Is there a big difference between local and national news coverage when it comes to the future of news?

It's hard to be totally certain about anything related to the future of news. But if there's one thing we can say with some degree of confidence, it is that national (and even international) news organizations and brands will probably be more economically successful than local or regional news outlets. It is more likely that the New York Times will be around in twenty years than many local newspapers. From the closure of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009; to the slashing of home delivery and even the number of days per week the newspaper is printed for distribution in cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Cleveland; to the bankruptcy of large regional chains like Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, the Journal Register Company, the Tribune Company, and Sun Media Group, regional news organizations have been decimated in ways that their more global counterparts have not.

But why should this be? Hasn't the Internet made it easier to give consumers of information exactly what they want to watch or read in a targeted fashion? Why aren't local and regional news outlets looking at a bright future? One answer might be that local news websites aren't "sticky" enough. Local news websites account for only 15% of all news traffic on the web, with 85% going to national news sites; in terms of entire web traffic, local news counts for one-half of one percent. As one media scholar aptly put it, "local newspaper traffic is just a rounding error on the larger web." What's even worse is that local news websites still aren't doing a lot of the things their larger national rivals are doing—their web pages load slowly, they often look terrible and are awful to navigate, they are loaded with obnoxious advertisements, and they aren't personalized. These days, national news websites also test out different story headlines simultaneously in order to see which one will draw the most readers—what people in the industry call "A/B testing." Local news sites rarely do testing of this kind.

There are at least four other explanations for the relative dearth of local media success, beyond the very real fact that many of their websites are terrible. It is possible that national and international brands will simply continue to have a larger readership (or potential readership) and can thus command higher advertising rates on the open market. Related to this, it is also possible that the differences between advertising rates have more to with the demographic characteristics of New York Times and Wall Street Journal readers—distributed over a larger potential pool of readers, these companies can more easily target their content to the most valuable audiences. A third explanation might be that global and national news companies like the Times and Washington Post are family-owned and have thus been able to stand up to the vicissitudes of the turbulent journalism market.

The fourth and final explanation is the most seductively simple, but we need to be aware that even here there is contradictory and confusing information. Maybe people simply care more about national and international news. When the hyperlocal news organization Patch shut down most of its operations in late 2013, one of the reasons offered for its failure was that people simply didn't care about local news; they care far more about events in the Middle East than events at a local Middle Eastern restaurant. But the data is unclear. Perhaps Patch folded not because people don't care about local news, but because it was poorly designed and poorly run. Perhaps, in fact, people only care about international news when they understand how it relates to their local circumstances. Maybe people care about international news more when they see how it relates to their daily lives.

Even if that's the case, though, it doesn't help us answer our question: Why are local news websites having such a tough time? A final interesting data point lies in what we might call the "nationalization" of the American news business. Forty years ago, there were many strong regional newspapers, and a few upper tier regional papers that had national ambitions— the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and perhaps the Chicago Tribune or the Philadelphia Inquirer. But the United States, unlike the United Kingdom or France, did not have a tradition of powerful national print news outlets. Our newspaper journalism was, like our politics, federalized.

All of that has changed in the past twenty years. Now there is indeed an unquestionably national newspaper that dominates the American journalism market: the New York Times. The Washington Post continues to have national ambitions. And even formerly foreign papers, like the Guardian in the United Kingdom, have tried to carve out a US national niche for themselves. The trends in the American new business seem to be toward increasing nationalization and even internationalization. And now that national news is readily found elsewhere, it's possible that citizens are less eager for the newspaper and have what seem to be reasonable substitutes—news acquired from friends, from neighbors, or even from local TV news. None of these explanations exclude any of the others, of course. And it may simply be that there is a greater diversity in business and organizational structure among news outlets with a national or global focus. But whatever the explanation, how we discuss "the future of journalism" depends a lot on what kind of journalism we are talking about—particularly whether it covers local, national, or international events.