What if years ago, newspapers told visitors the following:

[Wonder Why]

"So you are from out of town and want to buy a paper to read the local news? Sorry, we don't do that. You have to buy a six month subscription and every time you want to read the paper, you have to tell us who you are. And if you pick up a previously read paper from 3 weeks ago, you still have to pay to read any article".

Think that would fly?

That's what so many local media sites are doing today. You see an online article about something that happened in East Podunk and you say to yourself, "I used to live there" or "I'm considering visiting there so I want to read some local restaurant reviews" or some other reason. Can you do that? Not any more and so many sites whose numbers increase daily, it seems. You have to pay to read any article or one of interest to you that is "restricted to subscribers". Moreover, you have to login so they can track which articles you read to sell that information to others - even if you paid to read it!

So you do what so many of us do - restrict your reading to the free sites or go to the library and read the national papers there. Of course, if you are a local, you can stop by the library daily and skip paying for the local paper at all. For the out-of-towner, finding a local paper that has local news is difficult and the location of the library and its hours are something that has to be looked up at every town.

Sure, local news sites need the income and are fast dying. But they, in the past, made their money from local residents and didn't track what they read or, worse, sell that information to others.They lost their ability to market themselves locally. They "off-shored" their subscription handling which cost them many customers dissatisfied with the service (like me); they contracted out their printing to out of town mega-printers who provided low quality printing; they stopped carrying much local news and just added national inserts (Do I really need to read national news from local inserts?); they put all their stories online and instead of selling news, they sold the readers' personal information ;and, in general, lost their way.

Their solution is to sell 6 month or 1 year teaser-priced subscriptions with auto-renewal to catch the suckers to anyone and everyone just to read a single story (or more than the first paragraph of one).

Front Page used to be the latest news, so extensively written that they had to send you to the back pages to finish it. Now it contains meaningless unrelated pop-up videos that move around, lots of ads and plenty of stories that are months old. (My local paper until a few weeks ago had its Black Friday story still on the main page!

"Local newspapers" are no longer local. Owned by out-of-towners that own many papers and containing little research on local stories with poorly written articles, lots of stories about the local high school football team's last game, and lots of canned stories provided by outsiders who "contribute" their articles to push their agenda. The reporters are gone and the editors all have the same name - "Microsoft Word".

Oh, well. No wonder Fox News does so much business.

[WheelWalker]

1. Truth.

[underpants]

2. Completely agree. Even national news sites that require reclicking it

I click on a link here. Two paragraphs and then “continue to read on app”. Close it. Hit the link again and then “Expand article” is available. Look, get the clicks and promoting their app.

Our local paper does the paywall thing. People keep getting the actual paper as a matter of habit at least they used to. Now I rarely hear anyone mention the Times-Dispatch.

[Dum Aloo]

3. As soon as I see "pay this or that," I look elsewhere.

I know, we must pay for good reporting, but I am cheap and look elsewhere. I am just a regular Joe and I don’t want to pay for some talking head’s Benz.

[brooklynite]

6. Heaven forbid people having to PAY for news...

Why can't the reporters and editors just work for free?

[BWdem4life]

7. I completely expected you to say that. nt

[Dum Aloo]

8. I will anonymously pay one charge for a myriad of sources.

Is that too much to ask?

[delisen]

4. I am following 2 local newspapers online

I am looking for small press local news

One is Decaturish which covers Decatur, GA and nearby Atlanta, GA neighborhoods. The other is Colorado Blvd out of Pasadena area. I think small press with local reporters is rebuilding.

Hopefully some other newspapers will figure out a way of building online without building walls.

[fishwax]

5. I agree that this aspect of today's media environment sucks, but it's strange to blame local papers

for it, when they're among the least powerful entities in the media ecosystem, and have seen their share of power in the marketplace declining for decades (even before the internet). It's like getting mad at the guy in the food truck for charging more than McDonalds. Fox News doesn't thrive because local newspapers dropped the ball. Local newspapers have been dying for decades because of competition from other media with national scales and a local reach (broadcast and cable television, long before the internet) and aggressive expansion of large media companies in all forms of media, including local newspapers. These processes were well underway even before digital culture began to supplant print culture.

And, of course, this trend is reflective of trends in other sectors (independent booksellers swallowed up by Borders/Barnes and Noble, who were in turn gutted by Amazon, Main Street giving way to Big Box Stores) and at the same time it is a function of those trends. For example, in the 1990s it was a big deal in the industry that Wal Mart rarely if ever advertised in newspapers. So when they drove the local hardware store out of business, the newspaper lost an advertiser. (And the local clothing store and the local sporting goods store and you get the idea.) Sears, which was essentially a sibling of modern print journalism (both were made possible by the telegraph) advertised in local newspapers. But of course they haven't survived either. The local diner benefits tremendously from having a newspaper to advertise in. McDonald's, on the other hand, doesn't need it.

Local newspapers didn't so much lose their way as they lost their way of life. I think local journalism is worth supporting, so I pay for online access when I can. Of course, I can't do that for every paper in every town I used to live in, but I'm not sure why I should expect the same sort of access to their product that, in the past, I would have had to physically travel to them for. Another thing that one can do to help is, when you read a story online from a local paper, make a point to contact one of the local advertisers and let them know you saw their ad.