West coast/everyone, watch your lunch
This Nieman Lab piece on how the LA Times is struggling to meet its digital subscriber goal is a clear snapshot of the growing chasm between being a newspaper owned by the Sulzbergers/His Royal Amazon Highness and being one owned by anyone else, and it’s depressing (Read this Twitter thread if you want a tl;dr).
One could make the point that maybe the “good old days” of journalism were really just a time of intense overlap — broadcast TV and the internet reduced the need to turn to your mom-and-pop Gazette Times for the exact same national story, for example — but it’s also a frustrating update on how local media still hasn’t quite figured out how to articulate their very real value proposition to their literal community and monetize it properly.
And while it’s lofty that the LA Times’ owner apparently wants to pull a Bezos and compete with national titles like the NYT...well, meanwhile, the NYT is getting ready to come for the West Coast’s lunch. The latest proof of that: their new Styles California Project, which begins today.