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I am reminded of all the enthusiasm which greeted the launch of broadcast news. I am also reminded of the probably apocryphal story of Louis B. Meyer describing the potential of talking pictures to Albert Einstein. Telling the famed physicist that soon movie film would contain technology for transmitting sound at the same time as images, Einstein is said to have asked, "The same time?" In response, Meyer said, "Yes, the exact same time!" to which Einstein responded, "It won't work." What Einstein knew and Meyer did not is that light and visual images travel much faster than sound. Sounds must be recorded and played back slightly in advance of the images, otherwise they will not align.

The Compass Experiment failed because it cannot work, not because distant news networks do not work as well as adjacent ones, but because local Internet news media will always fail. Print news is pushed and arrayed. Electronic media is pulled and sequential. Print news has inverse referencing (you can refer back to a story or an advertisement at will) and electronic media almost never does...once it's gone from the screen, it is difficult, if not impossible to easily retrieve. This means that local electronic media can never attract enough viewers, and can never aggregate the audience necessary to turn an audience into customers. If you want to do local news, the only viable option is ink on paper. Nothing else works or ever will work.