I realize what you're saying, but really, local news will always have a geographical monopoly.
Can the NYTimes or WSJ even think about covering local issues? How will investigative reporting function for say a local office holder or a local environmental problem?
To my knowledge the real problem is that the traditional business model supporting reporting has dried up. Running classified ads or selling marketing inserts is an obsolete practice. This doesn't really change the need for local reporting though.
And no, Twitter and Facebook are not suitable replacements.
Removing local news has created a hyper focus on national news. People forget about their local communities where a ton is happening.
This isn't good for local communities.
We need more focus on the local. Not everything is national.
They don't effect me very much because the government mainly effects the real world and not the internet world.
No. They all go to Facebook and Google.
Not sure why smaller businesses don't do so. I suspect the targeting options aren't good enough to get "spatula city" good ROI.
It's more because small businesses do not know how to market or cater online, still. Sure there are a handful of successful ecomm shops that work in niche markets that work on word of mouth, and then there's the enmasse scale giants like Amazon that have their own marking departments.
tl;dr Tools exist, people don't know. Most common small business solution is to engage their web developer to do marketing on fb/ig and SEO.
Whereas if they print $50 worth of signs and tape them to every nearby street pole, they'll sell $500 more.
I say "not much" because there might be a chance that people would appreciate the combination of local news combined with the national and international coverage that would be shared among all these editions. But that, also, isn't exactly new: it's what these "newspaper chains" have been doing for at least 20 years.
And I do like local news. In fact I care more about city level issues close to home rather than following the bad soap opera that is the national politics.
Yes.
The NYTimes has a Canadian desk. Eventually they'll have a Vancouver desk. Eventually they'll have an East Van desk. Eventually they'll have a Main St desk.
"local news" and "local news media" are not the same. I may pay attention to local news through google, facebook, etc, but never read the local paper or watch local TV news.
In any case, whether an open internet would have resulted in newspapers' bankruptcy is speculative... even though I share your speculation. What actually happened was that FB & google achieved control over who sees what on the internet, who earns ad revenue and how much. That is how their business models actually died. It makes sense to sue, lobby, beg or otherwise try to get what you can from them. There is no market, just them.
Maybe it would have happened anyway in a free market, but it didn't happen that way. What happened was that big tech took over content delivery and online advertising.
NYT papers in New Jersey used to have different content. I'm not sure if that's still the case.
West coast editions printed in Los Angeles used to have an entire extra section. The last time I checked, that section is no longer there, but there are other subtle changes. Like the weather forecast in the upper right corner of the front page.
The other side of that coin, however, is that everybody knows the national news, but the vast majority of people know nothing about what's happening in their own backyard.
I'd estimate that at least 80% of Americans don't even know what days their city council meets.
Only that the winner alleged here is neither NYT or WSJ but Google and Facebook; So is it really a free market when horizontal monopolies eat others lunch?
Total gross ad revenue of Google & FB for FY21 in India: 23,213 Crores (~ 3 Mil USD).
Total gross ad revenue of Top 10 listed media companies for FY21 in India: 8,396 Crores (~ 1.12 Mil USD).
At the end of the day it's the consumer's loss, Traditional print media had strict editorial guidelines and journalistic principles. Now the digitized versions of them are in pressure to roll out content at an ever increasing rate as dictated by Google & FB for those ad revenue and So there's no need for journalists but just content-writers rehashing the title into short articles which are not even proof-read nowadays.
[1]: https://indianexpress.com/article/business/ad-revenue-facebo...
like radio is big, but before tv ad def before streaming it was king, now it is just something you listen to when you don't have internet access or are trying to listen to a certain show that is only found on the radio (very rare this days considering most radio broadcast can be streamed these days anyways).
a smart move would be to eventually move all broadcast online, like have backup communications (analog) for emergency situations but at this point it is almost a waste of bandwidth broadcasting local tv and radio channels. if that spectrum was reclaimed by internet providers we could fix the remote areas where internet is scarce, something we has seen is a must considering how many people are still doing remote learning because of the pandemic.
anyways that was a bunny trail, newspapers are great but realistically they waste a lot of paper and online is good enough, most people do not flip through newspapers anymore, it just a waste of resources in all actuality. i get why big media is kicking and screaming, but one could argue that its better to evolve than do business as usual.
if you are like me, we knew this was coming, we were the geeky people into technology when others were saying "what's the internet gonna be good for anyways?" we were in chat rooms building bots and talking to people from new york to people in uni in amsterdam, tokyo, auckland etc. they had an opportunity to listen and evolve with the times, not sticking up for google and facebook but there was def an opportunity for old school media to embrace a new model and they dragged their feet.
"stop slipping on pimpin'" is a street term similar to, "you snooze, you loose"
Add to that the fact that classified ads have been taken over by likes of ebay, LinkedIn, craigslist, etc. Basically the business model of the old newspapers have been disrupted and trying to blame it on popular targets like Google and FB is pointless.