NewsBeat

10 NewsBeat August 2016 By JIM BRADY Local news isn't dead. We just need to stop killing it. or more than 20 years, local news organizations around the globe have been trying to make a go of it in the new digital economy. And most, as we read day after day, are still struggling. Layoffs are constant, bankruptcies common, and storied local brands face uncertain futures. This has fueled low morale and heightened cynicism in many local newsrooms. In fact, when the subject turns to local news, we're more likely to hear what isn't possible than what is. Local can't scale, critics say. Local sites can't build large enough audiences to generate meaningful revenue. Local advertisers don't get digital. Many think the local news opportunity is too small to be worth much effort. But this is no time for surrender. As someone who has spent most of the past 20 years working in local digital news — the last two running Billy, a mobile news site in Philadelphia — I say now is the time to refocus on what local can do instead or what it can't, and to build a new ecosystem on that foundation. Now is the time to take advantage of what makes local unique instead of trying to follow the footsteps of a national business model that will never work for local. Now is the time for a local digital news revolution. For revolution to happen, it's going to take a major shift in how local journalists think and operate. Too many local news organizations—both legacies and startups—likely are already doomed by a business model that is simultaneously keeping them alive and dragging them under. As Walt Kelly said: We have met the enemy, and it is us. It's not as if media's economic problem hasn't been staring us in the face for the past decade. In 2005, according to the Newspaper Association of America, US newspapers generated $47.4 billion in print revenue. That number has dropped every year since, and, in many, precipitously. By 2014, US print revenue had declined to $16.4 billion, marking a 66 percent drop over nine years. In that same time period, digital revenue for US newspapers increased only from $2 billion to $3.5 billion. Yet, if you talk to many local editors and publishers, you'll hear a long list of reasons why local hasn't transitioned effectively to a digital world: We should have charged readers from the start! Google is stealing our content! Aggregators are stealing our content! We can't compete with social media! Unethical ad blockers are killing us! Clickbait! The common theme of most of these statements is, "It's not our fault." F the aggressiveness of a Tryptophan-addled Thanksgiving glutton. When we were still relatively fat and happy — from 1995 to 2005 — we did just enough to make it look like we cared about digital, but not enough to ever disrupt our legacy businesses. By the time the bottom really starting falling out in the mid-2000s, and the push to grow digital became more than a throwaway line in earnings press releases or company all-hands meetings, it was too late for most. What digital businesses we did have by then were based mostly on a display ad model that required aggressive growth in pageviews and/or ad impressions. And, for many reasons, it was our pursuit of those metrics that led local to where it is today. Why? Well, for most, the only way to achieve massive pageview and advertising impression growth was to stop worrying about local readers — or, put another way, whether readers were actually local. Where readers came from became less important than that they just came. This led to local news sites being overloaded with stories that had little or nothing to do with the communities they were ostensibly serving and, in many cases, were published purely to drive pageviews. This need for more pageviews and impressions also led to what can only be described as the excruciating user experience of most local news sites. Slow load times? Check. Pop-up ads? Yes sir! Auto-play video? Of course! Forty-page slide shows? Why not? User experience? Sorry, not familiar with that term. According to a Renolds Journalism Institute article from October, the average load time for all US websites was five seconds. For US newspaper sites, that same average was 17 seconds. Yes, almost three-and-a-half times longer. If you think quality content is enough to convince people to wait that long for a page to load, stop right now and count out 17 seconds before you continue reading. It's a long time. Ad blockers are another example of how news organizations have mishandled the relationship with their consumers. Partially as a result, the aforementioned junking up our user experiences, the use of ad blockers has skyrocketed in the past year. The response from many news organizations — national as well as local — is to block or limit the access of readers using ad-blockers. But does the "we'll-show-them" philosophy work in a world in which there are hundreds of news sites that won't make the same user experience mistakes? And don't for a second fall into the trap of thinking, "but we're the only site that has that information." That philosophy only works if that information is indispensable to your audience. Most local news sites no longer have enough of that kind of journalism to prop up an ad-driven business model. But it is. We had plenty of time to adapt to the new digital world. Newspapers have been online since 1995. Google was founded in 1996. Craigslist launched on the Web that same year. Facebok was founded in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Snapchat in 2003, Huffington Post and Mashable launched in 2005, BuzzFeed was formed in 2006, and Mic began life as PolicyMic in 2011. There was nothing stopping media companies — who were there before all of those companies — from being the innovators. And, almost completely, we missed the boat. Most successful digital startups have focused on building national audiences and businesses. Most local markets remain open for innovation. But the first step toward local success is to stop acting like we're helpless victims of changing times and begin dictating our own futures. To do that, local news organizations need to re-focus on things many have forgotten about along the way: their customers and communities. In my view, it's been a long time since local news organizations have focused on their consumers in a meaningful way. The huge profit margins of newspapers between 1970 to 1995 meant they didn't have to listen to the reader. Beats and sections were added to generate still more revenue, even if the subjects weren't important to a majority of readers. Yes, news organizations still served their communities journalistically during those days, but they fared poorly when it came to a two-way dialogue with readers. Many news organizations seemed to take the position they wanted to be of the people, just not with them. It's been a decade since the digital revolution made it untenable for a news organization to keep its distance from its audience. Consumers have an infinite number of ways to occupy their digital time. They now hold the power. The day of the local media monopoly is over, and over forever. Standing around lamenting how great things used to be may feel cathartic, but, frankly, it's a useless exercise. Let's start by owning the mess we've made. Because until we do, we cannot fix it. To me, there are five major issues that continue to hamper local journalism, some of which overlap: 1) a continued lack of commitment to digital, 2) a fatally flawed business model, 3) brutal user experiences, 4) lack of a deep relationship with our audiences, and 5) sclerotic newsroom cultures. So let's unpack those a bit. When it comes to digital, let's be honest: Many local news organizations embraced the medium with

• Cover