They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it | Hacker News Reader

They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it

cjr.org

26 pointsprawn55 comments

The article is about a news organization offering its paper for free and only 44 signing up. Speaking for myself, I don't trust "free". Being offered a subscription newspaper for free, I'd think it was a lie or that there was some kind of gotcha down the road since I know they cost money to produce.

Exactly this. Or I'd question what this 'news' really is. Someone has to be paying for it and what is it that they want or get of me reading their paper? It's theoretically possible that its a benevolent benefactor who genuinely wants to make the world better by funding journalism. But I doubt it.

If it is free, then you are the product ...

If it’s paid you are still the product just more valuable

I don't get this. I'm the product of my grocery store?

The line gets blurry. But it depends if you have a loyalty card. A grocery store is a market-place where many large companies can sell their stuff.

Your grocery store is probably collecting data about you and making money from it. If so, then yes, you are the (or, more accurately, a) product.

But at least you can foil a lot of that by putting your phone into airplane mode before getting anywhere near the store, paying in cash, and not using "loyalty" cards.

Yes. That's not new. There's a well-established business model for free weeklies: Advertising. Not adtech, which includes tracking, but simple advertising space sold to companies who want to reach the head-shop-and-granola crowd. Is this actually new to anyone? I can't imagine it is.

Being "the product" is only horrible if you're being infringed upon (tracked, for example) in the process.

Our local newspaper is free to read. It sells advertising. Its advertisers are trying to reach a specific demographic. But they do not know every reader's shoe size, car problems, diet prefs, etc.

I am reminded of watching Geritol ads as a youth. That was the price of enjoying The Lawrence Welk show. Saturday cartoons were paid for by Tony the Tiger.

TV commercials were broadcast at a significantly higher volume than the content they were embedded into. They knew you were leaving the room during the commercial breaks.

I think that most people don't mind that level of targeting or the printed ads in a newspaper. I agree with you that it becomes intolerable when the advertiser gets to know if you personally are leaving the room to run to the fridge or to run to the bathroom.

But it sounds like you read the linked article - a news report - for free before commenting?

Plenty of cities have free newspapers given away at train stations and suchlike [1] - they're packed with adverts and owned by sketchy billionaires, of course, but so are most newspapers you pay for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_newspaper

I can believe a free newspaper but it's probably going to be more ads than content and 95%+ regurgitated content from other media and official announcements.

This is what I recall when I lived in an area and time that got a free newspaper. The daily papers often just sat in the driveway until they took the trash out, then they threw the papers away.

And they'll sell all your contact information and viewing history.

It would be interesting to see how the offer was written.

If they'd offer me FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME NOW I'd pass.

If they'd say it's part of an experiment, maybe. But that would ruin the experiment.

Same with <.x • price> deals where you can't cancel without calling them (something I have on my todo list for the local newspaper).

Personally I'm very cautious about accepting free content; it could be a freemium, a trial period, or some other form of marketing in disguise; or it could be of lower quality.

Do we know more about the methodology? Were the participants aware that this is a paid publication made free for the purpose of a study?

Edit:

The paper says: "In the first phase, we used postcards and targeted Facebook advertisements to offer treated individuals free, 13-week online subscriptions to their local newspaper.".

In 2024 I automatically ignore all postcards, web ads or phone calls that promise to give me free stuff. A Mitchell and Webb sketch comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsYoeoEE3ww

I wouldn't have seen their offer either. With physical mail, I pull out everything that doesn't look like junk mail and immediately put the rest in the recycling bin. I don't examine any of it well enough to know what they're offering. And I don't use Facebook, so anything there is invisible to me.

Although if I had seen their offer, I wouldn't have taken it anyway, because free offers are almost never worth the hassle they bring later.

As somebody who used to read one of these papers, the quality has gone downhill largely because their best talent has left for greener pastures - whether that be national newspapers/publications, radio, television, or podcasts. It's hard for local papers to retain good writers that draw subscribers.

At the same time, I can say that the local paper in my city in India is often the only source for important city-related developments - like what laws or orders are in action for traffic violations (it changes without notice), district wide developments, and so on. It's tabloidey as hell. But it's also still useful.

That paper could be close to shutting down. The information it collects goes with it.

Journalists could be real world scrapers. A list of facts, a table or a graph could be enough for a lot of topics.

Three-ish decades ago, the Ann Arbor New was automatically delivered, free, to everyone in the city. (Ann Arbor, MI.) Well, one day per week it was. That was the day when the grocery stores' weekly sales ads were in the paper, and doubtless "free" meant "paid for by the extra ad revenue". If you wanted the other 6 days, you had to pay for a subscription.

A 2% conversion rate is actually quite high. The mistake here is that they assume the reason people don't subscribe is because of the cost.

Indeed - for me a daily paper is a liability: it is an enormous pile of garbage that has to be moved out of my house for waste collection. And indeed most of it is waste to me: ads. I do subscribe to the paper The Economist (at a cost much higher than zero) because its signal-to-noise ratio is much higher.

The Economist strikes as an opinionated news source, and I typically don’t agree with their opinion.

Attention economy and all that.

Yeah a 2% conversion rate on what is essentially gutter-level spam (postcards in the mail & facebook ads) is crazy high. If they're dismayed by those results, then it seems like the study authors had no idea what they were doing.

Strong conclusions drawn from a bad study. Bad article.

I have a physical, print subscription to my local newspaper, and I really enjoy it. Local news, local opinions, and only a few local ads--and they're usually the sort I'd be interested in, EG: a local venue is hosting some kind of event. But if I didn't have a subscription, I wouldn't take a free one. I'm so suspicious of anything that's offered as free.

And while we're talking about it, a lot of folks here are painting their local paper with the same brush they use for the TV news and blogs. I wonder how many of them have actually read their local paper since they were in high school? I know there are a lot of papers out there that have been sucked up by PE firms, but you should check on yours. There are still a lot of good locals out there, and it really is the best way to figure out what's going on in your city.

Here in the Twin Cities, the main paper was taken over by a Republican billionaire who uses it to push right-wing views. I'm not paying for that. The next largest paper is owned by a PE that also dedicates column space to a right-wing columnist. Again, no thanks.

There are some newer local news outlets that don't have a right-wing bent: Racket, Minneapolis Voices, MN Reformer. I do pay a subscription for these. But in terms of the traditional, long-standing newspaper companies? They're pushing viewpoints I don't want to support with my money.

Folks, the article is about how national political news dominates to the detriment of local politics.

Exactly what I see in my friends groups.

I have friends who are politically active, to the point they will organize voter letter writing, march in all the various anti-orange man marches, go to fundraisers for various national politicians.. watch every stupid newstainment John Oliver/Hasan Minhaj/Colbert/Jon Stewart/etc shows religiously.

They'll argue about politics halfway across the country, and then admit they are completely unaware of various local NYC events because they do not watch or read any local news sources.

Like how do you choose your DA/city council/mayor/etc choices in that scenario? Unbelievable to me.

I have been thinking lately that maybe a consequence of AI generated content and overall information overload might be that people start losing interest in global and national politics and start caring more about local issues, not out of a desire for localism, but simply to not go insane from the abundance of information.

But it also might just lead to a loss of interest in the news entirely.

Yes, but I think that the experiment they performed is deeply flawed and doesn't indicate anything about that subject one way or another.

I'm a former news editor and worked at a metro daily newspaper in the mid to late '00s.

Here's the thing: The local news spiral has been going on for decades. Business revenue drops, budgets are cut, leading to voluntary and involuntary attrition, leading to a decrease in both content and quality, leading to customer dissatisfaction and decreased subscriptions, leading to additional reductions in revenue, and the spiral continues.

Nevertheless, does quality local news matter? Objectively, yes. It's clear to me that as investigative/watchdog journalism has decreased due to budget constraints, we're seeing more people and companies in power get away with things with less scrutiny. We're seeing local communities who are less informed about issues that affect them, and that has political and social consequences.

Yet _quality_ local news has been harder to come by, not because there aren't fantastic, dedicated journalists out there, but because they're stretched so thin. And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views.

So I think we have two primary explanations for why people seem to devalue local news. One, quality has, indeed, gone downhill. But two, people's media literacy and consumption habits have gone downhill as well.

> And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views.

Are you sure you have the causation in the right direction? It seems to me that the news sources have gotten less objective, thanks to takeovers by PE and wealthy individuals. I'm not interested in news sources with an explicit right-wing position, which is what the major papers in my area offer, so I don't subscribe to them.

I think each feeds the other.

You're right that news orgs that have fed readers' desire for bias-affirming content have done better than those that still aim, however imperfectly, to present the news objectively.

But those news orgs wouldn't thrive if not for demand, and there is quite a lot of social science research out there showing that while most people _say_ they want unbiased news, their actual consumption habits indicate a preference for news that is in line with their existing ideological bents.

Sure, I'm happy to accept "both are to blame." Your original comment placed all of the blame on readers, but I think it's important to recognize that newspapers are also to blame when they are selling a viewpoint that many readers don't want.

Sponsored by: Local asbestos mill. The news: boring. The horroscope: Interesting. One starsign only, cancer.

But this discussion is a free market media dark forrest culture side effect visible. Nobody trusts anything, everyone stalks the night, trying to influence and manipulate everyone else. Honest communications or islands of honesty, attract the stalkers as the sound of prey.

Sometimes people put a nominal fee on something solely so it has worth in the eyes of others. Most people do not value things they don't pay for, whether in money, effort, time, etc.

I just want to give a shoutout to Community Impact ( https://communityimpact.com/ ) who provides amazing local / regional news coverage of major Texas metros. Mostly politically neutral articles on city and county planning, local election guides, local business spotlights, and tons and tons of facts and stats. The ads are also local businesses.

It's the easiest subscription I ever made, and the only news source I regularly consume.

PS Amazingly I still am saturated in national news despite actively trying to avoid it, thanks to every social media platform shoving it in your face.

I wouldn't have taken a free subscription either. Not because of any lack of interest in getting the local paper, but because I'm very used to "free offers" coming with some kind of catch that will cause me hassle later.

On campus many years ago, someone was handing out bags of free stuff. I politely declined the lady and she looked at me like I was crazy. “But it’s free?”

For some reason I still remember the look of confusion on her face. Nearly 20 years later, I think “free” has been so conceptually abused that it has negative appeal. Connotations of “how else will I end up paying for this?” or “how will I feel after storing this cheap junk and ultimately throwing it away?” are what I think about when someone offers me “free”.

Free local newspapers were also commonplace where I grew up. I don’t think most people ever read them, perhaps in part because they were free.

Where I live, we have a couple of free newspapers that are legitimately the most read newspapers in the area. They do actual and excellent reporting of local things -- something the commercial "local" paper doesn't do. Also, if you want to know what's available in terms of local events and other things to do, those papers are the best way to do that.

There's a large difference between a thing that is always given at no cost (in money or in data), versus a thing that usually has a cost but is being offered "for free". The former doesn't raise red flags to me, the latter does.

To what extent is this a study of the effectiveness of Facebook/Direct Mail advertising?

From the referenced study (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4502329): "In the first phase, we used postcards and targeted Facebook advertisements to offer treated individuals free, 13-week online subscriptions to their local newspaper."

In my small community we have a weekly paper that they deliver every Friday for free. I love it. It was recently bought out and the quality has gone down hill, but I still enjoy reading about what’s going on hyper locally.

I’m the minority however. Most of my neighbors never bother to bring it in off their driveway. The papers tend to sit until the next garbage day at which point it goes from driveway to garbage bin.

People are exceptionally weird about news consumption.

Some of my most politically active friends in NYC admit they don't read local news, when brining up specific things. It's not like we are a small town either, I'm talking about NYC news vs National News.

Everyone is too busy putting on their red/blue hats and voting for their national sports team, and not paying attention to what is happening in their local communities.. where their votes have more impact.

Then they're not interested in the news. They're interested in sports. Perhaps vanishingly few were ever that interested in the news itself.

Correct, national politics is the new sports & religion for many.. and for the worse.

This might be a hot take: I think content is generally overvalued these days.

Reading news has neutral to negative value for me. For much content I would have to be paid to even wanting to look at it.

The problem is that it has to be filler. How much local news that actually matter are there in any given day? Maybe news would work better if it only got sent out when there was anything worthwhile.

I live in a small (7000) New England town, and your right. Usually a few good stories a week in our paper that arent school sports.

I live in a similar-sized town that used to have a local paper. There may be some ongoing issue that's somewhat relevant at a given time related to rezoning or funding for schools. But, beyond that, other than a new restaurant that's opened up or whatever there's very little that I actually care about.

I'm surprised you have a daily paper at that size. Around here, most rural papers are once-a-week to reflect the amount of stories and work it takes.

They sent emails to 2,500 folks who had done surveys. When a normally subscription based business offers something "free" it would be normal to assume it would be a trial w payment locked in to renew at a price. A small sample can not model making the digital subscription truly free.

Many people are not from the area they live so they care less about history and such and only need the info on things that affect them now

Peeking at Wikipedia's page for the Pittsburgh paper...this might be a problem:

> Politics

> The Post-Gazette historically had a liberal editorial stance. However, it turned more conservative in the 2010s, especially following the 2018 consolidation of its editorial department with that of longtime sister newspaper The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, and the appointment of The Blade's editorial page editor, Keith Burris, a frequent defender of Donald Trump, as the Post-Gazette's editorial page editor.[2] Burris assumed the additional position of executive editor of the Post-Gazette in 2019.[63] In 2020, the Post-Gazette endorsed Trump's reelection bid, the first time since 1972 that the paper had endorsed a Republican for president.[64]

And Wikipedia's page for Allegheny County, PA (where Pittsburgh is) suggests less than 30% of registered voters there consider themselves Republicans.

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