[simonw]

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.

[TylerE]

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.