> 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".