How much it would cost to rebuild local news to pre-collapse levels? Not much.

Here’s the deal: The sky is touching the ground and the birds are walking. We either fly the airplane, or we auger in. Like a lawn dart.

But local news can be restored for under five billion dollars a year.

That’s enough to put working reporters back in city halls, school board meetings, zoning hearings, and police briefings in roughly 1,400 daily newspaper markets across the country — physically in the room, taking notes, asking questions, creating a public record.

We’re already at minimums. We’re at decision height: 200 feet AGL on an ILS. We either have the runway or we don’t. In aviation you can go missed if you can’t see the approach lights. In civic life, there is no missed approach.

If nobody is in those rooms, money disappears, contracts move in the dark, police write their own version of events, kids get hurt, and there’s no record it ever happened. That’s how communities auger in.

But there is a permanent fix: A dedicated public-service endowment of roughly $120 billion would throw off on the order of six billion dollars a year, forever. That annual yield is enough to fund local reporters, public-service newsrooms and noncommercial broadcast coverage in every market in the country, every year, without having to beg billionaires, chase ad impressions or please a hedge fund.

That is the cost to keep self-government viable.

It is less than what this country casually wastes on things that do not keep anyone honest.

So what happened to newspapers — why did page count, page size and staffing all collapse at once?

It was not for a lack of readership. Readership today is higher than ever.

The collapse happened because advertising revenue disappeared.

Advertising had always carried most of the water for American newspapers going back to Ben Franklin. The quarter or fifty cents you handed over for your daily newspaper never came close to covering the real cost of reporting, printing and delivery. Advertising made up the difference.

But when local advertisers stopped buying newspaper ads and started buying targeted digital ads, the money that paid for journalists evaporated almost overnight.

Advertising did not vanish. Advertising migrated to the internet and left newspapers high and dry. Print-era revenue did not walk away. Revenue was re-routed to platforms that could micro-target and measure — something newspapers could never do.

In the heyday of newspapers, every one in every market got the same product. But as is often the case, one size does not fit all.

Once the money left, the newsroom salaries left, which meant watchdog coverage left. Communities were not abandoned by journalists. Communities were abandoned by an 18th-century business model.

A typical midsize daily paper in the healthy era had something like 80 newsroom professionals. Reporters on city government, schools, cops, courts, business, environment. Photographers. Copy editors. Designers. Informational graphic artists. Assignment editors. Section editors.

Today a lot of those same papers limp along with fewer that 20 people. You can feel the missing 60 heads in every public meeting where no reporter shows up and the only record of government is whatever the government posts about itself.

The goal is not to bring back the physical newspaper. The goal is to bring back the civic function of daily, local journalism.

You do not need 80 people to do that job in 2025. You need about 20 to 25.

Twenty to 25 full-time journalists is enough to blanket core beats in most communities: city hall, county board, schools, cops and courts, water and infrastructure, public money, health, housing, environment, business influence and basic accountability. You still need a few editors to say no, and a lawyer you can call and at least one person thinking about data and visuals.

Here’s the clean anchor for readers who need a north star on “how much is enough.”

Kahneman and Deaton’s Princeton study in 2010 showed that life evaluation keeps rising with income, but day-to-day emotional well-being flattens around $75,000 in 2010 dollars. Update that to today and you’re looking at roughly $111,000 in 2025 dollars. Call it the “enough to breathe” line — not luxury, just the point where money stress stops shouting over everything else.

Now map that to a working newsroom. A fully loaded reporter — salary plus benefits plus overhead — at about $120,000 a year sits just above that updated well-being threshold, which is exactly where it should be for serious public-service work.

Staff 25 people at that level and the math is $3,000,000 per market per year. Scale to roughly 1,400 markets and you land under $5 billion a year to put watchdogs back in the room across the country. That is not pie-in-the-sky. That is payroll meeting civic need.

That $5 billion is not fantasy. It’s merely payroll.

That number is also elastic in a sane way. Smaller communities do not need 25 people. A smaller city might need 10. A big metro might need 40. The model scales with population and complexity. The point is coverage density, not nostalgia for how fat the paper used to feel. Even if you flex staff counts by market size, the national spend still sits under five billion dollars per year.

Now, what work are those people actually doing?

For decades, most daily newspapers shipped four sections.

A section: national and world news plus opinion
B section: local news
C section: sports
D section: features and lifestyle

A typical 32-page daily paper often meant four eight-page sections because presses requried balance. At 25,000 to 50,000 papers printed per hour, a three-story, out-of-balance press would tear itself apart.

The press run was locked to physical multiples, not civic need. So readers got eight pages of local and 24 pages of coverage they can now get elsewhere, often for free.

Here is the important part. The A section (national and world) is already covered at scale by The New York Times, which employs around 1,700 journalists and roughly 5,800 to 5,900 total employees focused on nonstop national and global coverage. A metro daily cannot out-report that national machine, nor does it have to.

The C section (sports) is now wall-to-wall entertainment. ESPN, Bleacher Report and in-house team media blast sports updates twenty-four hours a day. Local cops and zoning boards do not get that treatment. Local can be replaced only by Local.

The D section (features) was lifestyle, entertainment, restaurant writeups, home decorating tips, the horoscope, comics and puzzles. All of that exists everywhere now for free. None of that holds the mayor accountable.

Take away national. Take away sports. Take away features, including the comics and crossword and Sudoku. What is left is the only thing a community cannot get anywhere else: local news.

Kill A section. Kill C section. Kill D section. Keep B section. When you do that, workload drops by roughly three quarters. The only remaining mission is watchdog coverage of public power and public money. The job gets narrower and more serious, not broader and cuter.

Now let’s talk production.

The 1995 newsroom had copy editors whose job it was to clean grammar, fix typos, enforce style and catch risky wording. AI can already handle first-pass cleanup on typos, clarity, tense drift and even basic defamation risk. Human editors are still essential for fairness, sourcing and legal sign-off. You still need judgment. But you do not need a full copy desk in every town just to publish a school board vote story.

The 1995 newsroom also carried designers and graphics editors whose job was to pour stories, headlines and photos into daily page layouts that had to match the physical press. None of that labor has to exist in a digital-only civic model.

Digital presentation can run on a tight, intentional template system.

But today’s one-size-fits-all online templates do not work, because a sleepy Tuesday with three routine council updates is not the same as an industrial fire, a derailment or a mayor in handcuffs.

So the model is a library of about ten core layouts, pre-built. I built such a template more than 20 years ago for the Observer-Reporter, in Washington, PA:

Quiet day template for slow news cycles where you lead with one solid accountability story and two service updates.
Normal day template for a steady mix of beats: schools, city hall, crime, money.
Crisis template for extraordinary days when one story dominates the entire community. On those days you need one live page with running updates, maps, emergency numbers, safety guidance, legal context, budget documents and public comment. All in one place, not scattered.

Those templates carry hierarchy, typography, live update modules and service callouts. Reporters, photographers, info graphic artists and editors plug content into the right template and publish in minutes.

No custom front page design sprint. No 2 a.m. layout panic. No wasting headcount on building pretty shells for wire copy and lifestyle fluff. All the money goes to reporters, photographers, informational graphic artists with oversight from editors.

At this point the model is clear:

Hire 20 to 25 journalists whose only job is to cover local power
Drop national, sports and features (including comics and puzzles)
Publish in focused templates built for service, not ego.
Spend about $3M per market
Scale newsroom size up or down by market size
Do it in about 1,400 markets
Land under five billion dollars per year

Now connect that to Wall Street.

Who writes the check, and why would any public company do it and not get crucified by shareholders?

Let’s do the numbers:

Apple today is worth about $3.0 trillion in market cap. Microsoft is worth about $2.8 trillion. Alphabet (Google) is worth about $2.1 trillion dollars.

When a company is worth multiple trillions, a one percent stock move is not trivia. A one percent move for Apple right now is roughly $30 billion in market value. To get that number you take Apple’s market cap — about $3,005,779,833,320 — and multiply by 0.01, which equals about $30,057,798,333.

A two percent move is about $60 billion. A four percent move is about $120 billion dollars. If you multiply $3,005,779,833,320 by 0.04 you get roughly $120,231,193,333.

Now remember the newsroom budget. The newsroom budget is under five billion dollars a year.

And here is the math the board cares about. Apple is a four trillion dollar company. A routine two to four percent up move in stock price is worth roughly eighty to one hundred sixty billion dollars in added market value.

Out of that kind of lift, carving off about $4.2 billion a year to fully restore local watchdog reporting in almost every city in America is a rounding error.

In plain English: one decent Wall Street day pays for the First Amendment forever.

A four percent move would be worth about $120 billion — more than twenty times the cost. Microsoft and Alphabet have the same basic physics, just off slightly smaller or larger baselines.

Is a two to four percent move realistic? Yes.

We have already seen Apple move 4 to 7 percent in a single day when the market believes Apple has strengthened or weakened its long-term technology position.

Example one. June 11–12, 2024. Apple shows its AI hand:

At WWDC 2024 Apple unveils Apple Intelligence, an on-device plus private-cloud generative AI layer wired straight into iPhone, iPad and Mac, plus a reboot of Siri meant to make Siri act less like a voice remote and more like a reasoning assistant.

Investors read that as Apple planting a defensible flag in core AI that runs on Apple’s own silicon and operating systems. Apple stock jumped about 7 percent the next trading day and closed at a record high above $200 a share, adding on the order of $180 to $200 billion in market value in one session.

Analysts called it one of the biggest single-day value gains in U.S. market history.

Example two. January 21, 2025. Apple gets hit:

Multiple analysts downgrade Apple and warn publicly that Apple is falling behind rivals in core AI — smarter assistants, on-device intelligence, integrated reasoning — and also flag soft iPhone demand.

Apple falls more than 4 percent in a single session. The selloff is driven by fear that Apple’s foundational AI stack and long-term moat are weaker than Microsoft and Google, not just by “this quarter’s iPhone number.”

Example three. August 6, 2025:

Apple stands next to the White House and commits another $100 billion to U.S. manufacturing and AI infrastructure, bringing its total U.S. pledge to roughly $600 billion over four years.

Apple frames it as locking down domestic chip production and AI server capacity so future devices and AI compute can be built in the United States without getting kneecapped by tariffs or geopolitics.

Investors see that as Apple protecting the supply of next-generation silicon and AI compute inside U.S. borders. Apple stock jumps roughly 5 percent on relief that Apple just showed how it will control its own pipeline.

All three days tell the same story. The market did not react to how many blue phones Apple could sell that weekend. The market reacted to whether Apple looked like it could own the next layer of infrastructure — AI layer, assistant layer, silicon layer, supply chain layer.

And Microsoft has a similar story: July 31, 2025 — up about 8%

Microsoft made more money than expected from AI and cloud, and showed Wall Street how much it plans to spend on data centers and chips to keep that going. Stock jumped roughly 8% that day. This is the easiest contemporary comp for “AI plus strategic narrative = big move.”

And here is Google”s story: October 30, 2025–up 5%

Google/Alphabet said it made $100 billion in three months for the first time. Ads did better than expected. Cloud did better than expected. YouTube did better than expected. Investors said, OK, AI is actually helping the business, so we’re not scared of the big spending coming in 2025. The stock jumped almost 5 percent after the news.

Now connect that behavior to local news.

If Apple — or Microsoft, or Alphabet — stood up and said:

We are permanently funding local reporting in roughly 1,400 U.S. communities. We are paying professional reporters to sit in the rooms where your money is being spent. We are guaranteeing that public meetings will be watched and documented. We are publishing in clean civic templates built for service, not fluff. We are doing it with an AI memory layer that keeps institutional knowledge over time without leaking private data or rewriting quotes. We are doing it because trust is part of our brand.

The funding source is not tax dollars or philanthropy. It is a carveout from governance IP revenue owed by the platforms and infrastructure operators that adopt the safe and governed AI I’ve filed to patent to reduce their regulatory and fiduciary exposure.

When they license it, they pay an access fee. A fixed share of that access fee is directed into a permanent, independently administered endowment for local news. In other words, the AI systems that create new risk also fund the civic infrastructure that keeps the public informed about that risk.

Wall Street would not hear charity. Wall Street would hear moat.

And Wall Street would hear regulatory insulation. And Wall Street would hear political cover. And Wall Street would hear reputational dominance in trust and civic legitimacy — something no rival can copy overnight.

We know that because Wall Street already hands out 4, 5, even 7 percent pops when it believes Apple has locked in future control of the stack.

And here is the math the board cares about: a routine two to four percent up-move in stock price could mint tens of billions of dollars in added market value, which easily covers the roughly $4.2 billion dollars a year it would take to fully restore local watchdog reporting to almost every city in this country.

In plain English:

One of the richest companies on Earth could buy back American local journalism, fund it forever and still walk away richer at the closing bell.

We have the skill. All we need is the will.

I feel compelled to say the following words. Words that I’ve said before. Because they bear repeating.

These words are not mine; the belong to Thomas Jefferson:

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

My name is Alan Jacobson. I'm a web developer, UI designer and AI systems architect. I have 13 patents pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office—each designed to prevent the kinds of tragedy you can read about here.

I want to license my AI systems architecture to the major LLM platforms—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, Co‑Pilot, Apple Intelligence—at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Collectively, those companies are worth $15.3 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T—twice the annual budget of the government of the United States. What I’m talking about is a rounding error to them.

With those funds, I intend to stand up 1,400 local news operations across the United States to restore public safety and trust. You can reach me here.