They didn’t destroy them, digital media and the internet did by making a vast number of information channels suddenly available.

In the same way that 500 cable channels and 24/7 news networks hurt local TV news.

When I grew up my TV reception could only turn into 3 TV stations, and we had one real paper: the Baltimore sun. There was no choice but to consume them by sheer convenience.

As soon as cable and internet virtually eliminated barriers due to geographic distance the dominance of local media with a guaranteed audience was ended.

Even without search, the internet put national And global newspapers at the touch of individuals. The idea that exposing your local outlet to the ease of accessing 1000 competitors wouldn’t have hurt them is dubious.

Yeah, this is pretty much it in a nutshell. Journalism as a business only really worked when there were significant gatekeepers to publishing information on a large scale, where competition was limited and where these publications were the best place for advertisers to advertise their wares.

That's not coming back. Any journalists who think the 'old world' is going to survive in the internet era are flat out delusional. You cannot undo time and technology, and you cannot try and freeze society at the turn of the millennium.

Hence the solution isn't to throw money at all these sites and publications, especially given they almost certainly won't be sustainable in today's economic climate. It's to find new ways of distributing information for a new generation, one that doesn't involve ads, subscriptions or newsrooms full of wriers.

Reputation, brand, accuracy is still important.

We might laugh at BuzzFeedNews, but probably millions of people grew up on BuzzFeed, and for them it was probably more reputable than let's say the NYT.

That said, independent sources, cross-verification of information is going to be a big challenge, especially as fakes/faking become more important. (Eg in a war zone. Was it a false flag or not? Did that rocket attack happened at all?) Even though AI cannot [yet] understand it, it's perfect for looking for similarities and similar posts. (So if someone sets up a system that ingests the twitter + FB + YT firehose for example.)

FWIW, I have been running a local newspaper (both digital and print) for the last five years. There is _no_ competition to speak of whatsoever. There are papers allright, but practically none of them make serious journalism, they just do whatever it takes to stay afloat.

That’s the crux of the issue – there is fierce competition in the ad industry where almost everything is swallowed by the big players, but they don’t deliver the service the local media did. At all. I would love to be superseded by a better newspaper, but that’s not what’s happening.