Thursday 25th July: California's news industry is in steep decline. Here's what is at stake

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We only have a handful of these daily newsletters left, so it’s only right that we use this space to highlight some solutions to the biggest issues facing the news industry. After all, that’s been our raison d'etre since we began Media Voices, and — let’s face it — despite the best efforts of so many people, these issues aren’t going away any time soon.

This collection of articles from the LA Times sets out both the scale of the problem and some of the cynical ways in which the powerful are taking advantage of it: “Richmond is now a laboratory for online journalism startups, including the one owned by Chevron, whose massive refinery looms over the city and has been the focus of ongoing concerns over toxic emissions.”

As you’d expect, there’s also a lot of attention given over to the proposals that platforms like Google and Facebook pay directly for news. Our take on that — that direct payments from platforms for news is a horrible idea that wilfully misinterprets where value originates online and will only benefit the biggest media businesses — is also something we’ve spoken about many times over the past few years of the daily newsletter. And, just as these issues aren’t going away any time soon, we can’t see this argument disappearing soon either.

Too often the bean-counters (as Peter loves to call them) forget that journalism is the product, not a by-product. At the same time elder journalists are very often stuck in their ways to the point that the medium doesn’t evolve, compounding the problem. In this listicle for journalism.co.uk Jacob Granger takes a look at some fresh new news formats that buck the established expectations.

I was going to go back and check how many thousands of words I’d written over the past few years about the deprecation of the third-party cookie, what it meant for publishers, and what the mooted replacements were going to be. But honestly I just laughed and laughed and laughed. A total time waste that’s taken millions of man-hours, all for naught. It’s a brilliant prank.

Look, this might seem like a trifling thing on the face of it. Reddit — despite all its investments in making itself look professional — is still a bit of a distant destination on the internet. But this is another indication that the splinternet is on its way, and that publishers are going to have to adapt to yet another upheaval in the topology of the internet.

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