To me, it was the most absurd statement a digital leader for a top newspaper company could make — worse, I wouldn’t know until much later that the trajectory I helped set my smaller news organization on wasn’t much better.

“You simply can’t put the cat back in the bag,” he said, referring to his contention that there was no hope of reversing the newspaper industry’s practice of providing free articles online. He contended the future of newspapers — especially the local ones that do most of the heavy lifting in the U.S. when it comes to holding state and local governments accountable — was in rounding up as many clicks each month as possible.

My response: “We don’t have much of an option, we must put the cat back in the bag or we won’t have local journalism.”

I, having a few months earlier helped launch a new paywalled website at the small daily newspaper where I worked, bristled at his plan to focus his staff on what essentially was click bait. I contended readers would see the value in supporting their local newspaper by subscribing online, giving them access to both the racy crime articles AND the less entertaining, but more important coverage of how their elected representatives were steering their government.

They didn’t.

The problem is, neither of us was entirely correct. It was 2008 or 2009 and online news consumers were shocked by the notion of paying for their news online. They were conditioned, mostly by flippant practices of newspapers at the outset of online news, to consider digital journalism as nearly value less. Worse, we at the newspaper did little to explain the economics of local news to our readers and we proceeded to set a price for the online subscription that aimed to protect our print subscriptions, not to grow our digital audience. The backlash was awful and drove many to stop consuming local news as part of their daily routine — the exact opposite direction from where civic-minded local newspapers want to go. The fact is, we were nearly a decade early (payment systems were clumsy, prices were too high, only one national outlet charged for content at the time, and we failed to communicate the value of what we were doing).

Unfortunately, the digital business model that larger chain and many others adopted was fatally flawed. It relied upon digital advertising, mostly from national services, that today barely pay enough to cover the electricity bill at most local newspapers. The second hit for those organizations struck when the practice of aggregation proliferated. Those factors combined to drive many local newspapers out of business or at least to such low staffing levels as to render them ineffective. In some places, the shift created opportunity for new digital outlets to thrive. But the result for most has been the creation of vast local news deserts. 

In hind sight the outcomes all were predictable.

So what’s the real problem here? Certainly not that one business model may be driven into extinction by a newer, more technologically advanced one. 

No, the real problem is the lack of local journalism occurring in communities across the United States. Nobody is asking what the city plans to do about lead contamination in its water supply. Or what the state will do about PFAS groundwater contamination left behind at airports and military installations. In the worst cases nobody even knows those issues exist until its too late. 

Our solution didn’t work, neither did that of others who took a different path. And we likely weren’t the best positioned to provide solutions, nor were we asking and answering the right questions. We were far more concerned with how to ensure the survival of our news business model.

So the question is how do we make local journalism affordable, accessible and sustainable?