You are 100% right. However, I personally think it is worse than that. Let's just say that local papers found some new feature (no idea what) that could fund local journalism. Do we think the money would be spent to create great journalism or would the money just be taken as profit by posting social media snippets as "news"? I fear that in this post truth world that we don't even have enough people that value the creation of journalism. Most just want to score internet points and get online ad revenue from talking nonsense on their daily podcast. And we've seen that sowing dissent is far far more profitable than creating journalism.

I work adjacent to an online publication business and freelancers are getting ~$750 for a 1500 word article. I don't know how you get actual journalism at that price. Increasingly we're just going to get people dropping concepts into GPT and editing whatever comes back for 30 minutes. I fear that the only way out would be a single one of the dozens of billionaires to step up and donate a self-sustaining grant towards long term journalism excellence. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have shown that they don't care about the world and just want to make their number go up at any cost necessary.