Matthew Prince

It just didn't work otherwise.

And so, like, again, we bought the newspaper, not because we thought it was a great business, but because we thought local news matters.

And what you want to do in order to support a community is actually have sources of information that people can trust.

And the only KPI that we measured, it wasn't around financials or anything else, the only KPI we measured was voter turnout.

And voter turnout, the election right before we bought the paper, was at 23%.

The last election, which was an off-cycle, non-presidential election, it was 63%.

And the only thing that changed was we actually covered like the election a lot better and covered candidates and things because people don't like to vote if they don't feel like they know what's going on.

And so I'm really proud of that.

What's been interesting, though, is I think that this year we may make more at the park record.

off AI licensing deals, which don't require micropayments or anything else.

Those are like one-off deals with AI companies.

Then we do off digital advertising.

Why?

Because it turns out that local news is exactly what the AI companies want.

Like if you go to chat GPT and you say, hey, I'm planning a vacation to Park City, Utah.

What's the best new restaurant?

If you don't have the information from the park record, you cannot answer that question.

And so actually more local news is more valuable.

Compare that

with like the New York Times versus the Wall Street Journal.