Ezra Klein’s interview with Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post (formerly of the Buffalo news) included a lot of discussion on the economics of media and news [1].
Her conclusion is that historically the local newspaper(s) had a monopoly on advertising. That advertising shifted to national ad campaigns on television, national papers (so her transition from Buffalo is highly relevant), and finally online advertising.
In particular though, the “cover everything for our readers” model has broken down pretty massively. The rise of focused journalism and partnerships between papers is apparently giving rise to some innovation here (the basic form is that you get articles from associated press for most things and then supplement with local stories, but the Texas Tribune is mentioned as having a fairly different donation based model plus collaboration with Politico).
So more than anything, I read this as “people will only subscribe and budget for so much media; what will they keep vs drop?”. The default answer has become “only the major international sources”. tbray’s list is incredibly “and also some local” by contrast! But not everyone is going to do that, and the conclusion has been the accelerated decline of local journalism.
The thesis of her book and the discussion is that’s a huge loss, and we likely need different funding models for this public good.
If a public good is technically difficult for the private sector to produce, that still leaves the option of the public sector, or of individual households?
I’d actually recommend the discussion during the interview (kind of towards the end, IIRC).
There’s a decent back and forth about the risk of political influence in journalism if the money were controlled by a government, the relative pros and cons of the philanthropy model (“tend to prefer ‘serious’ journalism, not local small news” in addition to needing to avoid angering the benefactor), and the various donation / crowdfunding / micro transaction possibilities. I think there was also a little detour into “why ads at all?”.
Her conclusion is that historically the local newspaper(s) had a monopoly on advertising. That advertising shifted to national ad campaigns on television, national papers (so her transition from Buffalo is highly relevant), and finally online advertising.
In particular though, the “cover everything for our readers” model has broken down pretty massively. The rise of focused journalism and partnerships between papers is apparently giving rise to some innovation here (the basic form is that you get articles from associated press for most things and then supplement with local stories, but the Texas Tribune is mentioned as having a fairly different donation based model plus collaboration with Politico).
So more than anything, I read this as “people will only subscribe and budget for so much media; what will they keep vs drop?”. The default answer has become “only the major international sources”. tbray’s list is incredibly “and also some local” by contrast! But not everyone is going to do that, and the conclusion has been the accelerated decline of local journalism.
The thesis of her book and the discussion is that’s a huge loss, and we likely need different funding models for this public good.
[1] https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/the...