Then you have the fact that “only old people buy newspapers”
Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.
The papers being organized are those that found a business model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms, which requires employing journalists at a living wage and having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether they will become essentially hollow brands with little original content.
But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.
At the end of the day, none of this looks good for local news, but that doesn’t been that subscription sales aren’t a viable business model to some degree.
> Total subscription revenue in 2020 was up 10 percent, to $1.195 billion.
> Total ad revenue at The Times fell 26 percent in 2020, to $392.4 million.
> Adjusted operating profit rose 1.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019, to $97.7 million, and 0.9 percent over the year, to $250.6 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/business/media/new-york-t...
The resulting problem is exactly why people complain about too many streaming services. You could easily have to juggle national, state, and various local-level subscriptions. Maybe multiples at every level. Plus any other publications specific to other hobbies or interests you might have.
Just because it works once, doesn't mean it will work for everyone.
My point was simply to show a counter example that news must survive off of ad revenue.
The old model of subscriptions covering cost of production + ads delivering the profits is just dead.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
At the end of the day, I think the answer is that local news rooms just aren’t going to be viable, by and large. This is a consequence of a century long trend to begin with.
The way I see it, either you have a broad enough reach, or you have to niche yourself into the broader content generation ecosystem. Local news publishing that just reprints of AP stories or talking about some new pop health study of the week isn’t going to survive. To the degree that local investigative journalism is valuable, it’s going to have to find an entirely new model to sustain itself.
stupidity has most of the same properties.
the main feature of those human communities that we've used for a few hundred years to try to accomplish that control is called "a free press".
The Times is the exception. It’s the Apple amidst a sea of Commodores and Ataris and DECs. The Times is the exception and is exceptional as a business reinvention story, but it is the outlier, not the norm.
(The Journal has always had a paywall (even in the mid 1990s when it sold digital editions over dial-up), tho its porousness has ebbed and flowed, and as such, has never had the same degree of challenges that faced local papers or the national papers like the New York Times, WaPo, and the LA Times)
[1]: https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-York-Times...
I'm more familiar with the UK media market, where quite a few legacy media publications have pivoted into digital successfully. Whatever you think of the Daily Mail/Mail Online, it's very successful. The Guardian is doing well without a paywall (although it has a large endowment to sustain it). Smaller publications such as the Spectator (which is about legacy as it gets) are doing well with a digital subscription model. And then there's The Economist, of course.
That said, I don’t think any of those other examples pivoted the way the Times pivoted. The Times didn’t just digitize the newspaper or combine the newsrooms. It started to do real digital first and product first investments. The Cooking app, the Games vertical, the investment into audio and video, the tremendous investment in data tools for its journalists for multimedia storytelling (consider the impact of Snow Fall, even a decade later).
The Daily Mail may have successfully managed profitability, but I wouldn’t put it on par with the transformation that happened at The Times. The Times looked at the innovation happening at BuzzFeed and Mashable (where I worked for many years) and Vice and Vox and has not just been able to compete with them, I would argue that it has largely vested them. Whatever else you think of their journalism, that alone, is nothing short of remarkable. And I cannot think of another legacy media company that has transformed itself the same way.
How about the Financial Times or The Economist?
(Thinking about it more, The Atlantic is close to successfully pivoting but I don’t know if I can say it has done it quite yet. And again, it had to sell itself)
FT is a fantastic newspaper but I think it’s much more akin to WSJ, where its paywall and subscriber base insulated it from the challenges than a lot of other papers. But that’s a good call-out as a paper that has done its part to pivot like the Times has. (It has also been sold, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but is worth noting).
The Times, to me, is unique in that it’s investment in its tech has been as significant as it has. And not just for the apps like Cooking and Games, but the commitment to the full stack within its storytelling, its video, its audio. It is really remarkable from a product perspective, as much as from a journalism perspective. The core product it offers is still news, but it has managed to really change the medium and packaging of its offerings in a very demonstrable way.
I realize these are basically the two highest profile legacy news products, so broadly your point stands.
Journalist reflexively took the word of the police department and prosecutors and didn’t believe minorities when they complained about police misconduct. It was only when everyone could film the police that it became apparent.
On the other side, the rise of Trumpian populism came about because everyone ignored rural White America including journalist.
> Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through indirect taxation of the reader. The kind of circulation which the advertiser will buy depends on what he has to sell. It may be "quality" or "mass." On the whole there is no sharp dividing line, for in respect to most commodities sold by advertising, the customers are neither the small class of the very rich nor the very poor. They are the people with enough surplus over bare necessities to exercise discretion in their buying. The paper, therefore, which goes into the homes of the fairly prosperous is by and large the one which offers most to the advertiser. It may also go into the homes of the poor, but except for certain lines of goods, an analytical advertising agent does not rate that circulation as a great asset, unless, as seems to be the case with certain of Mr. Hearst's properties, the circulation is enormous.
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
Especially relevant today, with the number of advertisement driven companies.
Also from the book, how newspapers will often let erroneous stories die rather than correcting them and angering passionate readers:
> The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.
Not a soul that took note of the fact that Kata'ib had denied any involvement or that this happened very far away from where they held power and deep in territory with an enemy local group that had instantly claimed the attack.
It's been funded by for profit organizations, that have a vested interest in controlling what is newsworthy and what is ignored, and who gets discredited and maligned. Unbiased news died with Operation Mockingbird in the 60's and it's corpse has been dancing along like Weekend at Bernie's.
Larger cities may be OK a little while longer since they usually still have some local investigative reporting.
It's one of several reasons I'm no longer sure the Web is compatible with healthy democracy.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/hundreds-of-hyperpartisan-...
I canceled all of my subscriptions after asking politely that they do something about the third party tracking.
Really? I didnt know that. I assumed ad sales were how newspapers made money.
I was off when I said “most”
> Newspaper classified advertising peaked in 2000 at $19.6 billion. In 2012, the most recent year for which data are available from the Newspaper Association of America, classified advertising was $4.6 billion — a drop of about 77 percent in barely more than a decade.
> In 2000, classified ads accounted for about 40 percent of newspaper industry ad revenue. In 2012, classifieds made up about 18 percent of the ad revenue in an industry that was barely half the size it had been a decade earlier.