Is Local News Sustainable?
Does nature really abhor a vacuum? Issue #84
A few months ago, our family did something I never thought we would ever do. We canceled our subscription to the local newspaper. To anyone paying attention, it’s obvious that the city newspapers have been struggling for some time. Their current offerings are quite diminished from earlier decades.
When I was single, I picked up a copy of the Chicago Tribune every morning on my way to work. When we married and moved to the suburbs, we converted to a daily subscription that we maintained for many years. Even as the paper shrunk in size, coverage, and as reporters and columnists we liked departed, we remained loyal to the paper.
But finally, a few months ago, we realized that most of the national and international coverage in the paper was syndicated. Local coverage was limited to scandals and murders. Almost all of the reporters and columnists we enjoyed were gone. The Sunday paper was at best a quarter of the size of what it once was. The local suburban weekly papers that the Tribune purchased a decade earlier and that we relied on for coverage in our community still existed in name, but the coverage was at best an occasional report about “happy news” or a high school sports team. There was rarely any coverage of the village board or any of the eleven taxing bodies that make up our community.
So we gave it up for some digital subscriptions to national papers.
What do we do for local news?
Well, there is no real local news. There is a county paper, but even its reach is limited. There’s a county oriented “news site” but it’s funded and owned by a group with very specific opinions about government and I’m very curious about their funders. There’s Nextdoor. But that is mostly for people who complain about empty retail spaces and worry about the latest coyote sighting. There’s Facebook, but that’s about the same as Nextdoor. There’s a local website that is dedicated to the police scanner so that’s not exactly covering budget meetings, school councils or what the county board is up to. Five minutes on that site will make you want to run out and buy some guns and build a bomb shelter.
It’s been said that nature abhors a vacuum. I’ve long maintained that city magazines could become the “paper of record” for many communities that either have news deserts or, as our county has, seriously limited local coverage. But in today’s market, regional magazines often face the same issues as their national counterparts. The scale is different, but the problems are the same. What buckets will provide enough revenue to reach profitability?
In the first article below, we see how some local startup digital news sites plan on working together and sharing best practices to support each other and become sustainable. It’s these do it yourself organizations that give me a lot of hope. We see similar developments in the magazine community and I hope to see more in the future.
1__The Alliance for Local Sustainable News is created
“It’s no longer a question of searching for models that might replace dailies whose owners have disinvested,” said Ken Doctor, CEO of Lookout Local/Lookout Santa Cruz. “Our members are doing that — and becoming the primary, go-to news sources for their communities. Dedicated, mission-driven execution is what America’s communities need, and we are glad that ASLN can help lead the way.”
The founding members of this new alliance are six relatively new startups that in many ways are becoming the go-to sources for truly local news in their area. As the press release points out, the six organizations employ more than 275 full time journalists and business side team members.
Are they the future of local news? I believe so. As local newspapers fade away and local TV news focuses in on little more than crime, someone needs to keep an eye on everything else. I’m a subscriber to Block Club Chicago (Please come to the suburbs!) and their reporting is excellent.
2__TV Guide Magazine to launch TV Insider Magazine to cover streaming television
As the saying goes, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The mission of TV Guide Magazine is listings. But corded TV and over the air TV is fading away and more and more people are now streaming what they want to watch.
TV Insider will be a different magazine. Its mission will be to curate what’s available on the streaming networks and recommend what the best shows are to watch.
In an interview with Samir Husni, the president of TV Insider, Tony Frost had this to say:
You hear many people tell you there’s so much to watch on TV these days, but what do I watch? What’s worth watching? And the slogan of our magazine is “Know what to stream next.” … one thing regular streamers want to know to know is what to stream next. So yes, we really do believe that there’s a market for this.
The launch on the newsstand is a pretty big deal for today’s shrunken single copy market, 100,000 copies. But it also shows how relevant the title will be to the current print market. TV Guide has over a million subscribers, so it’s still a large circulation magazine. If the title is successful, it could wind up bigger than TV Guide.
This is the crazy, brave, kind of stuff I love to see.
3__Good news on the retail front: Store openings outpace closings in 2022
According to the report in Retail Dive, 2022 store closures declined by 50% compared to 2021.
“Four retailers led store openings in the sector last year. Dollar General opened about 1,024 stores and recently marked its 19,000th store opening. Family Dollar and Dollar Tree, which are owned by the same parent company, opened 393 and 206 stores, respectively. Youth-oriented retail discounter Five Below opened an estimated 134 stores in 2022.”
Think about that for a hot moment: Dollar General opened 1,024 stores in 2022. How is that shaping the bricks and mortar landscape? Well, this year, the chain plans on opening another 1,000 stores.
Note for those of you still interested in the retail sales of magazines: Dollar General carries magazines in many of their stores and for some titles, is a top retail outlet.
4__Apparently we Flatlanders (Illinoisans) have short attention spans…
OK, so first you have to get past the fact that it’s entirely possible that 54% of the people you know bring their phones into the bathroom with them. Take that into consideration the next time a friend hands you a phone and wants you to look at the latest picture of their dog or cat (or child).
It also turns out that we Illinoisans are in decent company because California and Pennsylvania also have very short attention spans. So it’s not exactly a coastal thing.
But what I found most interesting is that the survey, as quoted in MediaPost was performed by a company called Solitaire Bliss. This is not a typical survey firm, PR firm, political consulting firm, org associated with a major university or college. Solitaire Bliss is an online gaming company that is part of another online gaming com called mongoose.net and Unwind Media.
Does this mean the survey is inaccurate or can’t be trusted? No, I don’t think so. But a gaming company, doing a survey. Interesting. Not surprising. Just interesting. And clearly, mobile media is now and forever going to be a big part of the magazine experience.
Just, leave it in your pocket when you head into the bathroom, OK? #justsayin
5__Sci-Fi Magazine flooded with AI generated submissions
Clarkesworld, a sci-fi and fantasy magazine that has been published since 2006 cut off story submissions last week when they noticed that of the 1,200 submissions they had received this month, 500 of them were ‘machine written.’
First off, let the fact that they had received 1,200 story submissions in twenty days. Then, that they could tell, somehow, that 500 of them were machine based.
Said publisher and editor in chief, Neil Clarke:
"There's a rise of side hustle culture online," he said. "And some people have followings that say, 'Hey, you can make some quick money with ChatGPT, and here's how, and here's a list of magazines you could submit to.' And unfortunately, we're on one of those lists."
Eventually we may be able to sort this sort of thing out, but it’s an interesting example of the continued story of the unintended consequences of releasing technology into the world without really thinking through some of the implications.
Get this. Clarkesworld wasn’t the only magazine that experienced this. The Verge reported on a similar situation at Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. In that case, the editor kept receiving stories titled “The Last Hope” from different email addresses and with different author names on them. She believes they were all generated by AI tools.
Your Moment of Magazine Zen!
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