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The thing about the news business is that the product, for most people, is not very valuable. When I read the local, national or international news, I'm not doing so with an eye towards making some sort of investment that I expect to pay off for me at some point down the road. Sure, being informed is nice, but overall, it's as much about diversion as it is anything else. And so I'm not one to pony up for an online newspaper. I've thought about it, but generally, when I feel like paying for something, I'll buy a magazine from a bookstore. I prefer perpetual licenses to subscriptions that way. The upshot of this is that most news outlets rely on advertising to pay their bills. And that tends to mean clickbait.

What's interesting about this particular bit of clickbait is that the subtitle more or less immediately undermines it. While the top headline holds out the promise of a partisan fight, the subtitle is more in line with the article itself; it's not a pending Biden Administration that spells trouble for Coalstrip, Montana.

It's people like me.

I am, after all, one of the people who pays Puget Sound Energy to keep the lights on. (A job that they kind of suck at, to be perfectly honest.) And part of what is ailing Coalstrip is PSE's decision to accelerate the shutdown of two of the town's four production units. While I'm not a big environmental activist, I understand why a lot of people around here are. After all, the Sound is only a half-hour to forty-five minutes away from where I live. Coal might keep Coalstrip's doors open, but for a Puget Sound Area resident who is genuinely concerned about the prospect of sea level rise, renewables keep our feet dry. (Well, outside of the rainy season, anyway.) With both the Cascades and the Rockies between here and there, the sets of concerns are not the same. Coalstrip's mayor might have a valid reason to feel that PSE and other energy companies owe a softer landing to Coalstrip than what's being offered, but as one of the people who is going to wind up paying for it (after all, some of the "millions and millions" that he feels the company has made came from my payments), I'm a bit more dubious on what we owe them. After all, we paid them for their coal, presumably at a price high enough to allow for the "excellent schools, immaculate city parks and gleaming recreation facilities" the place boasts.

There's a lot more nuance there than "Could Biden's win doom this town?" suggests. And it all makes for an interesting read, especially for me, since I'm presumably a customer for the town's service. It's unfortunate that the BBC couldn't find something short that better directly carried the nuance that the caption hinted at. But that's the modern news business, it seems.