Comment by adrianN

4 years ago

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.

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adrianN

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PaulHoule  4 years ago

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.

evtothedev  4 years ago

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.

  • abathur  4 years ago

    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.

bilsbie  4 years ago

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.