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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

I just don't think the math works. Can a local newspaper even keep a journalist fed and housed on its revenue anymore in many of these smaller towns? I am not sure that many of them can, yet alone tech costs, editors, salespeople, etc.

In Canada, we have a massive local news conglomerate called Postmedia. They own probably 80% of newspaper readership in the country. They have consolidated and consolidated. They use the same web design across all properties. They have slashed salaries, outsourced printing, and sold the front page to advertisers. A lot of their staff are just a guy in their community.

They can't seem to make it work. Unless readers are willing to pay, I just doubt there is enough money to have a human do a lot of the work anymore for local news.

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I'm not sure "smaller towns" is the issue. Hyperlocal works in engaged communities, no matter what their size. In dormitory towns where fewer people engage with community activities, and where there are fewer independent businesses but more chain stores, the model falls down.

They are better off getting people to signup for a newsletter and go digital. Local means local businesses will have a strong interest in promoting to the subscriber base.

Someone has to prepare the actual content for a newsletter too, the only thing you "save" by going digital is the cost for print and distribution.

To make it worse: newspapers in cities and large-ish towns can keep afloat, even when going digital as there is a young subscriber base... but a small rural community? Most of them are old people which means they are unable to consume the content any more. That in turn raises serious questions about legal issues - is a "publication in a local newspaper" still compliant with a law requiring it, if the newspaper is unable to be read for half the population?

Why do you say old people are unable to consume content? They can still read. Many of them are online. Take a look at Facebook.

Not everyone has a broadband Internet connection worth that label or adequate phone service.

The mandate to publication in the local newspaper in laws is precisely to account for as wide and barrier-free distribution as possible.

Sure, but that's not a function of being old. Some people can't afford to buy a newspaper every day either, or they live far from town and only go in once in a while.

That's a 100 year old rule based on the traditional permanence of paper. Not because it's accessible. Old people largely don't have the eyesight to read the newspaper effectively. They aren't combing the classifieds for legal notices.

Reading a newspaper requires buying the newspaper. Reading an electronic newspaper requires buying a computer or a phone and an Internet subscription, that's orders of magnitude more.

Or it requires going to the library (in both cases). There are reasonable arguments about what level of friction is acceptable. Certainly no one's buying a newspaper to read public notices. The only thing that probably comes close to universal notification is postal mail to individual households.

1. As with books, the physical media doesn't actually cost a lot under most circumstances vs. paying for the person or people who are attending boring meetings, interviewing people, and writing stories.

2. A lot of local once you get out of urban neighborhoods and dense suburbia doesn't even have a lot of businesses.

This. No one cares enough to pay. Social media is more than adequate for most and there isn't any pesky "other side". The only model that makes sense is national level operations that have a "... and now from your neighborhood" segments in tv or in the print just have a local section to get a little local interest.

At The Factual (thefactual.com) we're proving that people will pay for news if (a) it saves them time (b) is affordable. This doesn't yet fund the news ecosystem but we plan to do so via licensing of articles in the near future.

I don't know if our model will work for local news but as we get large enough concentration of readers in various locations we'll test it out.

A small town has, say, 50000 residents.

If half of them visit the local newspaper daily and read ten pages, there's 250K daily page views, roughly 90M annual impressions.

At $1 CPM, that's $90K in annual revenue.

At $7 CPM (what the NYTimes claimed 10 years ago), that's $630K revenue.

With that, they could probably afford a staff of 2-5, depending on the town and cost of living.

If they're in a town of 5000 people, it's unlikely that they will make enough money to survive.

76% of incorporated places in the US have a population of less than 5000. I’m not sure a 50k+ place can be referred to accurately as a small town - where I’m from, cities with populations that large have managed to maintain their local papers anyway, unlike the smaller towns.

A small town doesn't generate 10+ pages of news a day. And considering something like 25% of the people are under 18, I doubt that most adults are going to read the local newspaper every day. 10 pages per week sounds like a more reasonable estimate.

Taking both of the replies below into consideration, we end up with ~3M yearly impressions, or $3K-$21K in revenue. No one is going to survive with that.

Perhaps the right model is to aggregate to the county level. I mean, does a town of 5000 actually generate enough 'news' to support a reporter?

I live in a town (suburb) of 80K people and our local paper's twitter has ~6000 followers and seems to tweet about 3-4 times a day.

In a perfect world, craigslist would dissolve and hand the reigns to each locality's websites back to local newspapers. they've done serious damage hollowing out the classified ad revenue model.

Having worked in this space, I can tell you there’s no putting that genie back in that bottle. Classifieds were great for the verticals that made money because it was the best distribution model given the economics pre internet. Now the marginal cost of disseminating classifieds type information is so close to zero that there will always be competition driving the profit margins down, on a per vertical basis. Just let that sink in. That means that there is no defensive moat on general classifieds, because someone can swoop in and make one vertical so compelling that they can start to generate network effects that can be hard to counter.

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