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Comment by arunabha | Hacker News Reader

> People will pay for it.

I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.

The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.

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There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.

I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.

This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/

People get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.

> Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time

They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.

There is also an addictive element to it.

I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.

> started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers

To bolster this argument, the local papers that hard paywalled seem to have done just fine.

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