I'm a former journalist who had to leave the industry not because I didn't care for journalism anymore, but because newspapers lost their business model, and th

I'm a former journalist who had to leave the industry not because I didn't care for journalism anymore, but because newspapers lost their business model, and the industry remains a shadow of its former self. Whenever people ask me how I got into the technology industry (as a non-CS person), my short answer is something like this: when I saw what the Internet was doing to print media, I knew I had to learn how to code. Which led to having to learn how to design (CSS & JS). Which led to having to learn how to create servers for hosting and zero-downtime deploy. And also needing to understand machine capabilities and OSes and network loads and... etc. Journalism was what I loved in middle and high school: darkroom photography and developing pictures from literal film in stop bath. Cropping shots with razor blades before gluing them on mockups. Soliciting local businesses for ads sold by the square inch. Writing and editing and editing and editing because hey... once that hits the press there is no edit button. The process of traditional journalism is kind of dead, yes; though I don't think the industry itself has lost its business model... more like it fractured in a way that made national and world news dissemination way more powerful than the local yokel beat. That was what initially happened, anyway: small newspapers simply could not compete, and those that could were slurped up by massive parent companies that may or may not be entirely neutral or unbiased, politically, due to their size. However, I think the tides are starting to shift and the trend is back toward localization. My initial grand design plan for Ecosteader, for example, was big and national.. like a magazine. I realized that the kind of advertising I'd need to be able to sell in this niche would actually do best locally. And indeed, this is why I keep the site live (despite the fact that I have sold only one book and received zero dollars from Adsense). I am pretty sure that going forward the next "big" disruptive thing in will be in hyper-localization ... ecological and efficient when it comes to physical goods and labor. Anyway... slight digression, but I think it's indicative of what matters WRT to what people are willing to pay for when it comes to advertising delivered alongside content. Advertising works when people are looking for specific content relevant to them and they notice a good deal or a sale or a new store opening or something interesting about a place they see IRL. This is getting too long. I will stop now.