"Small" means what?

Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents.

Several dozen radio networks.

Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow.

The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper.

I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services.

And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.)

That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market.

I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive.

I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.

> It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels.

Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom.

Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.)

It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction.

I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.