Newspocalypse now

We finally did it.

After roughly five decades of per-capita reader declines, three decades of prophets shouting out from the digital wilderness, two decades of profits declining (whether due to digital platforms’ disintermediation, our poor strategy, or both); and a decade of private equity strip mining, we’re arrived at the end of days for the local news industry as we know it. We will look back on 2024 as the year that divided what was and what will be.

Think I’m a pessimist? Not if you consider the trends, the impending events of the year ahead and the definition of the end.

We could certainly look at the dour data compounding year over year (since 1946!) — closures, layoffs, ghost newsrooms, circulation declines. But nothing sobered me more than a recent University of Pennsylvania study in which 2,529 people were offered free, no-strings-attached digital subscriptions to major local newspapers.

Forty-four people redeemed those free subscriptions. Not 44%…1.7%.

We can’t give it away.

That’s the climate. And the weather ahead is terrible.

As we enter one of the most momentous elections in the history of our republic, local news will be even more of an afterthought for citizens in 2024. We’ll be debating totalitarianism, not county taxes. While television will see a perennial advertising benefit, that’s never really reached newspapers and online organizations. Partisan “pink slime” organizations will find themselves flush with cash.

All to say, in a stormy year, we’re less likely to turn things around.

I’m not saying that local news is over. What’s ending, more quickly than we thought, is the news industry as we’ve known it since the early twentieth century.

Some of the current generation will survive and find their way to thriving, even with current business model challenges. I have great hope for the independent metro dailies and other bright spots in the market — largely those for whom near-term profits are not paramount. But even if all of those hit home runs, it won’t put a dent in the national per-capita local news gap.

I’m aware that this is a rare “prophet of doom” moment in the Nieman prediction field. I’m also sure that many who’ve worked with me will be shocked at this turn from my longstanding pluck in working to contribute to solutions over the last thirty years.

Fear not. I’m happier and more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time.

The days of half-measures and incremental change will end because we have no other choice.

Big media companies will start spinning off teams to create new products that bear no resemblance to what we’ve seen before. Not iterations. Not “youth initiatives.” These will make the leadership that approves them scratch their heads at first. The smart ones will leave these strange creatures alone to grow under the care of product leaders and journalists. Most will fail, but a few may point a way forward.

New players, focused more on serving needs than on tax statuses, will try things that serve communities and bear at most a passing resemblance to the news sites yet to escape the newspaper template. Some may find a way to scale — not to cut costs, but to expand reach and grow.

Newly armed funders will stop focusing on adding additional players to metro markets that still have newspapers and instead turn attention to the suburbs that are disproportionately bereft or smaller markets where conservative voters are more likely to suffer from lack of local news.

As AI and political chicanery drive the value of junk information to, at most, zero, we have an opportunity to leverage the burgeoning competitive advantage of quality information in order to turn around our lack-of-value proposition.

We will learn that the less something looks like what we have now, the better chance it has of being the thing on the other side of death. Pablo Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

It’s time to create. We have no other choice.