> There are plenty of publications that are profitable.
Many that do achieve profitability do so at tremendous sacrifice to the service they provide to the community. A perfect example of this is Alden Capital Group, which owns over 100 papers. They're infamous in the industry for reducing the newsroom headcount by up to 50% and replacing them with sales. Not only that, they're now trying to offload their entire new portfolio because this model of profitability actually devalues the papers in the marketplace, largely because they can't serve their communities.[0] The papers they print are essentially worthless because they can't put resources into writing important local stories.
> I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free
The model of the internet forced them to do this. Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly. Ad platforms by companies like Google were the best way for them to monetize, but in doing so they gave up all control. It was a die quickly or die slowly scenario. Most chose the latter.
Nobody forced them to create websites at all, certainly not "the model of the internet" which can't make anyone do anything. And of those websites, nobody forced them to not implement paywalls. You seem to be claiming that there is some dichotomy between serving a community and charging money for things, but there isn't. Lots of local businesses successfully serve their local community whilst still being financially sustainable.
All the market is telling the news industry is that it's way overstaffed. Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Your case study of Alden seems to back this up. They're private equity, their purpose in life is to turn around failing businesses and make them sustainable, which they have done. The difficulty selling the resulting business is blamed in the final paragraphs on pension liabilities i.e. the hangover of an era when they were fiscally mismanaged; not on their inability to put resources into writing important local stories. With a 15% profit margin they should be able to easily find a buyer regardless of their perceived journalistic quality, but a huge pensions liability will definitely kill the attractiveness of the businesses.
That's like arguing nobody forced you to create a LinkedIn account in order to get a job. All of the infrastructure to get a job is online and has been for years, as is journalism. Sure, you don't _have_ to create an online professional profile, but you're dramatically limiting your options by doing so. Print media chose move online largely due the explosive growth of the internet. Publications saw the internet as innovative (who didn't?), and chose to jump on. Look at the bubble in the 90's, companies were trying to figure out how to incorporate the web into their business years ago. The armchair argument of "they didn't have to jump on" is weak when you consider they didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Everyone was getting on the web.
> Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Investigative journalism is dying in the United States because it often takes months or years to investigate a story and can come at an astronomically high cost.[0]
We're approaching an era of journalism where major landmark stories may never see the light of day because the market doesn't care to pay enough for them. Should we be concerned that future investigative scandals (think Catholic Church sex abuse) may not be unearthed in the future because we're not willing to pay people to investigate them? How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
Er, well, yes. I've never used a LinkedIn account to get a job. I've found work via knowing people. (I have one, but almost never update it, rarely check messages and have not obtained any work through it).
How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
I suspect there are models that can pay for deep investigations, but it's probably not daily or weekly newspapers. One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated. We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
> One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated.
There are many reasons why legitimate investigations don't yield results (inability to retrieve financial records and other evidence, lack of cooperation by key players, threats from sponsors, etc.)
From the article above:
> The level of sponsor interference that news directors said they experienced this year was pretty much the same as last year – it exists in more than half of all newsrooms. In all, 17 percent of news directors say that sponsors have discouraged them from pursuing stories (compared to 18 percent last year), and 54 percent have been pressured to cover stories about sponsors, up slightly from 47 percent last year.
This survey was conducted when news media was in a much healthier financial situation than it is today, and back then, over half of news stations received pressure from sponsors in one form or another to either cover or suppress stories.
> We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
Can you provide some examples of such "scandals"? Investigative reporting, like most other reporting, typically goes through many layers of approval before being published.
I don't mean investigations that hit dead ends and never get published. I mean investigative journalism that turns out to be wrong or fraudulent.
Claas Relotious is a particularly notorious recent example, but there is plenty of meta-investigative journalism out there, like Glenn Greenwald's writeups of how the media present things that look like investigations of scandals but which are factually wrong. Here's a recent summary he did of 10 such cases:
I myself am a subscriber to a daily newspaper, which I read online, to get access to paywalled content. It's essentially opinion and analysis which I find value, and only rarely investigation of scandals. There are lots of newsrooms and only occasionally do they ever get a genuine Watergate or Snowden style scoop which means I can't really subscribe to get them because I don't know where they'll crop up next. And anyway, any paper I do subscribe to will end up paraphrasing and summarising the original paper's investigations anyway, which for me is fine - there's no particular need to learn about these things quickly or even at all, because I can't do anything with the knowledge usually.
In the end I'm skeptical journalism is the right way to keep powerful institutions in check. There are other ways.
Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly.
I don't think that history bears this out. The Wall Street journal was an early paywall adapter, and they have been successful at it. The San Jose Mercury was one of the first newspapers to go online and originally had a paywall. They subsequently removed their paywall and went into a financial tailspin (I'm not suggesting that that's a cause-and-effect relationship, but removing the paywall certainly did not help them in the long-term.)
Many that do achieve profitability do so at tremendous sacrifice to the service they provide to the community. A perfect example of this is Alden Capital Group, which owns over 100 papers. They're infamous in the industry for reducing the newsroom headcount by up to 50% and replacing them with sales. Not only that, they're now trying to offload their entire new portfolio because this model of profitability actually devalues the papers in the marketplace, largely because they can't serve their communities.[0] The papers they print are essentially worthless because they can't put resources into writing important local stories.
> I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free
The model of the internet forced them to do this. Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly. Ad platforms by companies like Google were the best way for them to monetize, but in doing so they gave up all control. It was a die quickly or die slowly scenario. Most chose the latter.
[0]: https://nypost.com/2019/01/25/cost-cutting-fund-alden-global...