[dilemma]

>The only problem I see is printing is cash-flow intensive compared to full digital. I mean, for paper you have a daily/weekly expense with a proper credit line/funded account with the printer.

On the other hand, with digital you have to spend money to advertise and market to your audience, otherwise it disappears. With print, you own the "platform" because you pay for the paper, ink, and shipping.

[eb0la]

I agree distribution costs both for print/digital are non negligible (let's face advertising and SEO are forms of distribution in the online world).

But I am not sure digital should be the default way to go for journalism. Local or not.

In digital there are also personnel cost for setting up and maintaining infrastructure costs, and refreshing the front page every X minutes (no, it's not made automatically).

Even if you publish on a third party site (like Facebook) you still have to pay lump sum people to publish, promote, SEO, and A/B test landing pages...

... Is it worth for a 30-50K people audience? probably not unless you are thinking on the long run or you're making "evergreen" content...

... But this audience might be enough for a small newspaper printed in paper... even if the content is not "revived" every year/4 years by search engines.