| Not implausible Actually, the 20 years I spent in journalism tells me it is completely implausible. a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality? Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations. The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States. And even if it did, people would demonize it because it was centralized, or at one time published an article they didn't agree with, the way they do with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place. I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public. That was when television journalism started dying. |
> The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.
So, what? It wouldn't happen all at once or with just one organization, anyway. Maybe the Guardian sees demand from it's subscriber base for an additional product with local coverage in a couple of places, initially, and expands imto that. Maybe someone else does it in other localities.
Now, personally, I don't think there is an adequate market for profitable paid non-ad-supported local news of the type that we are used to thinking of as general need coverage because the people willing to pay are a narrower group with deeper and more focussed needs, but nonprofit quasi-patronage model like the Guardian and some others could work.
> Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.
No, what destroyed the traditional news media is not understanding the value proposition and drastically cutting newsrooms in shortsighted consolidation, a mistake which it hadn't recovered from and was maybe just starting to recognize when new media came along and made it impossible to recover other than by largely becoming the new competition.
What killed journalism is...nothing. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about the more opaque bias of the time when the media, top-to-bottom was far more uniform in it's bias than it is today, and when the major media were even narrower in their ownership, because people mistook (and mistake Even more in retrospect than contemporary audiences did) the uniformity of vías for neutrality and objectivity, but journalism is no less alive today than at any time in the past. Probably far more.