
Margaret Sullivan lays out what went wrong with the local news business - JSeymourATL
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/media-critic-margaret-sullivan-lays-out-what-went-wrong-with-the-local-news-business-and-how-it-might-be-fixed/
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patrickm_
I think the gut reaction is that local news is failing because people would
rather hear from a source that is more biased to their personal viewpoints.
Local news is by nature unbiased (mostly).

This is true, but there are a lot of people that don't care about this and
just want to hear the news.

I think that the more overlooked problem is that local news is too general.
There may be a few articles/stories that I really care about, but to
read/listen to them I have to sift through everything else.

With everything becoming more and more specialized, if I only care about two
areas that the local news reports on, it is almost guaranteed that I will be
able to switch to a separate outlet that covers only this. I only care about
sports and startups? Cool - I'll subscribe to The Athletic and a TechCrunch
newsletter. Now I get what I want without all the fluff around it.

This seems to be a huge problem that will be difficult for local news outlets
to solve.

