How Ads Killed the News (And Themselves)
Turns Out Clickbait Isn’t a Business Model
Community Journalism Is the Last Ad Platform Standing
Your Local Paper’s Dead. Your Web’s a Dumpster. Here’s the Good News.
You’re not imagining it. The newspaper’s gone, the web is broken, and your digital ad budget is going up in smoke. CPMs are up, attention is down, and the only people making money are hedge funds and click fraud farms.
But there's a way out. It starts with turning the attention economy off and turning storytelling back on.
The Long, Slow Death of the News Business
Let’s start where the rot began.
In the early 20th century, newspapers were a hybrid business: they served readers but got rich off advertisers. For a while, it worked. Ads funded investigative journalism, classifieds paid for city hall beat writers, and the separation of church and state (editorial and sales) was real.
Then came Craigslist. Then came Google and Facebook. The subsidy vanished. In a two-decade freefall, newspapers lost more than 70% of their ad revenue. From 2005 to 2022, over 2,500 newspapers shut down in the U.S. aloneWhat Works in Community….
Hedge funds like Alden Global Capital filled the void, gutting local newsrooms and calling it efficiency. (The History of …. Want a taste of how that went? Gannett laid off more people in one day than the combined staff of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. What Works in Community….
📘 Read Hedged on Amazon 📘 Read What Works in Community News on Amazon
The Web Went Rotten, Too
While newspapers imploded, Big Tech exploded—and took your attention with it. “Enshittification” isn’t just a meme. It’s the cycle Cory Doctorow nailed: platforms lure users in, extract maximum value for shareholders, and leave a wasteland behind.
AdTech is now a trillion-dollar magic trick. It doesn’t work. Tim Hwang, in Subprime Attention Crisis, shows the entire digital ad market is built on bad data, fake clicks, and theater dashboardsSubprime Attention Cris….
Facebook and Google take two-thirds of all digital ad revenue while serving you...what exactly? Inflated impressions, auto-play videos, and content optimized for rage. Not results.
📘 Read Subprime Attention Crisis on Amazon 📘 Read The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu on Amazon
Ads Are Dead. Long Live the Story.
Even if your ad lands in front of a real human, it probably won’t matter. Banner blindness is real. People skip, mute, scroll, and block. Less than 0.1% of users click banner ads todaySubprime Attention Cris….
So what works? Stories.
Storytelling doesn’t depend on tracking pixels. It builds memory, trust, and emotion—the holy trinity of brand value. As Robert McKee puts it in Storynomics, “Story-driven marketing doesn’t interrupt. It engages.”Storynomics_ 1 - Robert…
📘 Read Storynomics on Amazon 📘 Read The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr on Amazon
Mercury Local: Where the Web Didn’t Go to Die
At StrollingBallantyne.com and The Charlotte Mercury, we didn’t build a click farm. We built a community-first newsroom powered by original reporting and value-driven sponsorships.
What does that mean for businesses? It means you’re not buying “impressions.” You’re telling your story—through branded profiles, email features, newsletter shoutouts, and SEO-rich content crafted for humans, not bots.
Explore our packages:
🌿 Community Partner Package – $149/month
🚀 Premier Growth Package – $299/month
🏆 Executive Thought Leadership Package – $599/month
All privacy-first. All locally written. All story, no surveillance.
This Isn’t a Manifesto. It’s a Lifeboat.
We’re not promising to “revolutionize” digital media. We’re just trying to clean up the mess.
If you’re tired of paying Facebook to show your ad to your competitor, or Google to place it next to conspiracy content, or a hedge fund to hollow out your hometown—join us.
You don’t need better data. You need a better story.
– Nell Thomas Senior Writer, Strolling Ballantyne Still manually approving every sponsored story like it’s 2003. 📬 Advertise with us |