Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.
2 responses in agree
The council meeting example is exact. Nobody clicks on the planning committee, so nothing that depends on clicks will ever cover it, and that is where most local corruption actually lives.
And this is why every "people should pay for news" campaign fails. It asks readers to fund something they were never funding, and to notice a loss they never saw as a purchase.
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something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
small on purpose. you will need a code from someone already here.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.