Can anything save the news biz?

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 Doctor 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 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. But Ken is not giving up just yet. I do believe if you build it right, they will come. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm Waylon Wong. Today on the show, we'll look at two startups bucking the trend. Their success so far might just reveal a path forward for a local news revival. Santa Cruz County in California has a population of around 260,000 residents. For a long time, the paper of record there was the Santa Cruz Sentinel. But when Ken Doctor moved there in 2019, he says the Sentinel was a shell of its former self. Its owner, a hedge fund called Alden Global Capital, was notorious for buying up newspapers and slashing their staffs. After a few decades working as a journalist and then as a media analyst, Ken felt like he had to do something. I decided that I needed to, put my my principles out there and exchange the relatively easy work of being a consultant and analyst for being an entrepreneur. Ken decided to start his own local news outlet. Ken, there gotta be easier ways to stand by your principles. Yeah. I mean, only madness lies that way then. But despite the decline of legacy newspapers, Ken believed that with some tweaks, the classic business model for journalism was still sound. You get businesses to pay you who want to advertise. They wanna reach customers, and you get readers to pay you because they like they they like what you're writing. They wanna know what's going on. So in 2020, with a newsroom of 10 people, Ken started a digital news site called Lookout Santa Cruz. In a few short years, Ken says its readership has grown to the point where they reach about half the adults …