Twenty years ago running a local newspaper was an incredible business to be in.
You almost had a monopoly on advertising within the geographic area that you served. If a company wanted to reach people in Wilmington, Delaware their best bet by far was to buy ads in (I just looked it up) "The News Journal".
You could afford to hire a lot of reporters.
Online advertising - first Craigslist, which chomped up the classifieds section, and then Google and Facebook, which provided access to your audience with better metrics and lower rates - means that business model doesn't really work any more.
Newspapers still haven't found a model that comes anywhere close to replacing that.
I was in the biz (on the IT side from roughly 2007-2013. Even in that time frame writing was already on the wall.
It’s really classifieds that killed it. Maybe not in terms of absolute dollar values, but they are were way up there in ROI per unit effort. Those going away really took away a lot of runway.
There were so many bad outcomes of this Act. It led to the corporate dominance that exists over US media today, and that translated to greater censorship, greater homogenization, less local control, and a simplification of American perspectives in general.
Clear Channel could not exist without this Act - that should be enough on its own to condemn it.
The media is trash today because of this law. But the media is owned by those who benefited from it, so you'll never hear about this.
The outlets expected to help "Real People to access Real News the way they want to," will probably not horrify you as much as they do me, but if I'm mentioning media consolidation, they're obviously the bad guys. IMO, you might as well be getting your news from a partnership between your boss and your landlord.
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Fortune Magazine: Fortune Magazine's New Owner Is Member Of Thailand's Richest Family
Rolling Stone: Owned by Penske Media Corporation, owner of Variety, Deadline Hollywood, Billboard, Boy Genius Report, Robb Report, Artforum, ARTNews, and others.
USA Today: Gannett. Owns the Ventura County Star, The Times Herald, The Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, El Paso Times, The Journal Sentinel, The Indianapolis Star, Bergen County Record, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Columbus Dispatch, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, The Florida Times-Union, The Nashville Tennessean, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Asbury Park Press, The Wilmington News Journal, Knoxville News-Sentinel, The White Plains Journal News, Reno Gazette-Journal, Providence Journal, The Ridgecrest Daily Independent, Utica Observer Dispatch, The Gadsden Times, Naples Daily News, and others.
SF Chronicle: Owned by Hearst Communications, who also owns The Danbury News-Times, Greenwich Time, The Stamford Advocate, Connecticut Post, The Middletown Press, New Haven Register, The Norwalk Hour, The Register Citizen, The Alton Telegraph, Edwardsville Intelligencer, Jacksonville Journal-Courier, Huron Daily Tribune, Midland Daily News, Albany Times Union, Beaumont Enterprise, Houston Chronicle, Laredo Morning Times, Midland Reporter-Telegram, Plainview Daily Herald, San Antonio Express-News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, half of A+E Networks, 20% of ESPN, Inc., and Hearst Television, owner of 35 television stations.
LA Times: Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who also owns The San Diego Union-Tribune and a 24% share in the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, The Virginian-Pilot, and the Hartford Courant, among many others.
Yahoo!: Owned by Apollo Global Management. Again, who knows? It's enormous, and from a skim of the Wikipedia article, they even own a local grocery store chain with a location a few blocks from me.
ProPublica: Independent, but in a particular way that is very common among a certain type of nonprofit.
> While the Sandler Foundation provided ProPublica with significant financial support, it also has received funding from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. ProPublica and the Knight Foundation have various connections. For example, Paul Steiger, executive chairman of ProPublica, is a trustee of the Knight Foundation. In like manner, Alberto Ibarguen, the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation is on the board of ProPublica.
Also: "ProPublica, along with other major news outlets, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was subsequently arrested for fraud."
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Semafor: I have no idea who owns it.
Media startup Semafor says it will buy out Sam Bankman-Fried’s $10M stake
> Semafor is a news website founded in 2022 by Ben Smith (the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and media columnist at The New York Times) and Justin B. Smith, the former CEO of Bloomberg Media Group.
The Conversation US: Nonprofit, independent. But very connected.
> The website was launched in Australia in March 2011. The network has since expanded globally with a variety of local editions originating from around the world. In September 2019, The Conversation reported a monthly online audience of 10.7 million users, and a combined reach of 40 million people when including republication. The site employed over 150 full-time staff as of 2020.
> Each regional or national edition of The Conversation is an independent not-for-profit or charity funded by various sources such as partnered universities and university systems, governments and other grant awarding bodies, corporate partners, and reader donations.
> The U.S. pilot was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four other foundations. Maria Balinska became editor in 2015, before moving to the US-UK Fulbright Commission. She was succeeded by Beth Daley, who became editor and general manager in 2019. The U.S. edition of The Conversation was originally based at Boston University, and that was its first partnered university. It later opened offices in Atlanta and New York. Other partnered institutions include Harvard University and MIT.
Democracy Docket: The Arabella Group and Priorities USA Action.
> Arabella Advisors is a Washington, D.C.-based for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network. It was founded by former Clinton administration appointee Eric Kessler. The Arabella network spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020.
> Organizations incubated by and affiliated with Arabella Advisors include the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Windward Fund. These groups have been active in various efforts to oppose the Trump administration and to organize opposition to numerous Republican politicians and policies.
> According to The Atlantic, Arabella Advisors has "undeniably benefited from the rush of panicked political giving on the left during the Trump years." In 2020, the Sixteen Thirty Fund donated $410 million toward defeating Trump and winning Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. Because of the way they are legally structured, Arabella Advisors and its affiliated groups are not required to disclose their donors, and they have not opted to do so. Billionaires George Soros and Pierre Omidyar have disclosed multi-million donations to the network. Politico has described the Sixteen Thirty Fund as a "left-leaning, secret-money group", writing that the group "illustrates the extent to which the left embraced the use of 'dark money' to fight for its causes in recent years. After decrying big-money Republican donors over the last decade, as well as the Supreme Court rulings that flooded politics with more cash, Democrats now benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars of undisclosed donations as well."
> Priorities USA Action is a progressive political action committee and is the largest Democratic Party super PAC. Founded in 2011, it supported Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. It was the primary super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It focused mainly on high-dollar donors. As of September 2016, it had amassed $132 million in support of Clinton. The top six donors to the super PAC have given $43.5 million, which is a third of the money collected by Priorities USA Action in the 2016 election cycle. The super PAC raised $21.7 million in August 2016, marking its largest monthly fundraising haul.
> Before the 1998 re-launch, the editor stated that "nothing will be left of the old magazine except the name." It was therefore necessary to distinguish between the modern and the historical Technology Review. The historical magazine had been published by the MIT Alumni Association, was more closely aligned with the interests of MIT alumni, and had a more intellectual tone and much smaller public circulation. The magazine, billed from 1998 to 2005 as "MIT's Magazine of Innovation", and from 2005 onwards as simply "published by MIT", focused on new technology and how it is commercialized; was sold to the public and targeted at senior executives, researchers, financiers, and policymakers, as well as MIT alumni.
You almost had a monopoly on advertising within the geographic area that you served. If a company wanted to reach people in Wilmington, Delaware their best bet by far was to buy ads in (I just looked it up) "The News Journal".
You could afford to hire a lot of reporters.
Online advertising - first Craigslist, which chomped up the classifieds section, and then Google and Facebook, which provided access to your audience with better metrics and lower rates - means that business model doesn't really work any more.
Newspapers still haven't found a model that comes anywhere close to replacing that.