ABSTRACT
It is no secret that local journalism is declining in the United States. The most recent numbers show that half of local journalists have lost their jobs in the last decade, and so-called news deserts are popping up around the country. Moreover, after nearly two decades of experimentation, no scalable business model for local online news has yet appeared. Thus, local journalism is in a deep crisis. Simply put, there is no for-profit business model that can sustain local and regional news organizations, at least not at a scale sufficient to allow them to serve a fully democratic purpose. Thus, if we believe that such journalism is crucial for the maintenance of democracy, as surely most of us do, it is time for us to support it via public subsidies, a radical idea but an idea whose time has arrived.
