The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads.

When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news.

You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information. It was never the news itself that was profitable but being the local gatekeeper of that news. The Internet destroyed that entirely.

> because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information

Not to worry, several US states still have draconian laws to keep the local newspaper in business. In NYS, when you start a LLC or corp, you have to publish an announcement in 2 papers in the state announcing it and get certificates from the paper proving it. Of course there are ever so convenient "business papers" to leech off it. Some law makers tried to change that a few years ago and queue the lobbyist outrage.

Governments pick winners and losers. For all these laws, like this Canadian law and the one you mention, there are plenty of business models that disappear without anyone doing anything about it.

I feel that if there is still a market for news then the market will figure it out. We should make laws encourage smaller players and avoid monopolies. Instead of making laws that transfer money from one giant corporation to another giant corporation. But that'll never happen because giant corporations have all the influence.

I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know?

I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town, or that the elementary school passed a new measure for students, or that there's going to be an art exhibit presented by some local artists. I want to know when there are some foster kitties looking for temporary homes, and a little articles about people who go all-out on halloween decor. The internet doesn't give this to me, not without a load of muck.

My go to solution for that was reddit.com/r/somecommunity which was local enough to have posts about lost cats and dogs.

More than once local media near me has literally just published a story that was first posted as text to Reddit.

I've tried this strategy but often r/somecommunity is either never used by people who live there/is too small to be useful, but the bigger neighborhood/city is absolutely astroturfed by people who don't live there.

I do live in a country with a disproportionately large Reddit population.

I guess you just have to get everyone together in one place -- but that place could still be on the Internet.

> I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information.

It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.

I disagree.

I'm a member if many local communities on Reddit and Facebook.

Where I live, Facebook Marketplace is _the_ place to go to buy and sell used goods. And it is absolutely hopping in my community. So much waste is averted from landfills due to the platform Facebook provides, which has good search, and a reasonable UX.

If all we had were the old school classifieds in the newspaper, I doubt nearly as much activity would happen.

HN just loves to shit on social media and lament the fall of old school local news, but I think that's just rose coloured glasses.

Through Facebook I do local second hand shopping, I discovered and am and member of several local niche sports and activity groups. And I see local news through the eyes and mouths of locals talking about it rather than what the one or two employed local journalists think.

If all you do is scroll /r/all or your Instagram feed than sure you're not getting local info, but you get what you consume.

And I say this as someone who doesn't like Meta/Facebook and would delete it in a heartbeat if there was a viable alternative, but the matter stands it _does_ support and encourage local communities and content in some places.

It might depend on the community, then. In my area, the big social media outfits are not useful in that way at all. (Except for selling stuff on Facebook, but that's not what I was talking about.)

Facebook and Reddit are the only ones I'm familiar with for this, though, and they both have the same problem -- they are dominated by a very small number of people.

> It might depend on the community.

Always. But maybe a factor is the size of the "community"? A hub city has X number of residents plus Y folks who work there plus Z folks who live in suburbs but are counted as part of the metropolis.

OTOH a small city is small, so the folks may share more in common -- and thus push out interlopers and ignore noise makers.

I live in a small city. I think the reason that social media hasn't really become central for community here is because we have a small free arts & entertainment newspaper that has served the role for longer than I've been alive. That's where everyone expects to find public announcements, events, buying/selling things, etc.

Craigslist is also very popular here. Does that count as social media?

> Craigslist is also very popular here. Does that count as social media?

I was going to make a joke about "Not since they removed the personal ads", but CL has threaded discussion forums, so it's definitely social media.

> Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section.

Local newspapers (at least in my US state) were mostly funded by their commercial ad placements, not by the classified section. Classified ad revenue and the purchase price of the paper were minority fractions of their revenue.

Most reports have classified ads at at least 1/3 of total ad revenue for newspapers. Some sources show higher but none lower.

I doubt it, esp. if you mean US newspapers; can you cite any source?

AFAIK the trend of the last 3 decades has been first Craiglist then Yahoo then FB and apps hollowed out local newspaper classified ads, especially in the US.

Here's data for 2013-2021 from US Census Service Annual Survey (SAS) for "Breakdown of Revenue by Advertising Type: Newspapers Advertising Space - Classified Advertising for Newspaper Publishers, All Establishments" [0]. Seems to show newspaper classified revenue is seriously sliding. If we only saw the numbers for local newspapers, probably even worse.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPCNCAEF51111ALLEST

The real threat to local news is national/international news. An organization selling a story to the entire anglosphere has an advantage over an organization trying to sell a story to just one town or country. Both stories cost about the same to write and distribute, but the story with [manufactured] international appeal has massively more earning potential. So newspapers with a focus on national news (NYTimes, WaPo) end up killing the local newspapers even in big cities like Chicago. And the same dynamic applies internationally; the organization which is best at manufacturing international interest for their stories will have an advantage over any organization that focuses on national news with national interest.

If the intention is to get Canadians to focus more on local news, making Facebook pay to link to local news is completely backwards. Facebook will (and apparently has) simply transition to showing cheap international news. Instead, Canada should be making Facebook pay when linking to foreign news, or paying Facebook when linking to local news.

I would argue many local papers could just be a monthly town newsletter. Lol.