The weekly papers do well here. No garbage just straight local news.
If someone had a national app for obituaries by town, county and state there would be no local daily paper.
Leftist billionare boyfriend of Chellie Pingree just bought a number of Maine daily papers. I imagine that the papers will tank further.
The only thing that props up local weeklies is the government-paid legal ads. Pull that stuff and they go under, too.
In the founding era, most newspapers were weeklies. There were some which didnt have a deadline at all, and just went to press when the printer was good and ready!The Associated Press changed that by producing/distributing a continuous stream of news from around the country and the world. Thus, the newspapers stopped being about the opinions of their printers and became about so-called hard news.
Around here, we have reasonably good quality, entertaining, informative local papers, tabloid format, which are distributed FREE and make ALL their revenue off advertising.
So what's so hard about the newspaper bidness?