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The NYT has subscribers across the country (and beyond) as it covers broad US and world events. I doubt a local paper that principally covers local/state news will have that same reach.

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The NYT, WSJ, FT, The Economist, and maybe a few others have a national and international (to greater or lesser degrees) audience who are willing to pay $100/year or so for a subscription. That's a much tougher sale when your audience is almost entirely just, say, Philadelphia.

And for the same reason, local papers are going to have paltry ad sales.

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.

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