elblues

Hey, thanks a lot for answering this. Kept scrolling and for some reason I thought you'd dodge it, but you didn't.

Glad that you've been able to use your smart to contribute elsewhere!

Not op, but chances are that the best hope for for-profit news right now is to ask and nag for subscription for now.

Not that non-profit model doesn't work. It's just most aren't set up that way. For-profit news organizations remain the majority of Pulitzer winners for better or worse. Plus the digital disruption affects non-profit news just the same.

IMO the broader content industry has been under digital disruption for nearly two decades, and has seen the decoupling of eyeballs moving from local and regional platforms onto even bigger platforms. The la carte of content hurt the record business first thanks to portable music players, but they have since been readjusting to a tour base model while steaming giants like Spotify and Apple grown even larger. News was next, but have a harder time to stabilize compared to music given the nature of short shelf life and an ever shortening attention span. Meanwhile Facebook and Google took away the majority of eyeballs and advertising revenue from news. For many publishers, Facebook and Google combined are easily 85+℅ of the source of their traffic, and a significant cultural/power change when news outlets themselves used to be able to dictate the information flow.

TV and movie executives has seen what digital disruption has done (i.e. unbundling, cord cutting and Netflix) to music and news business, so they have been smart to build a fortress around their content. They consolidate even more, and pump out more remakes. They are so far doing okay precisely because their content has an even longer shelf life and larger scale of all.

So basically the news business is uniquely positioned to be disrupted by information technology. Local news has limited scalability with limits to population and geography. The for-profit model doesn't help, and in the US currently does not have a deep culture for mainstream, widespread, non-profit news. Meanwhile everything is getting more consolidated, consumers have less choice for everything from their music, their ISP, their movies, and yes, their news.

At some point something is going to give. Nagging for subscription is not perfect, but a stopgap from going bankruptcy until a sustainable business model emerges.

Until then, local news is going to get smaller, they will be force to scale up and become more regional in interest despite more staff cuts. The end game might be just a few national and international players survived, and plenty of regional outlets, but their local and regional coverage power will be weaker than today given, again, local news is hard to scale.

In the bear future, expect less and less original reporting pieces, more quotes done by embedding tweets and Facebook. And a whole lot more click baits for national and international sites fighting for advertising dimes.

How will all these affect the democracy is another real problem. (Hint: more bubbles and polarization.)

So much this.

If Josh sees this I just want to give a shout out to Bryony Marks... Love her scores.

Been listening to them on spotify since I don't get season 4...