Welcome to Axis Pro Radha, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

Sponsored by AT&T. I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, the rise of the Uber Mafia in what Blue Apron got very, very wrong.

But first, what might be the highly exaggerated death of local media? Now, the New York Daily News yesterday made headlines for laying off

around half of its newsroom, including every single one of its staff photographers. And this

happened just hours after it was officially acquired by

Trunk, which some of you might know is Tribune Publishing. Now, for anyone who lives in New York

City or believes in the value of holding local officials accountable, it was a very depressing

development. It even caused the rival New York Post to write, and I quote, we sincerely hope the

remaining staff can find a way to turn things around. We want to beat the

news, but not like this. Now, on the upside, it does seem that the new owners forgot to change the

Daily News's social media account passwords, so there was some pretty good shade thrown, although,

sadly, most of that since been deleted, luckily screenshoted by a few people. But the fact that

a big city daily is struggling isn't the surprise here.

After all, that's something that's been happening since the early days of Monster.com and Craigslist

and really the internet, which cannibalize the classified advertising that things like the news

used to rely on. But what might surprise you, and definitely surprises me as someone who briefly

ran a local paper at the dawn of the

internet age is that you are getting an actual uptick right now in local news all online. There's a

trade group and it's called the local independent online news publishers or lion and it reports

that its membership has doubled, doubled in the past year, thanks to both

the surge of startups and also some print papers who are finally, belatedly, moving online.

Now, I'm still not entirely sold on the business models here, but I'm incredibly grateful

...