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The truth about local, state and national media is this: the industry isn’t in decline, it’s in collapse.
The gatekeepers of legacy outlets are still asked to “save the ship,” but they’ve been handed a vessel that’s already half-submerged, taking on water faster than they can bail. Without revenue, nothing works. Nothing.
You can reshuffle anchors, rename mastheads, or sprinkle a few “digital innovation” buzzwords in the boardroom, but the reality doesn’t change: the dollars are gone, the trust is gone, the audience has moved on.
Television newsrooms are the clearest example. The formula hasn’t changed in decades: a couple of crime reports, a human-interest puff piece, weather teased ten times an hour, and a kicker about a dog finding its way home.
The product is tired, and the audience knows it. Viewership has cratered, advertisers have fled, and the stations run on fumes. Once upon a time, the 10 o’clock news was appointment television. Now it’s background noise, something you leave on while scrolling your phone for the news.
Radio isn’t faring better. What used to be the soundtrack of a community — local voices, trusted talk shows, the heartbeat of a town — has turned into an endless rotation of national feeds, gossip chatter, and ad blocks that feel longer than the songs themselves.
People can get their playlists from Spotify or Apple, their news alerts from Twitter, and their weather from a free app. Why sit through 12 minutes of car dealer commercials and DJs pretending to laugh at each other’s jokes? The medium hasn’t just lost relevance; it’s lost its soul.
Newspapers? They’re a shell of what they once were. The print editions show up two, maybe three times a week. They’re thinner than the circulars stuffed inside them. The veterans who once gave them authority are gone, replaced by younger, cheaper staffers — talented but inexperienced, and rarely rooted in the communities they cover.
They’re not lifers, they’re ladder-climbers, punching their ticket in Duluth or Rochester before aiming for Minneapolis or Chicago. And readers can smell it. They know when the voice doesn’t sound like it comes from here. They know when the storytelling is generic. They know when a reporter’s here long enough to update the résumé.
Consumers aren’t loyal anymore, and why should they be? The loyalty contract between communities and their local media has been broken, replaced by a strongly eyeballs-supported buffet of blogs, Twitter threads, Facebook groups, Substack newsletters, and TikTok videos.
People will still devour news — but they’ll do it on their terms, from the sources that sound like them, that live among them, that don’t feel like outsiders parachuting in to collect quotes.
Hyper-local blogs, independent sports pages, neighborhood reporters — they’re the ones drawing eyeballs daily, because they tell the stories that matter to the audience that matters.
The paywall? Forget it. Nobody wants to pay $9.99 monthly to read warmed-over copy they can get for free elsewhere. Readers laugh at the “Subscribe Local News, Now!” pop-ups, close the tab, and check Facebook and Twitter for the same headline.
Legacy outlets haven’t realized it yet, but their insistence on charging for an inferior product has only accelerated the audience exodus. It’s not that people won’t pay for news — they just won’t pay for that news.
Advertising, the lifeblood of the business, isn’t coming back.
I’ll never forget the longtime local advertiser who told me, years before COVID-19, “I’m moving all of our spending to Facebook. That’s where my customers are.”
He said it with such confidence you’d think he was announcing a merger. He expected immediate results, even joked he might need to hire additional staff the next morning to handle all the new customers responding to a single Facebook post. That was the mentality then, and it’s only hardened now.
Why spend thousands on a print ad or radio spot when you can micro-target on Facebook for pennies? Businesses don’t just think they’re saving money — they think they’re getting better results.
That shift in mentality is the nail in the coffin. The economy could roar back tomorrow, consumer spending could surge, and businesses still wouldn’t shovel their ad dollars back into the legacy media furnace. The habits have changed. The ad budgets are gone.
The advertisers aren’t coming back. And without advertising, there is no model. Full stop.
So what’s left? Scraps. Media outlets are fighting tooth and nail for the crumbs, slicing and dicing their content into smaller portions to stay in the game.
But a big ship can’t survive on crumbs. Legacy TV stations, metro dailies, regional radio networks — they were built on the feast of big ad buys, and now they’re starving. More right-sizing is inevitable. More layoffs, consolidation, and hollow promises of “efficiency” and “digital reinvention.” It’s the same hymn, sung by a smaller and smaller choir.
Meanwhile, the independents — the bloggers, the hyper-locals, the loudmouths with day jobs who still cover school board meetings at night — are thriving.
They don’t need massive budgets or a Madison Avenue sales team. They need a laptop, a social feed, and a voice. And they’ve got readers — more than ever.
Because the truth is, people crave local news. They crave authenticity. They crave a voice that actually sounds like their community. And they’ll take it from a blogger in his basement before taking it from a corporate newsroom 200 miles away.
The State of Minnesota Media? It’s the obituary nobody wants to write but everyone already knows. Legacy outlets are bleeding out. Paywalls are a joke. Advertisers have left the building. Consumers have moved on.
And the only voices that still carry weight are the hyper-locals, the independents, the ones who refuse to let their towns go silent. That’s where the future is. That’s where the trust is. That’s where the eyeballs and ears are.
And no rebrand, paywall, or quarterly reorg will ever change that.
