Extract …
… How will you fund all of this? This is the most important part: Shun advertising. Instead, ask readers to pay for it with real money — $5 or $10 a month, or perhaps even more. It will take time, but if you build it right, you just might create the next great metropolitan news organization.
This plan may sound simplistic, almost like a joke. Wait, Sherlock, your big idea is to create a really good product and charge people money for it? Haven’t people tried this before?
Less than you might think. The short history of digital media is lousy with advertising, which promotes all the wrong incentives for online news — volume over curation, aggregation over original coverage, speed over accuracy.
More recently, there has been a surge in online subscriptions. Netflix is doing it for TV, Spotify for music, and Patreon for podcasters and YouTubers. And many news outlets — big companies like The New York Times and start-ups like The Athletic, which covers sports — are making subscriptions the center of their journalism.
Yet few entrepreneurs have jumped on the subscription bandwagon for local news. The reluctance makes sense; local markets are by definition small, and journalism is expensive.
But after studying Ms. Lessin’s and Mr. Thompson’s methods, I suspect there’s a market for subscription-based local coverage. Someone just has to build it …
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New York Times
