I don't think you're willing to pay what it would actually cost. Not calling you a liar, just noting that a truly local news source, operating at the level that they did 20 years ago, would cost so much more today.

The revenue for a local paper used to come primarily from advertising that doesn't exist anymore. Movie theater listings, classified ads, auto dealership sections. The Real Estate "section".

Each of those have been picked off by apps and websites. Craigslist, IMDB, Redfin/Zillow, etc.

And it's a spiral. With each reduction in circulation, the attractiveness for advertisers drops. Any attempt to make up the shortfall with higher subscription rates just accelerates the downfall.

So we get conglomerates that try to manage costs by being "local" in name only. They can't afford to employ reporters in every town with 75,000 residents. You instead get local papers that are just a reskin of a common wire feed. A few easy articles that could be GPT'd from the police blotter. Maybe a blogger or two.

I live in a fairly small town (7,000 people). A long time ago now, we had a sort of labor of love local paper that ended up shutting down. (The publisher fell ill.) The only remaining paper option was a "local" from one of the conglomerates. Pretty lousy overall and it mostly covered what was going on in a local small city and some bigger towns. Wouldn't have been worth subscribing to. Facebook and NextDoor is about the best I can do although even those aren't very active.

This is ignoring the traditional economics though.

Newspapers would charge for a subscription and sell advertising. The subscription fee would essentially just pay for printing and distribution of the physical newspaper, and then advertising provided the margin.

Now advertising is in the dumps but the internet has removed the capital and operating costs of a printing press and physically delivering dead tree pages to doorsteps.

Traditional newspaper subscriptions were something like $10/month. If you have 50,000 local subscribers and negligible printing costs, that's $6,000,000/year. You can fit a full staff of journalists into that budget.

Or you can go it alone, charge the same $10/month and be making $120,000/year with 1000 subscribers.

But how many newspapers/magazines can get a critical mass of people to spend $100/year? The NYT, WSJ, Economist, maybe New Yorker?

What's a critical mass? You sell subscriptions and hire journalists in proportion to how many people subscribe.

The "critical mass" to hire the first journalist is like 1000 people.

Huge publications like that only exist because of the historical capital cost of a printing press. Using traditional numbers, e.g. a city of 500k people 10% of whom subscribe to the local outlet, you can fund ~50 full-time local journalists. Which is the same whether they all work for one publication or they all work for themselves.

"Publications" will probably become subscription aggregators. So instead of 50,000 people each paying $10/month to one of 50 independent journalists such that they each have 1000 subscribers, all 50,000 people pay $10/month to the aggregator and then get access to the work of all 50 journalists.

So how easy do you think it is for one journalist to produce content that 1000 people will pay $100/year for? (And that number is probably too low because you probably have significant marketing expenses if nothing else.)

I mean, there are a lot of people already doing it on Substack.

The common marketing mechanism seems to be to make many of the articles available to non-subscribers (or do this after a time delay), and then they get spread around on social media which acts as promotion for the author.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some substack newsletters that make that kind of money, especially if people brought a large audience from elsewhere. I doubt many of them are covering local news which is what this sub-thread was about. Personally, I doubt I'd pay $100/year for a newsletter unless it were making me money or really delved into some niche topic of significant interest not well-covered elsewhere. But I'm glad if some people are making a living off it.