NPR.
It seems impossible to imagine now, but not long ago, journalism was actually a good business.
For decades, hundreds of millions of Americans relied on newspapers, TV,
and radio to find out what was going on in the world and in their communities.
The money for journalism came from two main sources, news consumers and advertisers.
And news outlets had an endless supply of both.
When the internet came along, things changed.
Media industry analyst Ken Docter had a front row seat to it.
You can see that newspapers were in decline because of the inroads of Google, Yahoo.
They were taking advertising revenue.
They were also taking something that's even in a sense more precious, which is attention.
Consumers' attention turned to social media and streaming.
Advertisers followed.
And the business model that supported news for centuries began to crumble.
In the past couple decades,
more than 3,000 local newspapers have closed and thousands of journalists have been laid off.
For millions of Americans, the vacuum left behind has often been filled by misinformation,
paid influencers, and AI slop.
One could look at all this and reasonably conclude that fact-based,
independent, local journalism is cooked.