I'm so happy to announce that the @the_ntln has just completed its first acquisition: @ColoradoNewsCCM, an independent, family-owned group of 24 community newspapers. We are joined by the veteran journalists @ColoradoSun and a network of incredible partners. For years, the narrative about local newspapers has been about their inevitable demise. The conventional wisdom is that these trusted sources of news are doomed by digital disruption, hedge fund take-overs, the squeeze of corporate consolidation, or closure when an owner retires.

I’m a big fan of both @peretti (savviest operator/observer of digital media business) and @benthompson (all my academic colleagues should study aggregation theory) but think they veered into some problematic terrain on the “saving journalism” front here:
stratechery.com/2020/an-interv… 2/ In brief, @peretti’s solution to the broken business model for high quality local journalism is to get #bigtech to allocate $2bn/year to pay for 30,000 or so journalists to make the kind of content that current ad-supported and subscription models struggle to fund at scale.

Here's my take: There is/was no commercial business model that could have saved most news publishers. This is not a case of product commodification, it's a case of total de-commercialization of news as an industry. Cc @skok @emilybell @niccomele 1/8 Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what -- there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work (see @benthompson @stratechery). 2/8