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> In fact, I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all.

As a young (21yr) person in my community, I have to say I have never read through a full local newspaper and don't know a single friend my age or younger who has. The local news channels have websites these days and I would say those, in combination with local public radio, television channels, and even social media are the main source for local news in my town (for my demographic at least).

I personally don't feel a lack of community due to the fact that this news comes from my computer monitor instead of ink on some rolled up paper, but then again I never really lived in an era when I got to experience that.

It's not that the information comes digitally versus in deadtree format. The problem is the destruction of local news, period, which means that you're going to get less of it even in digital formats.

As someone from the last generation born without ubiquitous web, the biggest difference for me is the definition of community.

Now, a community is whoever you want it to be. Folks who play the same game you do. People who hate rocks. People who think purple hair is awesome. People who think purple hair is stupid and red hair is awesome.

The people may live next to you, or they may live in another country.

Previously, all these people who made up your community were in your town, by necessity. Because of that, you pretty much rolled the random dice and that's who you interacted with.

Gain (present vs past) -- being able to find a community that's similar to you. Especially if you don't identify with the norm (imagine being the only person you knew who thought computers were cool). Much more rapid dissemination of ideas and social mores.

Loss -- forced mixing of and interaction with different groups. Exposure to new ideas and different perspectives. Identification with people who aren't like you (but are still "one of us", i.e. from the same town)

I think encouraging local communities is pretty important for the functioning of a town. You can circumvent the tragedy of the commons a bit if the person keeping the parks clean isn't some rando, but it's Bob from down the street who bakes those great cakes for the local potlucks and the police officer isn't just someone waiting for an opportunity to shoot your dog, but the mother of your kids classmate.

> Identification with people who aren't like you (but are still "one of us", i.e. from the same town)

This. I miss that, on a small and large scale.

There's an even bigger one on the loss. In my opinion the phenomena you're describing is related to the rise in groupthink. The problem is as people create communities based around shared ideology, it means that people can be effectively 'exiled' from that community if they say something that may be interpreted as going against that ideology. If your community is defined by shared location, then nothing you can say or do changes that. I think this community from ideology makes people afraid to say what they actually think, for fear that it could unravel their created community connections. There are some major parallels here to how cults sustain themselves, but in this case we've done it entirely to ourselves!

I don't think that's true at all; people were and are often shunned and ostracized by their local community for ideological reasons. Sure, they often can't literally kick you out, but they can and do make your life miserable if you don't fall in line, or at least keep your mouth shut.

> as people create communities based around shared ideology, it means that people can be effectively 'exiled' from that community if they say something that may be interpreted as going against that ideology. If your community is defined by shared location, then nothing you can say or do changes that.

Small towns are historically far worse for ideological conformance, because once you're ostracized you're stuck.

Community doesn't translate to small town. The reason community would be constrained to your 'town' was a matter of geographic distance. Community is whoever you were surrounded by, and who you interacted with was more or less random. People would end up making friends, often good friends, with others even when they had deeply differing views. Of course had they known the views of the person they were talking to ahead of time, they may well not have even been willing to give them the time of day. Now a days people are able to get that knowledge ahead of time, and it's resulted in this trend towards social homogeneity. And I think there's a very strong argument to be made that that homogeneity is really the source of so many of the social ills of today.

It doesn't make that much of a difference whether you read it on screen or on paper. Still, someone has to write it.

I used to consume news the same way you do when I was your age, but now that I'm entering my 30s I consume a lot more local news. I want to feel updated about what happens in the local schools (by far most of that is regulated and budgeted on the local level) not only to know about whether or not this is a good community for raising kids but I also want to feel informed if my colleagues who have kids are affected by something. Same thing with elderly care, public transportation, local business news, and real estate projects. This stuff affects me more profoundly when I'm trying to build a career, raise kids, find a permanent home, and worry about my parents being taken care of as they get noticeably older and weaker. And, of course, as the people I socialize with also worry about this stuff now to varying degrees I want to feel as informed as my peers about the usual topics of discussion.

I know I'm kind of dreaming here, but I think this would be a cool application for ActivityPub / Fediverse. Every town gets an instance with some official accounts (govt, school board, etc) and a dedicated reporting staff to gather tidbits to publish. Because of federation I could follow the news of other places I care about but my identity would be on my own city's instance.

One of the most important parts of any newspaper is that it is independent from the government though. I know in my town officials have openly accused the local paper of slander, and everyone is the better for seeing both sides. Having official accounts is just asking for coverups.

I wasn't imagining that the 'official accounts' would be exclusive accounts or have privileges over other accounts, just that they would be centralized places for those groups to release information. I agree that it shouldn't be run by or have behind-the-scenes influence from the government (or other powerful orgs.)

> In fact, I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all.

And that’d be silly. Communities existed long before newspapers, and they exist for nnplaces too small to support their own newspapers now. And even communities that would have had a newspaper a couple decades ago make do with, e.g., one or mor Facebook groups today, with the boring bits you refer to informally crowdsourced.

This is also one of the largest issues with EU politics and elections right now – there’s few EU-wide media, as result, there’s little EU-wide debates, and no real community.

Is it even possible to have all of that without a shared language?

That’s the other major part of a community, and a major problem, yes.

If only the French hadn't opposed the use of Esperanto as the common language...

It would be great to have a common language in the EU that close to nobody ever heard of.

Fun aside, language is not only shaped by culture, but also shapes culture.

It couldn't get any harder for people to affiliate with the EU if the EU institutions would embrace a foreign, sterile and planned language.

In fact I think it would only strengthen the resentment against the EU.

Introducing a foreign language as lingua franca worked pretty well for India and I'm reasonably sure that there was a lot more resentment for the British in India than for the EU in Europe. I don't think the Indian democracy would be possible without English.

Esperanto is easy enough to learn that most people could by now speak it as a second language if it had been introduced in schools back when it had the possibility to become the language of politics (that's a hundred years ago now!).

I did not want to say that speaking a second language to communicate with everyone is a bad thing.

In my opinion, having one or a few well established communication languages works pretty well right now, although adoption could of course improve.

My comment was mostly targeted at the concept of Esperanto. As far as my knowledge goes, it is a culture-free designer language made to ailinate people from the literature and thoughts of the past.

Based on that I have difficulties to see it in a more favourable light.

I think you have the wrong impression of the language. Esperanto was made to encourage the sharing of culture, knowledge and ideas over language barriers, not to alienate people from anything.

Maybe check out the introduction of the book that introduced Esperanto:

http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html

I have to admit that it has been a while since I have read about it, but reading the introduction right now, it sounds pretty consistent with what I remembered.

It states it is neutral, which it obviously can not be. Just because a language doesn't impose current biases (which Esperanto does) that does not mean that it will not impose its very own, new biases.

From there it gets highly problematic: The thought that languages shouldn't get translated into each other but should get cleared and isolated by translating them only to and from Esperanto is something you would expect George Orwell to come up with.

With this I don't want to say that the current, grown concept (mostly English, Mandarin, Hindu, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) isn't without its flaws, just that Esperanto has those flaws as well, plus its (new) design issues and the dystopian political agenda of its enthusiasts. (Like the culture filter I mentioned from the introduction.)

Would you personally see something positive in the adoption of Esperanto compared to the current model? I'm curious.

Weird how you and I get so different impressions from reading the same text :)

It's hard to learn English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi. At least for Chinese and Arabic there is a multitude of mutually unintelligible topolects that you'd also have to learn. Each of them takes at least ten years to master.

I'd strongly prefer it if we had one language that most people speak reasonably well. English gets you quite far (outside of Asia at least) but English is a lot harder than Esperanto. Esperanto has a number of flaws, most notably it's too Euro-centric making it harder to learn for people who don't speak a romance or germanic language. There are other conlangs that try to address that deficiency, but they are a lot less popular than even Esperanto.

I don't really mind which language wins, but I want to live in a world where I can interact with everybody without having to learn dozens of languages. I learned English reasonably well so I can interact with large parts of the "western" Internet, but that's just a tiny echo chamber compared to all content.

I think what you describe used to be true. I think that as the boomers die off, local papers will have almost 0 readers. It is a time and era that is dying off at least in the US. Most of this local journalism now is barely more than a tweet even though it is an "article" online. No facts, no research, little more than a headline.

In the US, the papers won't totally go away because certain things must (by law) be reported in a public data source. I think the thing that the journalism totally missed the boat on was being the source for local entertainment. People always want to know what fun things they can do this week/end with their kids and friends. Having local knowledge is something the Yelps of the world will never be able to do right.

> In fact, I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all.

In the US, it was the churches that made an area a community not the newspapers. As the churches have faded nothing has replaced them. Newspapers supplemented what was discussed informally in gatherings.

Frankly, local newspapers that didn’t remember that they served locals and either tried to preach or kept republishing national news outlets when it became obvious national news was available elsewhere doomed themselves.

My small town had a Catholic church for like every 4,000 people (and many other churches too). I think other poster is talking about communities of tens of thousands. I don't think you are talking about the same meaning of community.

I’m talking about the overall coverage provided by groups of churches. Larger towns had interlinked churches. Even small towns had multiple churches that cooperated.

The future is probably an AI aggregator that takes meeting minutes and summarizes them. Then every public event / happening gets posted to Facebook. The one journalist turns into the content creators themselves themselves. Maybe someone like Facebook could geofence sites and aggregate them into something like My Town.

I'm actually working on a project similar to this, using an AI to generate local news articles. The problem with this is every town does it differently, and some do it so awfully that getting anything of value from the minutes takes a lot of work for a human who was actually at the meeting itself.

For example, my town doesn't publish its meeting minutes online for three months. I can get the minutes in person the week after, but by then the once-weekly newspaper has "scooped" my AI because they had a human there. And even after I get the minutes, oftentimes the note will say "approved PUD conversion from C-2 for [Business X]. Motion from [Councilmember Y] seconded by [Councilmember Z]". Without knowing the discussion surrounding that decision, the minutes are dry and would produce an even drier news article.

I've tried to work with other area towns as well, and many of them don't put their meeting minutes online at all. The most reliable council meeting notes come from bigger cities, which don't need an AI to write their news for them.

Maybe do voice transcription in towns that record video of their meetings.

I think the future is just as likely civic disengagement.

Yes. I think the last US Presidential election is a small taste of the future rather than an aberration.

>I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all I would say the opposite. If members of a community aren't aware of the goings on, they don't have that 'regional awareness', it's not much of a community. A daily newspaper is only needed if people aren't informed. Daily is too often for the news to simply be a supplement for word-of-mouth that is the medium of a genuine community.