Is email the future of local news?

Bo Sacks picked an article for distribution by Jim Edwards called “Why the future of digital-only local news maybe small, focused and based on email.”

The reality is that not that many people care about what we call “news.” This has always been the case. When people bought print newspapers, they weren’t necessarily reading all the political stuff, and what journalism advocates say is “essential to save democracy” and all that breathless, self-congratulatory banter.

They were reading the sports page, the comics, the obituaries. They wanted to know what movies were playing this weekend, and who has the best deal on tires.

As all those previous components of the daily paper moved to other places, so “the news” was all that was left, and it’s a harder sell – as newspapers around the country are finding. The fact – whether it’s sad or not is up to you – is that not many people care about news.

The standard business model to keep the news afloat in the internet age was advertising. At first, that worked decently well, but ad rates keep going down, and they’ll continue to do so. So the economics of local news keep getting worse.

But there are bright spots. Some digital-only, local newsrooms are doing well. At least as compared with other news operations, so “well” is a low bar here. But the ones who are doing well focus on email.

That’s partly because both Google and Facebook are not prioritizing news in their rankings, so
… where is the news site going to get the traffic to support the ad revenue?

Email.

And more and more revenue is coming from subscriptions.

Anyway, this is all consistent with what I said in an earlier podcast, that email might start to displace the website as the main means of content delivery. Keep an eye on that.

However, ringing in the back of my mind is Troy Young’s evaluation of email in a recent People vs. Algorithms podcast. He doesn’t like the tabs. He can’t prioritize what he wants to read, and when. And in many interfaces, like Google, there’s no preview.

Put simply, it’s a lousy experience.

How can that get fixed? I have some ideas.

Someone can design a better email interface – one that’s focused on the reader, not on ad revenue.
Along those lines, email could be read and organized in a reader app where you would have more control over how things are displayed.
Something involving AI agents might disrupt the whole concept and create a completely new interface. Troy Young suggested something along those lines in the same podcast.

What does this mean for publishers? What do you do while you’re waiting for somebody to fix email?

There are no great answers. You could create your own app, but there’s a huge app fatigue. People don’t want more apps. As I’ve said many times, there should be one “reader app” to rule them all, but … who knows. Maybe Elon will do that in X. I’m not holding my breath.

I think the best you can do in the short term is to re-think your emails to try to overcome some of their shortcomings in the structure of the email itself. That’s a big topic … for another day.

Resources

Why the future of digital-only local news may be small, focused and based on email
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/regional-newspapers/why-the-future-of-digital-only-local-news-may-be-small-focused-and-based-on-email/