Comment by mola
4 years ago
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-...