The media landscape in the United States is increasingly grim. In recent weeks, thirty-three thousand news workers have lost their jobs or had their hours and pay slashed. Newspaper chains are going bankrupt as vulture capitalists pick over the remains. With advertising revenues decimated, local news outlets are hollowing out, silencing an important source of information when it’s needed most.

But it’s important to understand that commercial journalism, always prone to crisis, was collapsing long before COVID-19. The newspaper industry had already shed over 50 percent of its employees since the early 2000s. The virus, more an accelerant than a cause, simply kicked over a teetering edifice.

The underlying economics are simple, if often obscured. Advertising long provided what was essentially a subsidy for local journalism, a public good that typically can’t pay for itself. It was a lucrative arrangement for many publishers until news moved online, where digital ads pay only fractions of print advertising revenues, thus killing newspapers’ business model. Commercial alternatives like online paywalls have failed to rescue the vast majority of news outlets.