You call it “lazy,” I call it time management. No one has the time or intellectual bandwidth to respond to all the deeply stupid comments on the Internet, so downvotes give us a quick and easy to register our opinion and move on.

In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can’t operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.

Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?

The answer is that it’s not there at all, and that’s why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.

If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.

This is because the Internet killed journalism’s revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn’t get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it’s just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.

One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don’t.

That’s fair.

I keep forgetting that there are people who still use cash.