The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

This has _always_ been true, but for generations classified ad revenue neatly subsidized it. Once the internet came along and blew up that revenue stream, the industry was in trouble.

I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. Everyone will go on the internet and talk about how valuable people sitting in city council meetings is, but not enough people want to pay the monthly bill to enable that.

Disagree. Where I live there is a local news website that is mostly one guy, who attends city and county meetings, summarizes issues discussed and decisions made, analyzes the data that local government provides under various "transparency" initiatives---all stuff that our local newspaper no longer covers. I pay a monthly subscription (which isn't even required to read) because I believe that local news is the most important news. Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint, and it's easy to stay informed on those events through a variety of sources. But there's very little coverage of the stuff that does affect me: decisions of local government, boards and commissions, stuff that directly affects the taxes I pay and the community I live in.

You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.

I stopped subscribing to our local traditional newspaper because it's nothing but lightweight feature stories, local sports, and reprints of news from USA Today.

> The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

I find this approach superficial and dangerous.

Maybe local journalism has been superseded or looks like not important to the locals. The lack of local journalism IMO will end up costing a lot more to any community in the long run for obvious reasons.

It’s not flawless but public funding for journalism is about the only answer here, I think. In the UK the BBC offers newscasts for different regions of the country… while they don’t exactly do a ton of hard hitting journalism they could if the money was spent more wisely.

You are 100% right. However, I personally think it is worse than that. Let's just say that local papers found some new feature (no idea what) that could fund local journalism. Do we think the money would be spent to create great journalism or would the money just be taken as profit by posting social media snippets as "news"? I fear that in this post truth world that we don't even have enough people that value the creation of journalism. Most just want to score internet points and get online ad revenue from talking nonsense on their daily podcast. And we've seen that sowing dissent is far far more profitable than creating journalism.

I work adjacent to an online publication business and freelancers are getting ~$750 for a 1500 word article. I don't know how you get actual journalism at that price. Increasingly we're just going to get people dropping concepts into GPT and editing whatever comes back for 30 minutes. I fear that the only way out would be a single one of the dozens of billionaires to step up and donate a self-sustaining grant towards long term journalism excellence. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have shown that they don't care about the world and just want to make their number go up at any cost necessary.

I don't know what you think "worth" means but if "the money we make from this product covers the cost of producing the product" then it is worth it.

That was the case until, as you noted, advertisements became drastically less valuable.

I live in a city of one and half million. There are two "local" newspapers with histories that, in one case, reaches back over a century. One used to have offices across the street from city hall and regularly broke stories when somebody stumbled out of city hall and into their offices to report dirty deeds. The other paper was of an opposing political slant and the two papers used to fight like cats and dogs. People would read both papers to get a handle on local political winds.

Today, both papers are owned by the same Toronto-based, American-owned media conglomerate. Both papers have lost their local offices. Some work-from-home types produce localized content. Just enough to make the papers look somewhat local. Much of the local content is lazily scraped from reddit, showing up in the city's subreddit one day and appearing in the papers the next. However, 99% of the content is the same as the "local" paper in Toronto runs. The former disagreements over politics are over, and both papers run the same ranting opinion columns.

And yet... You can still walk into any convenience store in town and buy a paper copy of these two "local" papers. My parents still have both papers delivered, and haven't seemed to clue into the fact that they're both the same, American owned paper.

It's not just a loss of ad revenue that have killed local news. It's media conglomerates who are hoodwinking people into thinking they still have local news coverage when they really don't.

There probably is sufficient demand to pay for it, the issue is that there is no mechanism for orchestrating such funding while remaining uncompromised. If you split out the cost of salary for 1 or 2 people, you'd likely end up with individual citizens paying pennies to have people sit in and provide this information. If you look up the average population of a small city, where such an operation would be the least efficient, its about 50,000 to 100,000 people. That would pan out to maybe a dollar per year to cover the salary - I don't think many people would be opposed to that if they actually trusted it and the money was allocated efficiently.

However, there is no way to actually get that payment consistently. It would have to become a government subsidized operation in order to actually extract that payment at a consistent distribution, at which point a huge conflict of interest is introduced, and faith is lost in the independence of such individuals. As soon as this becomes a government apparatus, costs grow heavily to account for administrative overhead, and there becomes heavy incentives to provide more favorable coverage to political figures who are responsible for budgets.

The problem as with many things is that people just don't care and they just want things as cheap as possible. Even if people had a great local journal, there's no real reason to pay well for it when you can just figure things out a day later on facebook. Quality can go down without most people noticing because lots of people couldn't tell apart good reporting from bad , a good portion would have to put in effort to do so and an even smaller portion would immediately notice. Less incentive to go into local journalism if you're bright as well, dying field with little chance to go 'up'.

> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

The product is not priced at what it costs to produce it. Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

Why is it priced too low for its value? IMHO a major reason is people not rejecting the 'post-truth' era, but embracing it - devaluing truth. For example, they way overvalue information on social media, because its lack of truth is not a consideration.

Journalists personally are on the scene, talk to key people, read the documents, interview experts, and are trained professionals in gathering and reporting information accurately. Somehow hot takes from someone who hasn't left their basement is seen as valuable. Imagine someone on social media who did all that work.

> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it

Utility provided is not equal to willingness/ability to pay.

We should stop thinking of journalism as a product to be sold and more of it as a public good. That's kind of the point of the article.

I know plenty of Patreon or Substack supported individual journalists that sit in council meetings and report what’s going on. Honestly with much better signal to noise that the local paper.

What I am reading here is "Democracy doesn't come free of charge"

Not sure I agree about this, in the UK we have some excellent examples of independent local journalism, for example the Bristol Cable that is funded by readers.

People's satisfaction with the internet is on the decline lately, for a variety of reasons. Maybe it'll cross a threshold where opting into a local-only net would be worth doing for enough people.

Another reason I'm pissed my taxes aren't going to PBS/CPB anymore, and am praying they can still fund some local stations with new direct donation. Lots of communities depend on it.

  > the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

How to kill it:

1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a.

2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment

  > I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. 

1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?

> The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.

That's not true: you're forgetting positive externalities. The product is worth the cost, but the straightforward capitalist revenue streams aren't enough to cover those costs.

So if you rely on capitalism in 2026, that value get destroyed and the community is worse off for it.

> "I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this."

The democratization of local journalism, where anyone can become a reporter: reporting events in the field, interviewing key people, and publishing opinions. With the internet, anyone could set up their own news outlet.

This idea is quite well-tested in my local area, where audiences directly send donation money to individual reporters who run their own sole-proprietorship news outlets.

For-profit businesses tend to get bloated and eventually succumb to their own growth, one way or another.

Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).

Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.

Our local paper put up a paywall so subscriptions help subsidize the reporting along with the advertising. I'm sure it's a losing battle but you don't get into local news for the money.

Yep. There is some network effect nonsense that comes into play when it comes to news. Only stuff which carries at the largest, broadest, most simplified level survives.

this is what taxes are for

Not really true. I live in Portland, local journalism is very alive here.

I mean I'd be more than willing to pay/donate/support a local paper if we had any that weren't just tailing the narratives of power. Our local "paper of record" (Salt Lake Tribune) is basically a platform for the powerful to launder their actions as well as a police stenography platform.

I do subscribe to some larger papers, specifically the Guardian, and they're far from perfect. I would happily support a local paper with even those same compromises.

I never understood why the journalism industry didn't go the way of wikipedia.

Britannica was the shining example of capitalism, being sold door to door. Encarta was done by Microsoft. Both got disrupted real quick by a million people making little edits to an open encyclopedia. An open-source gift economy with many contributors seems to beat capitalistic systems. Linux. Wordpress. MySQL. In general, science / wikipedia / open source projects also feature peer review before publishing, a desirable trait.

Everyone has a cellphone. It's not like we need professional cameras to capture things. What we really need is a place to post clips and discuss them in a way that features peer review. It would be better and strictly healthier than the current for-profit large corporations like Meta or X. That's one of the projects I'm building using our technology. Anyone interested, email me (email in my profile)

Compare:

1. https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

2. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

Digital production has lowered the cost, and the Ghost platform in particular is a great value for small publishers, bundling together the blog, newsletter and subscriptions in one package, even now including ActivityPub federation.

And Ghost themselves a non-profit org that doesn't mark up the Stripe transaction fees!

One local news outlet recently switched to that, saving about %5 on Patreon fees and a second is switching now.

https://ghost.org/