What’s the practical alternative? Viewing the problems through a socioeconomic or political lens just makes them seem intractable. At least techies can influence technology, either through entrepreneurship or open source contributions.
As myopic as it appears, the approach at least scales well and has drastically transformed the world in the last few decades, for better or worse. The problem is that we hype up technology as a panacea when it’s at most an enabling component for improving human effort. At least we can do something to effect change if minor.
I think it mostly just seems intractable because people at the end of the day don't care about local journalism (at least not enough to pay reasonable amounts of money for it). At the end of the day I think there are some problems that are pretty simple with collective action but people just don't want it badly enough to actually sacrifice anything (in this case, money) for it.
Where I grew up had a local paper, and the community was more than wealthy enough money to pay for it but circulation was ever decreasing. In my naive view it died a death of apathy more than anything else and it's not surprising there's not a satisfying solution to it.
I think it's just another example of enshitification.
Newspapers can't make the bills with just subscriptions, so they start selling ads. Ad revenue starts dropping so they add more ads. More ads cause less readers. Cost cutting measures erodes at the quality of journalism. And then a big media company swoops in, buys the company, fires basically everyone, and turns the newspaper into one of the uniform newspapers that they also own eschewing all local issues. That further drops subscribers and trust which simply leads to more misleading garbage.
Throughout the process, yes people cared less. But also quality decreased which made people care even less.
My parents who have had a newspaper subscription for 50 years have cancelled their subscriptions a couple of years ago because of how garbage the paper is.
As myopic as it appears, the approach at least scales well and has drastically transformed the world in the last few decades, for better or worse. The problem is that we hype up technology as a panacea when it’s at most an enabling component for improving human effort. At least we can do something to effect change if minor.