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Way back when, it wasn\u2019t uncommon for small towns to have their own newspapers, filled with the stories and goings-on that mattered to people who lived there.\xa0\nPeter Rice has recreated that concept for the digital age and thinks this is the way more news outlets should operate.\xa0\n\u201cLocal news should be like a friend you enjoy catching up with occasionally. It should not be a helicopter parent that won\u2019t leave you alone, which is unfortunately the model ad-supported media have to use,\u201d says Rice, editor of the\xa0Downtown Albuquerque News. \u201cNewsletters are a kinder, gentler way to satisfy customers and make money.\u201d\xa0\nRice started his publication, affectionately called DAN, in the summer of 2019 after being \u201cinfuriated or angered at some point\u201d in the early 2000s about the decline of newspapers and \u201cthe almost self-immolation of the news business. I couldn\u2019t escape the suspicion that the business was not as hard as the industry was making it look. It was very clear it had to change.\u201d\xa0\nWhile newspapers went online, keeping their content free and hoping advertisers would come with them, Rice thought there had to be a better way, especially because \u201cthe overhead of the news business was about to go way down. Distributing digital media is about 3 percent of the cost of the old model, which literally involved loggers and truckers.\u201d\xa0\nWhy not just give people their local news, ask them to pay for it, and kick advertisers to the curb?\xa0\n\u201cIf these papers could convert even a third or a half of their subscriber base, which was already in the habit of paying for news, if they could just get them to continue paying for news in a different format, in retrospect we could\u2019ve avoided a lot of the carnage we\u2019ve seen in American newsrooms and all these news deserts that have been so depressing and threatening of self-government in general,\u201d he says.\xa0\nAnd that\u2019s how DAN started. \u2018It\u2019s. \u2018It\u2019s basically just a dead-simple business model that I thought they should\u2019ve been using all along. It is the old-fashioned business model, it\u2019s just very low overhead, because the technology takes out the printing and the ink and the distribution cost for the most part. What do you have when you have the old newspaper model with no advertising and no overhead? You\u2019ve got readers paying money for news.\u201d\nKeep up with the latest news about the It's All Journalism podcast, sign up for our weekly email newsletter. Also, listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, PodcastOne, Soundcloud, Audible, Amazon, or Stitcher.\xa0\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices