened. Here in my red state town, if I have some kind of problem that needs to be escalated to the media, I wouldn't call the Orlando Sentinel, I'd call the local news stations - and there are several of them all in competition with each other.
Now what happens to the local TV stations when all the Boomers die and no one watches cable anymore? Anyone's guess. But for now they appear to be a strong industry.
As a fairly young person who enjoys broadcast TV, I like it because you can’t beat free. But Roku released their free ad supported Live TV feature recently, and now I get ~1,000 free channels digitally, and I don’t know if local news stations will be able to make the transition, but I hope they will.
In case there are any West Coast billionaires reading these comments I think there is a market need for a West Coast NYT. There is enough connection between California, Oregon and Washington to support a publication or platform or something that provides coverage of all the cities on the West Coast plus their state governments. I love the NYT but it has an East Coast bias and there are tens of millions of people on the West Coast as a potential subscriber base.
The LA Times was trying to do that a decade ago but apparently they failed. No one else is in a position to do that, unless the NYTimes California office continues to grow.
I hear you and I wish that the LA Times was better but I think there’s room in the market for more than one paper of record and that a little journalistic competition is a good thing for the quality of the product. The NYT is good but also a bit smug and I think it would be great to have a West Coast competitor that would not write about the woes of the LA Times with an undercurrent of disdain for Angelenos (as if they are too shallow to care about good journalism) as the NYT has done in the past.
Unfortunately the west coast billionaires have invested in east coast media! Bezos with WaPo, and Powell-Jobs with Time. I still think Benioff might buy the SFChron...
I don't understand why you only propose going to philanthropists on bended knee. In my field - vaccine development - I recently proposed a way to build Consumer Reports-like testing infrastructure for medicines. The basic idea is that the federal government would issue matching subsidies indexed to the testing company's number of paid subscribers. Given the success of Substack, it would be very easy to extend the idea to independent journalists. There could be a bigger multiplier to incentivize journalists who predominantly cover local issues. The subsidy could be issued in the form of a personal income tax rebate - because who can possibly be opposed to tax cuts! Here's more detail on how I imagine the system might work for medicines:
As a philanthropic endeavor, local news is something that I think AI (even at its current level of capabilities) could cover at a reasonable level of productivity. Feed the bot minutes from all the various local meetings, changes to local ordinances and all of the local budgets and have it spit out a steady stream of articles.
Spot on Matt. I'm increasingly of the opinion we will just end up with trade publications, the NYT, WSJ, a handful of billionaire vanity outfits and then just straight up party organ publications like we had in the 19th century. Local news just doesn't have a viable business model, and in the future to the extent there is any coverage at all it will probably come from civic minded citizens doing patchwork amateur work like volunteer fire brigades did before you had professional first responders. I kinda wish that instead of focusing money and time on one publication, one (or several) of these billionaires would do an Andrew Carnegie for the 21st century and setup a philanthropic local news chapter funding model that would disperse a few hundred thousand or million dollars per vetted local non-profit or registered reporter per specific area all over the USA and at least try to put some kind of floor in place for keeping local governments, companies and schools accountable. Sure it wouldn't be the same as when dozens or 100's of local beat reporters existed per city/region but it I have to think that $10-20 billion in a trust throwing off $500million-$1 billion per year in cash flow would help.
I wonder if a business model like The Athletic, where you have one site investing in local coverage (of sports, in their case) could be viable. I’m a Chicago sports fan in the DC area, but I also like any kind of baseball news, and will occasionally read other long form sports stories. The subscription is similar to many Substack prices, but I can get all sorts of interesting stories with a few new ones I really want to read each day. I understand The NY Times isn’t expecting The Athletic to make a profit until 2025, but a very broad, growing paid subscriber base that resulted from building out high quality reporting market-by-market seems like a model worth considering.
As an LA resident and LA times subscriber, it's endlessly frustrating to see the paper put so many resources into national news coverage and opinion, which frankly has never been differentiated from other outlet, when their California reporting is excellent and extremely needed given the housing dysfunction in our city (shout-out to Liam Dillon who is an excellent housing reporter). I would be willing to pay far more for the paper if it exclusively covered local issues
"I don’t read Italian, but Chat GPT tells me this article is about the Brothers of Italy Party trying to get its leaders to improve their English-language skills."
I clicked the link and the Chrome browser on my Chromebook instantly translated the article to English, like it does for every non-English-language webpage.
In Seattle, in the year 2000, we used to basically have 8 viable local news services. The Seattle Times, the Seattle PI, Seattle Weekly, Seattle Stranger, three local television stations, and KUOW (our public radio station). Since then the Seattle PI and the Seattle Weekly have both gone out of business. The Seattle Times is a newspaper that has been owned by the same family since the 1800s. It takes what would be a politically centrist position in a State that leans left and a city that leans heavily left. It has even gone for far as to provide free advertising for Republican candidates in statewide races. They still didn't win. It's news coverage priorities and editorials reflect this and so a lot of the city of Seattle takes it with a grain of salt since they know it's slant is more conservative than their own. KOMO TV news was bought by Sinclair and runs its ultra-conservative "Seattle is dying narrative" seemingly primarily for a national audience that wants to see negative press about Seattle as much as for anyone local. Neither of the other two television news stations appear to do much serious investigation other than fluff stories, crime stories, and repeating national news with little obvious editorial content. The Stranger is a weekly paper, now online only, that was primarily a venue for advertising concerts, movie reviews, personals, and sex columns. It's news coverage was generally just alternative snark. But as the only news service whose perspective matches the majority of the residents is now the most trusted news source even though it isn't really set up to be a serious news source. It's political endorsements are the most impactful for local races but are mostly a serious of hot takes and jokes. So KUOW seems to be doing the best job of covering local topics that locals care about through a lense that prioritizes what locals value and it is publicly funded. I am inclined to think that without a monopoly we are likely to see the best objective news coming from these publicly funded news sources. I think PBS is the best source for TV news at the National level. Otherwise to survive news seems to need to be entertaining in a way that isn't necessarily consistent with great coverage, a vanity project that reflects its owners' biases, or polarizing propaganda. I think that begs the question of how much folks are willing to fund local public broadcasting. They need it but we don't always want to pay for what we need.
I think the last election undermined the idea that The Stranger represents the majority of residents.
I am not sure that it does given the very low turnout. It seems like when a lot of people vote - the Stranger endorsements almost always win. With low turnout the Seattle Times endorsements win most races (although there were races like Dan Strauss where the Stranger endorsement seemed to carry the day despite the Seattle Times' intense hostility.) I vote the way the Stranger endorses about 75% of the time, but not because of the Stranger. I do think they can get things very wrong in part because their political analysis is as much snark and thoughtful reasoning. But when I don't vote the same way it is generally because I am a high information voter and have experience or information that contradicts their opinion. Whether the Seattle Times endorses someone carries very zero weight with me. (I do think this is somewhat generational. My parents and their friends are much more likely to give the Seattle Times opinions weight even if they take them with a grain of salt and less likely to even know who the Stranger is endorsing unless they hear that from someone under 60 years of age.)
The thing I really want is the print version but in a digital format. Something I can set as a goal to get through and then be done with news. I don’t want to be on top of the very latest events and I don’t want to be part of “the conversation”.
I just want it in a format I can get on an e-ink device. Preferably in bed.
I work at the Washington Post as an engineer and we had a kind of a town hall of sorts with our new CEO. A question about local journalism as it relates to our over-representation on the coasts came up and basically, he said that we need to fix fundamentals before we get into serving geographic segments. Matt’s post has me reconsidering the challenges to local journalism.
Has there been talk about creating non-profit local news? Maybe they could operate like NPR and get money from a variety of sources. I don’t know if this has been tried.
I appreciated the link to Jeff Pearlman's advice. He himself makes the connection to publishing ("It's the same way you survive as an author selling books), and, yeah, it's really similar to what I hear in those spaces. Someone like novelist/satirist Leigh Stein (links below), for example, has been banging on for a while now about the imperative to build your audience in the places where readers are: i.e., online. I'm ambivalent, because neither making money nor building a readership are what i want out of writing, but I get the hard realities for people who wish they could sell their writing in the old way. Unlike the local news beat, there are new business models that seem to be working in the book world. But they're unfamiliar, engagement-driven, and, to my disaffected Gen X eyes, grossly commercial. Anyhow, I do like the challenge from practically-minded writers who are in the trenches.
Here's a couple links:
Leigh Stein interviewed on the #BookTok phenomenon: https://lithub.com/booktok-is-good-actually-on-the-undersung-joys-of-a-vast-and-multifarious-platform/
Leigh Stein on genre fiction (from her old newsletter before she pivoted to Substack): https://mailchi.mp/cf6ff8c4526b/mood-boost?e=0b5c195a81
P.S. my next sports book is Pearlman's Bo Jackson biography, The Last Folk Hero. I've heard good things!
Back in the day political scientist Jonathan Ladd wrote a great piece pointing out that throughout American history a majority of the public hasn't been very interested in what media and political elites would call "hard news" and so historically the news had to be subsidized by someone. In the Antebellum Era early newspapers were often funded by political parties via cash or things like patronage jobs or lucrative government printing contracts. In the second half of the 19th Century the "broad sheets" or "penny press" covered everything but serious "political content" or foreign affairs. Indeed the New York Sun once quipped once quipped that they never wrote about Congress because "our readers aren't interested in that. The 20th Century "bundling" model of newspapers worked to subsize newsrooms because journalists thought covering "the news" was important but it was always build on local monopolies of things like the classifieds and movie times.
So yes subsidies have always been there and finding new ways to make it work. I'd suggest making super rich private universities help fund joint local news projects as new growth area, newsrooms get funding and Harvard et al helps to work on their bad reputations among middle Americans. Same with trying to guilt and shame the New York Times into doing something similar. Instead of their reporters going "on safari" every few years in fly over country during presidential elections for after a police shooting, why not do something more long term?
https://mischiefsoffaction.blogspot.com/2015/08/four-approaches-to-providing-political.html
This is great analysis, but I think Matt is missing one angle: local TV news.
Local TV news has picked up the slack where newspapers have weakened. Here in my red state town, if I have some kind of problem that needs to be escalated to the media, I wouldn't call the Orlando Sentinel, I'd call the local news stations - and there are several of them all in competition with each other.
Now what happens to the local TV stations when all the Boomers die and no one watches cable anymore? Anyone's guess. But for now they appear to be a strong industry.
As a fairly young person who enjoys broadcast TV, I like it because you can’t beat free. But Roku released their free ad supported Live TV feature recently, and now I get ~1,000 free channels digitally, and I don’t know if local news stations will be able to make the transition, but I hope they will.
In case there are any West Coast billionaires reading these comments I think there is a market need for a West Coast NYT. There is enough connection between California, Oregon and Washington to support a publication or platform or something that provides coverage of all the cities on the West Coast plus their state governments. I love the NYT but it has an East Coast bias and there are tens of millions of people on the West Coast as a potential subscriber base.
The LA Times was trying to do that a decade ago but apparently they failed. No one else is in a position to do that, unless the NYTimes California office continues to grow.
I hear you and I wish that the LA Times was better but I think there’s room in the market for more than one paper of record and that a little journalistic competition is a good thing for the quality of the product. The NYT is good but also a bit smug and I think it would be great to have a West Coast competitor that would not write about the woes of the LA Times with an undercurrent of disdain for Angelenos (as if they are too shallow to care about good journalism) as the NYT has done in the past.
Case in point, one of the best Chronicle writers is now the NYT SF Bureau Chief: https://www.nytimes.com/by/heather-knight
(I’ve noticed the NYTimes seems to have Canada and Australia offices as well, producing what seems to be trying more and more to be a complete paper.)
Unfortunately the west coast billionaires have invested in east coast media! Bezos with WaPo, and Powell-Jobs with Time. I still think Benioff might buy the SFChron...
I don't understand why you only propose going to philanthropists on bended knee. In my field - vaccine development - I recently proposed a way to build Consumer Reports-like testing infrastructure for medicines. The basic idea is that the federal government would issue matching subsidies indexed to the testing company's number of paid subscribers. Given the success of Substack, it would be very easy to extend the idea to independent journalists. There could be a bigger multiplier to incentivize journalists who predominantly cover local issues. The subsidy could be issued in the form of a personal income tax rebate - because who can possibly be opposed to tax cuts! Here's more detail on how I imagine the system might work for medicines:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/consumer-reports-for-medicines
More intense Competition for reader attention does not mean better outcomes for readers. The readers eyes are the product.
As a philanthropic endeavor, local news is something that I think AI (even at its current level of capabilities) could cover at a reasonable level of productivity. Feed the bot minutes from all the various local meetings, changes to local ordinances and all of the local budgets and have it spit out a steady stream of articles.
This was really good analysis of the really challenging incentives for local news. But also not much in the way of solutions so it's kinda depressing.