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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's like saying Autos killed Horse and Buggies, and auto manufacturers contributing to horse farms means they are bad people.

How likely was it that local news was going to survive the digital transition as is, when suddenly, people who never ventured more than 25 miles from where they are born, and mostly obtained news by paper delivery or local TV, can suddenly access the sum total of human knowledge and any news all over the world?

Suddenly your local paper, which had "default" access set almost like a default app on an OS, is no longer the default because the barrier to accessing everything else is way lower.

The writing was on the wall, in the same way that streaming killed optical media and optical media killed LPs. Or in the same way that e-commerce is killing retail once logistics gets cheap enough to make delivery cheaper than buying in store.

This was going to happen inevitably.

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This is a completely different matter. Here you are giving examples of services getting replaced by a better competitor. How does Google or Facebook improve on local journalism? They have just destroyed an important public service with no viable replacement in sight. The situation has maybe improved for the advertisers, but the public has lost a big time.

They didn’t destroy them, digital media and the internet did by making a vast number of information channels suddenly available.

In the same way that 500 cable channels and 24/7 news networks hurt local TV news.

When I grew up my TV reception could only turn into 3 TV stations, and we had one real paper: the Baltimore sun. There was no choice but to consume them by sheer convenience.

As soon as cable and internet virtually eliminated barriers due to geographic distance the dominance of local media with a guaranteed audience was ended.

Even without search, the internet put national And global newspapers at the touch of individuals. The idea that exposing your local outlet to the ease of accessing 1000 competitors wouldn’t have hurt them is dubious.

FWIW, I have been running a local newspaper (both digital and print) for the last five years. There is _no_ competition to speak of whatsoever. There are papers allright, but practically none of them make serious journalism, they just do whatever it takes to stay afloat.

That’s the crux of the issue – there is fierce competition in the ad industry where almost everything is swallowed by the big players, but they don’t deliver the service the local media did. At all. I would love to be superseded by a better newspaper, but that’s not what’s happening.

Yeah, this is pretty much it in a nutshell. Journalism as a business only really worked when there were significant gatekeepers to publishing information on a large scale, where competition was limited and where these publications were the best place for advertisers to advertise their wares.

That's not coming back. Any journalists who think the 'old world' is going to survive in the internet era are flat out delusional. You cannot undo time and technology, and you cannot try and freeze society at the turn of the millennium.

Hence the solution isn't to throw money at all these sites and publications, especially given they almost certainly won't be sustainable in today's economic climate. It's to find new ways of distributing information for a new generation, one that doesn't involve ads, subscriptions or newsrooms full of wriers.

Reputation, brand, accuracy is still important.

We might laugh at BuzzFeedNews, but probably millions of people grew up on BuzzFeed, and for them it was probably more reputable than let's say the NYT.

That said, independent sources, cross-verification of information is going to be a big challenge, especially as fakes/faking become more important. (Eg in a war zone. Was it a false flag or not? Did that rocket attack happened at all?) Even though AI cannot [yet] understand it, it's perfect for looking for similarities and similar posts. (So if someone sets up a system that ingests the twitter + FB + YT firehose for example.)

It's not about jobs, it's about building and sustaining communities. Using inevitably as justification is not a good way to absolve responsibility.

If you live in a very sparse rural community without a large enough audience willing to pay for hyperlocal news, why is it the responsibility of others to make this viable?

Why does the US celebrate rural living such that people think it’s their god given right to have all of the same amenities someone in a large metro area have with its higher density in an economically untenable context?

I’ll grant you it’s sad when small towns die, but why is it the responsibility of everyone else to insure these towns are viable? Things change, industries change, and often, people have to adapt as a result.

But the New York Times doesn’t cover my local city council, which has a way bigger impact on my daily life than national news does. Without a more local paper, people become disconnected from the own town.

It’s very much unlike horses vs cars because in this analogy even if the buggie makers go out of business, people are still riding horses.

Might I suggest that states and localities fund local media reporting on government via tax and give it to organizations like CPB/NPR/CBS/CSPAN?

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