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It's OK, though, because new advances in AI will totally fix the problem. COPIUM

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Much like that meme of a young man holding up a sign, "First they came for the journalists... we don't know what happened after that."

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This is the woke purge that Musk started. It is happening across all of corporate America. Wokesters with a degree are getting rejected as job candidates. Good work you radicals infesting the education system, you have damaged your students... causing them a life of economic harm.

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The number of outlets that do first-order reporting is dwindling. And when it's your life and career on the line, it's going to be very scary.

I don't think, however, that the number of first-order reporting outlets will go to zero. That seems very unlikely. The number might go to two or three, which I think is undesirable. I think you maybe want 20 independent voices looking at every major thing, but they don't have to be the same voices/outlets.

Do 1000 different reporters need to go to the Super Bowl to report on it? Probably not. Nor does there need to be 500 reporters in the White House press room at any moment. It used to work that way, and now it isn't and there's a winnowing.

That said, I thought the LA Times would be a survivor, but maybe I was wrong. I certainly want at least one, or maybe two of the surviving first-line outlets to be based on the US West Coast - Pacific Rim, baby!

Once upon a time, I subscribed to SI. I loved that, read it cover-to-cover every week. That seems a bygone era. I don't know how we support writing/reporting like that any more.

However, I think we'll figure that out. I see good stuff out there still. Just packaged very differently.

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I've been looking for some old stuff from papers in the late 1990s, and just seeing how page after page has several hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars of ads from local businesses.

Yes, the print ad model is largely busted. 70% of revenue came from classifieds, and those aren't coming back. The national ads aren't coming back. But those local restaurants and banks and opticians — I have a hard time believe they are all thriving on Google & Facebook ads. Hell, I've worked with enough of them to know they barely have a Facebook *page* or a robust Google My Business profile.

I wish I had better answers, but I feel like there's a pathway that combines reader subscriptions + useful local advertising to help these new upstarts keep growing.

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