> 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.