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Comment by bartart | Hacker News Reader

The main problem with these newsgroups is that they have _so_many_ competitors. Most people don't want to and don't have to pay to get around a paywall because chances are someone else offers a similar article for free. Even for local news you have tv stations, print outlets, and npr. It is a tough business.

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If you live in a major city, perhaps. I get the town newspaper and there is plenty of information published there that will never appear anywhere else.

Yup, same story here in Norway - the smaller a population the paper covers, the better it does (generally speaking)

I can think of a few reasons why -

a) Local papers have gotten much of their revenue from subscriptions for a long time; their customers are used to this model.

b) Their ads are local, targeting perhaps a few thousand people at most. That makes a paper (with high penetration and trust in the target audience) a viable alternative to Google ads.

c) They provide news which doesn’t have a lot of alternative sources, while still being of interest to the readers. This encourages readers to keep subscribing (providing stable income), and the continuing subscriptions encourages advertisers to keep spending their ad dollars (or kroner, as it were) on the local paper.

Things are a little different here, in that many of the small-town (when I say small-town here I really mean everything other than major cities) papers are not doing that well and are owned by faraway, faceless national concerns. But the fact remains that there's not a good replacement (the candidates, I guess, are Patch and town Facebook groups).

I follow the local reporter on twitter, who sits through the entire city council meeting every time. Except for rare cases, I just don't see volunteers doing that, because it is a huge time commitment, and while some issues get people worked up, there is often quite a bit of minutiae (what kinds of signs are allowed is a recent example).

That and some of the remarks are, frankly, insipid.

> _so_many_ competitors

Go to a city council meeting, and count how many news outlets stay for the entire thing. Most places, you're lucky if it's one. Even in big markets, you can probably count it on the fingers of your hand.

The problem is that few people are willing to pay for coverage of their local city council meeting.

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