A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

The success of relevant commercial messages attached to search illustrates the
difference between advertising as an interruption of the user experience vs. an
improvement of it. Opportunities for local news operations include systems to enable
targeted ad buys by small advertisers as well as networks equipping local news
operations to benefit from linking national advertisers to specific groups of local
consumers.
Among the risky realities of local news is the extent to which its future rides on the
future of advertising. That’s true not so much because of links between the two, but
because, for better or worse, advertising remains the most important source of revenue
for news.
There was a time—scholars describe it as the period of “accidental prosperity” that
aligned advertising messages with news reports over the past century or so—when
journalists could be assured of sufficient revenue simply by assembling sufficient
audiences. Rick Hirsch, online editor of The Miami Herald, recalls the now outdated
notion “that if you got reach, you’d get revenue.” 84
When advertising was seen as a way of interrupting readers or viewers with a
commercial message—as engagingly and inoffensively as possible, of course—reach was
especially critical. But the opportunity to pitch a product or service to someone already
searching for something related changes the game dramatically.
Of $23.4 billion spent by advertisers online in 2008, 44 percent was spent on search‐
related ads. That compares with 33 percent for traditional display ads. 85
Bob Garfield, the AdAge columnist and host of On the Media, says the trend toward
search ads is easy to understand. “Search is contextual, measurable and information‐
rich…and captures shoppers in the process of shopping,” he says in his 2009 book, The
Chaos Scenario. 86
“In a connected world, ads are a kind of crude and clumsy means of creating
relationships with consumers,” he points out. “After all, people may not much care for
commercials, but they like goods and services just fine and are in constant search of
information about them…Oddly, in its obsession with not repelling audiences,
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