Why local newspapers are worth saving | Hacker News Reader

Why local newspapers are worth saving

alexdmoore.com

72 pointslloydarmbrust46 comments

Local journalism is worth saving. Nothing he talks about is intrinsic to print.

True, but.....what else could replace them?

Good luck replicating the relationships that the local newspapers have with the people in their communities who are able and willing to report on them. It's true that we don't have to use newspapers to distribute local reporting, but the only companies in most communities that have connections to the journalists there happen to be called newspapers and happen to put out a print product.

Any new service that wants to distribute local journalism will have a hard time re-doing all the relationship building that the newspapers have.

When I started Windy Citizen two years ago, I thought we'd be able to give people a better way to find news in their city. That's gone quite well, but I've learned firsthand that the real value that the "newspapers" have is that they're the ones that have all the journalists. There's a non-profit news startup here in Chicago called the Chicago News Coop that also had a similar goal when they started up. But instead of making a cool new product and taking lessons from hacker culture, they went out and stole away the crown jewel reporters from the Tribune and the local alt. weekly. They may be broke as a joke, but good journalists definitely would like to work there, which means in the end, they'll have a good product.

You know how people on HN talk about how hackers only want to work for and with other hackers?

Most journalists only want to work for and with other journalists. I thought that was one of the big takeaways from the NewsTilt post-mortem.

> True, but.....what else could replace them?

The web. more specifically, web versions of articles, like how you see news websites now. Alternatively, crowdsourcing websites, like reddit and twitter. The content quality is generally pretty low, with a surplus of editorializing but you get news quickly.

I live in a podunk area, but already most of our local journalists and our newspaper have hopped on the web bandwagon. They were actually pretty proactive about it, surprisingly.

From the number of comments posted on the sites, it appears their web editions are very, very popular. My only beef is that most of the comments are low quality, not well thought out, and/or trolls, and I wish the staff would moderate similarly to how print editions do "Letters to the editors".

My contact at the local paper indicates they regularly have "Is it time to cut out the print edition, yet?". Thus far the answer has been "no", but that "yes" day is getting pretty close.

"The web"? He's asking how journalism is supposed to be funded, you're talking about how it might be delivered.

Thanks.

I've been running a local news site in Chicago for two years now. I eat/sleep/breathe local indie news. Those are my friends and colleagues.

No one's making any money.

Windy Citizen is just ramen profitable, and I'm seen as an example of a "success" when I go to conferences and the like.

Yes, hyperlocal sites could be the next step, but right now, with a few exceptions (http://thebatavian.com, baristanet.com) no one's making any money.

To run a hyperlocal site, you have to produce great content AND be an exceptional salesman. That's friggin' hard.

You have to do both of these because you'll never raise capital. It will be a lifestyle business. There's no YC for community news sites.

Here's the latest report on how this new generation of local news sites is just not getting it done on the business front (again, with a few exceptions):

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/10/community-news-sites-a...

You have more practical experience in this area, but why can't you form a chain of community news sites? The infrastructure is the same - it's basically a network of blogs. You can run local ads for each community, and when you get enough communities, you can run big, national campaigns.

Totally do-able.

But again, no one's going to fund that, so you'll have to bootstrap or go the friends and family route.

Then you'll need to be technical enough to set up a Wordpress MU and figure out how to handle the caching stuff so your site stays up and responsive.

Then you'll need to go find a writer for each neighborhood who will consistently write for free/peanuts.

You might have to edit all their work too.

So that's production.

Then you have to build a list of sales contacts in each community.

You have to create a sales kit that explains who you are and why they should advertise with you. No one will have ever heard of you and that's where most sales conversations will die.

You have to take payment from them and then reroute that to your writers and so on.

In short, it's a ton of work, very hands on work. You can cut out some of these steps, but building relationships with the writers and with the Mom & Pop businesses is the tricky part and very time intensive.

Also, you'll be lucky if any one of these sites clears 1000 uniques in a day for the first two years, so national brands won't want to touch you unless you're running about 100 sites.

Again, it's totally do-able, but it's a lot of work for a small team.

Knowing absolutely nothing about this, let me just throw a random idea out there:

Split the work up so that you are just providing the service to partners in local communities. You can manage the tech centrally, and anything else that can benefit from centralization (national ad network, AP-style content, etc), but farm out the actual micro-sites to local partners.

Of course you probably want to run a couple of them yourself so you understand the market and the pain points. And you'll probably have to bootstrap pretty hard to get critical mass.

But at some point it seems like you could be providing services to established local organizations (like newspapers), and potentially become profitable while charging those organizations an order of magnitude less than what it would take to cook up their own site from scratch.

The key would really be understanding what all these local community organizations have in common.

Websites. Hyperlocal websites are springing up, from nationals like Patch to tiny town-focused sites. The business models aren't quite there yet in a lot of cases, and in others they can't support huge staffs, but this is true of everything from Twitter to the latest MVP here as well.

It's the journalism that matters, whether it's printed, posted, blogged or uploaded.

The biz model is the only thing that matters. Until it's there, this isn't a real answer to my question.

</guy who runs a hyperlocal web site>

How is a hyperlocal website ever going to generate any significant income without classifieds?

Who's going to pay for the guy sitting in on council meetings? Or the guy digging through seemingly trivial freedom of information requests?

Journalism has always been broken in a way, it's never paid its way, but the internet is excaberating how broken it is.

We can pretend that some upstanding citizen will do it, but they won't. We can pretend a blogger will be able to face a massive libel suit or a coordinated smear campaign, but they won't.

We were lucky in the last 50 years, classifieds paid for our journalism.

Worse still for us here in Blighty, the bbc is massively funded by tax payers, the Guardian by a trust fund, we're soon to be over-run by interest groups while main streams die a death.

It's a worrying time, we can't stop it, but any free thinker greeting the present situation for the print media with glee will be waking up with a very bad hangover in 10 years time.

In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia? How many dissenting critics will we actually have? Who will pay for journalists to be essentially unproductive for months or even years at a time on the off chance a major story breaks? How will a major story generate any revenue anyway?

Maybe it will all work out for the best in the end. But it is still a very uncertain time and trusting one man and his blog is very dangerous.

In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia?

He/she will be in Mozambique, or Serbia, and will be able and willing to tell us what's happening because he or she lives there. The value of dropping a satellite phone-wielding reporter from a helicopter and picking him up 24 hours later has always been questionable, IMO, and now it's completely pointless.

Information may or may not want to be free, but news definitely does.

Serbia is a good example, because whenever anything newsworthy happens in Serbia it's probably some sort of conflict between the local ethnic groups, and if you're relying on locals for information you'll find that their view of the incidents will vary greatly depending on which side they're on.

And that's just natural bias -- imagine what happens when you throw in folks who are deliberately sowing misinformation, for one reason or another.

It would take hours to sort through all the news reports coming in from Serbia, determine who are the more and less trustworthy sources, and put it all together into some coherent narrative, and I don't have time to do that for every controversial news story that happens in the world! I'd be happy to pay a dollar a day for a relatively trustworthy newspaper to hire journalists to do this sort of thing for me.

I'd be happy to pay a dollar a day for a relatively trustworthy newspaper to hire journalists to do this sort of thing for me.

At which point you're still in the business of having to trust people and seek out multiple points of view if you really want the whole story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair , anyone?

Oh, I said a relatively trustworthy newspaper, not the New York Times.

The public could always pitch in. It worked for broadcasting when broadcasting was hard for private companies to pull off, it might work for local news.

>We were lucky in the last 50 years, classifieds paid for our journalism.

In what way are classifieds + subscriptions not possible with websites? Any kind of hyperlocal website can have everything any newspaper can offer, the only downside is that they've got competition, which they may not be able to succeed against.

They've also got to overcome some resistance to online advertising, I suspect.

Our experience in CT has been different. Journalists are happy to have a place-to-work-not-print because they've been watching print die a slow death for years. They want to work with other journalists, of course, but a roomful of journalists alone isn't an especially profitable company. You need a way to publish their content and you need a way for the community to pay for the value that local content creates. Typically, local business has an interest in the proliferation of said local content, so along comes the (local) sales team. Can the math work? So far, the indications we've seen are positive, but there's much work to be done.

I want to believe that, but I have a hard time proving it to myself. Growing up, I loved to read the paper. Without cable or Internet, it was the best information source I had available.

However, when I visit home & look at the local paper now, I find it pointless. The "news" is outdated & rarely as in-depth as what I can find online. Classifieds? I'm more likely to find what I want online, if not with Craigslist, with Ebay & Amazon. Opinion & perspective? Nothing really insightful. In fact, I don't think we'd lose anything if the local reporters simply became online bloggers. Likewise, local stories & the rest. I can get a richer set simply looking at local bloggers. They don't really do investigative reporting. So that leaves local sports. But does my high school football team really need a newspaper solely because of it? In the end, I realized that my local paper of old was an unconfigurable RSS reader & not a very good one as that.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that local newspapers were doing fine. Most large city and metro papers are hurting, but small community papers are entirely different. Typically they are supported by ads and distributed to everyone in the community (no subscribers). They tend to have truly local news that isn't or can't be covered by major newspapers and rarely makes it into online news.

True to a degree. Think of small local papers as having a 10-year buffer--they're like looking at large papers in 2001.

There are several groups trying to kill small papers (like patch.com). And they will succeed if newspapers do not rise to the challenge. Technology is becoming cheap and accessible enough that makes this scenario possible. But the difference between patch and a local paper is that Patch doesn't really care about the markets they server--if they stop making a enough revenue they could pull out and leave after they've killed the small paper serving that market.

I think Patch will stick around long enough to kill of many, many local papers.

Then AOL will have a leadership changeover or will get bored of it not really making much money and shut it down creating a void in many communities.

Exactly. That's what we're fighting against.

Small local newspapers are in a better place than the big boys — mainly because they don't tend to have as much debt — but they're actually harder hit by things like Craigslist and Yelp murdering previously lucrative ad markets.

Incidentally, I blame the newspapers themselves for that. They could have been Craigslist, but instead they were too slow to adapt and got squashed by a better product.

Agreed. Newspapers aren't dying, they're slowly committing suicide.

I don't. Craigslist took over a fat market and slashed several zeroes off the end of it. In no way does it make sense for newspapers to have preempted craigslist.

Umm, it took seven years for Craigslist to become "an overnight success". Newspapers knew about it--we did and I was working for a newspaper at the time--but they ignored it.

If every newspaper in America would have gone to a free + paid model they could have saved at least half of their revenue and craigslist would still only be in 7 cities. But they wouldn't embrace change a lost big.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect any business to cut their revenues in half because they see something coming that might hurt their business more in the long term. Especially without any assurances that cutting revenues now will defeat the new threat. It's so easy to sit here now and say "oh the papers should have done x y and z", but even then you don't know if it would have worked. I remain unconvinced.

You sound like a newspaper publisher.

The Phoenix paper, the Arizona Republic, keeps cutting back and cutting back. They have interesting rationales for this, too. For example, the Monday paper is more of a broadsheet than a newspaper; they claimed "readers told them" they don't want a regular-sized edition after getting the big ad-crammed Sunday paper. Yeah, I'm sure. Didn't come with a corresponding price drop though.

Meanwhile, what content they do offer is increasingly from the AP or some other, larger paper, such as the L.A. Times.

On some occasions they do offer good, interesting local reports, but their current plan of routinely raising the subscription price while reducing content seems poorly thought-out.

There are a lot of (sometimes very vague) positive effects of local newspapers described here, but to be convinced that they're "worth saving," I'm going to need to know what the cost is.

Right now, they just need to make the transition online. But if you wanted to run a small online newspaper for a small town, the cost is low.

If a town of 20,000 people wanted to ensure that the newspaper stuck around and produced solid quality news they could access online in perpetuity, they'd need to subsidize it to the tune of about $1.25 per person per month. Advertising would likely take care of the rest.

If one was worried about government interference, this fee could be bundled this into cable subscription packages and it would basically work out the same way.

A lot of these points are valid. We are talking about local journalism. I use the word "newspaper" to describe the business and staff which comprise the folks that are creating the content, spending time with real people face to face and creating culture. People can call this piece marketing, but I call it supporting what I believe in. The fact is that SI and other companies are finding newer and better ways for "newspapers" to thrive. This directly keeps our nation's local journalists employed which equals more boots on the ground reporting and informing us about local issues. It may be tougher for folks from large cities to make the inter-personal connection I am discussing here, but the main point is defending American culture is valuable in units of measure beyond US Dollars.

"individuals who have delicate souls who are connected to each other through local communities"

Ignoring the "Delicate souls" silliness, my community hasn't been defined by the people I'm geographically near since I was 16.

I must be in the minority here, but I subscribe to and regularly read the newspaper. I'd be sad if it went away.

At Seeing Interactive, our goal is to save the journalistic and community building functions of the "paper" as well as keep the papers profitable.

The only way we know how to do that right now is to help newspapers make significantly more money online.

Journalism will continue to evolve, from newspaper to television network news to blogs to Facebook pages to YouTube channels to mobile apps to whatever. We have to make the distinction that newspapers is one form of journalism. It would be sad for some if the newspapers went away, just as it was sad when the stage coach or the floppy disk gave way to better alternatives.

This is exactly why we're proud to have Alex as an advisor.

Our job isn't easy. We're trying to help an industry at an inflection point.

Some "papers" will survive. Some will fail. The ones we work with will have better chance at making the transition.

This actually seems like a rather thinly veiled marketing attempt for your company, pulling on the heart strings of local paper lovers for the company's profit.

There was a lot of subjective emotion and very little objective facts in the blog. How about some sources and reality checks on costs and benefits.

Maybe what you're seeing is passion for solving the problem. We feel very strongly about it. That passion is likely a big reason why Alex invested.

BTW, our customers are newspapers. I'm not sure how much "heartstring pulling" we need to do for them to see that we objectively make them more money.

I'm sorry but they really are not worth saving.

Whether the newspaper continues to be distributed on paper, the newspaper as a service is incredibly important.

At Seeing Interactive, one of the problems we find is that people have confused an old-fashioned method of distribution with the important journalism and community building contained within. Sometimes the newspapers themselves are troubled by this very point. It has merely been a coincidence that for the last 250 years the best way to distribute news was on paper and that for the last 150 years or so it has been immensely profitable.

So when people say they don't want to save the newspaper, they're merely stating a preference that they'd rather read news online than on paper.

My two cents: I don't think much of the modern pseudo-journalism (and journalists) are worth saving. Granted, I don't subscribe to my local paper (the San Diego union is a noted piece of junk), but I can only think of a couple of writers who have the integrity and ability to call themselves journalists.

Most of the content produced nowadays has been chosen specifically to elicit a strong emotional response from readers/viewers. It's not worth saving, in my mind, because I disagree with the central precept of the linked article, that the content they generate is worthwhile.

Besides, most of the stuff is just reprinted from reuters anyhow. Even the comics stink nowadays. Ever read the sports section? Look at how backwards (and intentionally so!) the sports sections are (if you're unfamiliar with how wrong modern sports "journalists" are, read FireJoeMorgan).

In short, journalism already has gone away. All that's remaining is to clear the husk that remains.

There are plenty of non-profit news operations popping up around the country that you might find more valuable than the pageview-centric for-profits. Check out Voice of San Diego: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/

This reminds me of a Wizard of Id comic where the local paper comes in to interview the king.