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Comment by llbeansandrice | Hacker News Reader

Just because the NYT was successful doesn't mean that model translates at all to local independent newsrooms. It doesn't even necessarily translate to other large national news papers.

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.

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I mean, the ad model doesn’t seem to be working all that well for local news rooms either.

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 see your point, but I don't think it's a good counter-example. News needs a new paradigm entirely most-likely. The NYT isn't "the news" and the only options seem to be subscriptions and/or ads. For smaller operations, the problem gets a lot harder a lot faster since there's an upper-bound on the number of people they serve.

> The NYT isn't "the news"

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.

Or, more likely, simply die, and take fair local government with it.

Is 'fair local government' correlated to the presence of robust local media? Seems like a sad state of affairs if that is indeed the case..

corruption is an endless feature of human communities. one way to keep it somewhat under control is to publicize it to the broader community rather than allow it to remain secret. the corruption doesn't need to be extreme enough to warrant legal action (though it might); it could just be "bad for most people, good for a few".

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".

I feel like the NYTimes could take more papers under its subscription - e.g. give subscribers the option to bundle in a state and municipal paper, that the NYTimes essentially vets as a local affiliate (I’m guessing this would probably lead to substantial overhead on their end, though).

I absolutely agree. I've had some conversations with my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican about this, since their subscription cost seems sort of absurd for the value. They point out (correctly, IMO) that the really small upper bound on their potential subscriber base really forces their hand a lot, a problem that the NYT does not face and likely never will (given its national and international reach).

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