A great Q&A between the Awl and Jonathan Austin, co-founder of the Yancy County News, which has won two major awards in its first year of existence, the E.W. Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. 

At one point, the New York Times went a route that meant abandoning the regional newspapers. You can’t predict the future, but I trace it to when they bought the Boston Globe. They were wanting to lock up the advertising corridor of the US Northeast. At the same time, they were working on buying the Boston Globe they had the opportunity buy what had been the Multimedia Newsgroup, which was a wide-ranging capital city grouping but they let Gannett get that. Can you predict the future? No, but they rolled the dice buying the Globe for a billion, and I think they may not have had the great payoff they had hoped for. As a result, I think that the regional papers suffer.

If you’re interested in journalism, this is a super read.