Apple News Is Winning
A few weeks ago, my local newspaper sold its operations to Hearst. The transaction was widely viewed by the community as a death sentence for the family-run operation with a 120-year history. As a sign of the times, the transaction meant my local paper would now be available in Apple News+ given Hearst’s existing arrangement with Apple. While it may feel like there aren’t many surprises left to uncover in the news industry, my local paper shows how we are probably still underestimating legacy media’s collapse. Apple News is looking like the right product at the right time to take advantage of such industry turmoil.
My local paper was not immune to the pressures and headwinds brought on by the digital era. Losing classifieds and advertising revenue to Facebook has been a decades-long development that no news publisher has an answer for. My local paper was able to survive, or so it seemed as recently as last month, by cost cutting and a willingness to make little to no profit. Behind closed doors, the paper was on a slow drift into irrelevancy. While digital distribution issues kneecapped the newspaper’s future, the slow brain drain caused the paper to implode from within. Writer and journalist quality was on a steady decline, leading to incorrect and biased reporting that didn’t capture hyper-localized issues and trends. If my local paper couldn’t even figure out how to satisfy that news niche, there wasn’t a reason for it to exist.
As frustrations with my local paper grew, my Apple News usage began to skyrocket.
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