Ideally, investment in local news would come from the federal government,
which has more freedom to think long-term than cash-strapped states
and municipalities do.
The problem I see there is "cash-strapped states and municipalities" which leads to a dependence on the federal government that is often unhealthy: for instance when a bridge washed out in my town they had to wait years to get a grant to fix it. Similarly the bus company has had a large number of buses fail inspection and, being cash-strapped, isn't going to be able to fix them until it gets help from outside.
If we had some model where states and municipalities weren't cash-strapped I think they'd end up saving money in the long term.
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As for the media I was just looking at the 2009 book The Curse of the Mogul
which makes the case that media conglomerates had a history of structurally underperforming compared to smaller media companies. Around that time that book came out, Warren Buffet invested heavily in small newspapers but he took a huge loss on them in the end
part of that story is the disappearance of classified ads and Google and Facebook becoming the new ad monopoly and choking off their revenue.
Around Ithaca our daily newspaper (owned by Gannett) has turned into garbage whereas we have three free weekly papers, two of which have paper editions and a third of which is online only. It strikes me as deeply unfair that the daily is still getting the "paper of record" legal notice business when it is not doing the work to cover local issues the way the other papers are.
Part of it is that the weekly really has a better model, most towns don't have enough going on to really fill up a daily and it is easier for advertisers to support a weekly since they get the same value in the end.
If we had some model where states and municipalities weren't cash-strapped I think they'd end up saving money in the long term.
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As for the media I was just looking at the 2009 book The Curse of the Mogul
https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Mogul-Worlds-Leading-Companies/...
which makes the case that media conglomerates had a history of structurally underperforming compared to smaller media companies. Around that time that book came out, Warren Buffet invested heavily in small newspapers but he took a huge loss on them in the end
https://newrepublic.com/article/156399/warren-buffett-terrib...
part of that story is the disappearance of classified ads and Google and Facebook becoming the new ad monopoly and choking off their revenue.
Around Ithaca our daily newspaper (owned by Gannett) has turned into garbage whereas we have three free weekly papers, two of which have paper editions and a third of which is online only. It strikes me as deeply unfair that the daily is still getting the "paper of record" legal notice business when it is not doing the work to cover local issues the way the other papers are.
Part of it is that the weekly really has a better model, most towns don't have enough going on to really fill up a daily and it is easier for advertisers to support a weekly since they get the same value in the end.