6 Depressing Reasons Your Local Newspaper Now Reads Like Buzzfeed

[Commentary] The week of March 21, two local newspapers in southern California were sold to the second-highest bidder after the US Department of Justice blocked the highest bidder, who they claimed would form a regional media monopoly. It sounds juicy even without all of the legal details, but this isn’t the most buzzworthy media news. It does, however, relay the state of local media in the context of 2016’s great media consolidation.

Don’t think about this news as a revelatory statement that “newspapers are dying.” Newspapers, mainly their brands, have cross-platform value even in the evolved media landscape. If it hasn’t already, your local media outlets have been forced to farm content from the same heap of viral nonsense that we see filling our newsfeeds every day. They can’t get away with publishing a copy of printed content to their desktop-only website and failing to capture the value of their brand’s reach. What exactly is happening to our local and regional papers and alternative zines? They are part of the media consolidation that has been widely referenced in 2016. In today’s media landscape, local news is becoming obsolete. The Facebook pages of your childhood television station or newspaper might look more like the generic Internet that bombards you every day, aggregating traffic by piggybacking trends.