Comment by evtothedev
4 years ago
I keep thinking this is a ripe space for a startup. I could see it being, "Infrastructure for local news" or perhaps "Local news in a box."
For example, what would it take to have something like Berkleyside[1] for every small town in the country? Or what about something like Block Club[2]
If anyone wants to spit ball ideas for this, I'd love to riff: https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=20...
[1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/
This has been tried a lot with very little to show for it.
The problem is running a real newsroom that actually has the capabilities to do serious coverage is shockingly expensive.
So you need a revenue model. Being local, it can't pursue scale like WaPo or Dotdash-Meredith, so programmatic isn't going to work for you with. National advertisers want more scale and more specific demographics than you're able to offer, and besides, why should they deal with you when they can target the same people on Facebook?
So you're left with a few local advertisers, who may be willing to spend some money, but the metro papers have tried that for the last decade and it's not enough.
Which leaves subscriptions.
And here's the question: Newspapers were never actually in the political coverage business, they're in the Information Business, and local politics and news are loss-leaders inside that. In the old days, their offering included sports, real estate, classifieds, jobs, shopping, movie times and various other near monopolies that are now scattered to the winds of the internet.
So that leaves two questions:
1. What is a local information product that's good enough for a sizeable percentage of the community to pay for?
2. At what price point?
3. How big does that community need to be in order to make it work?
Can this be done? Actually, I think there's a shot if the right person tried it in the right place. I have some ideas, but odds are long, and I don't think anyone without a deep grasp of both the local community they plan to serve and the business they're going into has a chance.
It's expensive and risky. Telling truth to power invites power to fight back, and power has the means to fight.
A major unrecognised role of publishers is in providing legal shield to authors and reporters. Though some publishers are ducking out on that responsibility, see Cory Doctorow's take, "Reasonable Agreement":
https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed...
Alt (paywall / regwall / JS): https://scribe.rip/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7
Who pays for local news? You need to have actual journalists sitting in boring local council meetings and reading boring reports to generate "news" stories. That is not free. Local news competes for attention with national news, global news, and a billion types of non-news entertainment. Ad money is probably too thin to cover the expensive legwork needed for local coverage.
One answer to that is to go to a weekly format. I think the economics work out a lot better than for a daily.
Around Tompkins County we still have the Ithaca Journal but each edition seems a little thinner than the one before.
There is a civic-minded weekly, Tompkins Weekly which is mostly newspaper-length stories and makes it to public meetings, and also the weekly Ithaca Times which covers serious issues, often with stories a bit longer than newspaper stories. There are also some publications focused on arts and entertainment.
I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.
The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs. Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news to all parts of the country.
The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local, irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't something.
One tendril of the problem is that online delivery enables organizations to track engagement at a more granular level than "which articles generated lots of letters to the editor?"
I suspect it takes a lot of integrity, stubbornness, or stupidity to continually plow resources into reporting out, writing, and editing eat-your-vegetables articles instead of reallocating those resources towards the content people engage with.
I’d say to question those assumptions. Open source software exists but the congenital wisdom that engineers would never do work for free.
You’d be surprised what people will volunteer for. Some people are already attending those things and perhaps they’d be willing to report back.
It's a lot harder to get unbiased news if you solely rely on volunteers.
4 replies →
Patch [1] seems to be exactly what you’re describing — “local news in a box”:
> What is Patch? > > Patch is an innovative way to find out about, and participate in, what's going on near you.
My Connecticut hometown had a Patch site. As other commenters have pointed out, apps don’t address a dearth of local journalists (Patch appears to encourage community participation, which sounds good, but is not journalism), funding for local news (though I would expect it to reduce operating costs), etc.
[1] https://patch.com/about
Oh, neat! Thanks for sharing this.
If you mean startup as in VC backed super growth oriented companies. Then this set of incentives is exactly what got us here. I don't see anyway local news framework make big money without devolving to the attention grabbing mindless beasts we have now.
But newspapers have always been in the business of grabbing attention. Tim Wu has written about this extensively.[1] The issue for me is that in the past, this generated a lot of positive by-products (i.e. local news reporting on corrupt politicians resulting in them being kicked out of office; local news reporting on polluted water supply resulting in it being cleaned, etc.). With Google/Facebook news, and a focus on national stories, you loose this side benefit.
[1] https://bookshop.org/books/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-...