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.