Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions
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I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment.
The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that.
What's the word for government by random chance?
A vote-based system in the absence of an effective media to investigate and inform the electorate is not actually random, but is subject to sway and influence from any modestly motivated party, with no effective check from an at least putatively disinterested or nonbiased journalistic enterprise. You're not leaving selection up to chance, you're leaving it up the the most effective, least principled, least visible election manipulator.
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-may-17-la-me-chine...
Talking counties, schools, and towns outside even mid-sized cities, here.
I am worried this, and other developments, will mean the gradual end of the US as a relatively low-corruption state.
https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso-adm...
https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early-agre...
If all that matters is race and gender, or whatever other "Divide and Conqueror" scheme we're undergoing at this time, you'll notice criminality didn't make the list of what matters, so ...
An example local sustainably-funded investigative journalism outfit: https://theferret.scot/
Unfortunately this relies on the "sweet spot" where the government is corrupt enough to be outrageous but not corrupt enough to shut down your paper and campaign by force.
(It also relies on accepting that if you want local political news coverage, it's not going to be flatly neutral, because neither the audience nor the writers want that. That's not the same as being factional; "local government should be good not bad" is a highly political position, but not necessarily a factional one unless a party has a policy that local government should be bad.)
Party line voting
Most of them run unopposed, and I assume decide who gets what while they're at the bar or something. Their election campaign is usually a facebook page with cute kids smiling, and saying nothing at all. The city doesn't know what they're up to unless they ask for money. For a long time the federal level has been increasing in power, but maybe that's because no takes an active interest in city & state.
I've been considering running for a local seat just to be a monkey wrench.
Thing is, I've been curious about this. You mentioned, "I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper". So, I know this is the sentiment most people have. But, isn't that the problem? BTW, I'm not picking on you, this is more about the generality of the situation.
A lot of people think local politics and other issues are worthless. But then are annoyed when they don't know anything about what's going on, why no one is "doing anything about it", "how did they get away with that" or just generally complain that their local whatever is a POS. For politics that is more likely to affect you faster than state, fed or international level, why do we think it's worthless? I'm not going to pretend like I'm magically different. Our mayor is about as important to me as a dog turd in my neighbor's backyard is to me. I've been wondering how I even came to the idea myself about a month ago when local politics does heavily affect me, whether I like it or not.
Makes me wonder about some demographics. Like, what is the percentage of people that do "care" and actively read about their local area? And by how much (1hr, 3hrs, 5hrs a week, etc)? Then, what's their city like? Do they have relatively less corruption than other cities? Are their schools better? Parks? Roads? Rec centers? Gov employee well being any better? Crime rates? How many people are needed to care about "local politics", on average, to make a city "good"? 10%? 20%? 50%?
Then, what has to happen to make enough people give a shit?
Questions beyond this post and HN... but yea... why the hell do we think local politics and news is worthless when it's the issues that will affect us more and faster than anything else?
Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.
The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem.
I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.
Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.
That's an interesting idea. I love getting paywalled by some web site because I clicked a headline, especially when it's some a local news site or some other site I'll probably never visit again. I'm not signing up to read one article that I might not even like.
I thought pay per article might be a good idea, but that would just encourage click bait. And if the article is terrible, I still have to pay.
However, with a subscription to all of the news none of this would be an issue as long as it was reasonably priced.
Equitably means no one gets gov funding - no one is favored just like in the case of organized religion.
> Ideally a way that would create a market incentive for producing local news that people read.
Government doesn’t create market incentives, it destroys and distorts them.
Or do you have another truth to share?
Do Brave Attention Tokens fit this model?
True especially in the arts where the median can't get a job writing SQL queries for a Telecom.
But this sounds a lot like a rediscription of the dystopia we're already rushing towards.
The advertising model that floated newspaper journalism was circulation. Whether you read 1 story, 10 stories, or the whole paper. I don't think the genie can be put back, but online ads and going viral on the platforms are already both games measured in eyeball-seconds.
Rewriting society around eyeball-seconds is probably not a good idea.
It's not true that churches are able to function entirely on donations. They have all kinds of tax breaks and take government subsidies. And tipping? I bet anyone in the service industry in the US can tell you why that's a bad idea.
How exactly does the government benefit?
If by "well informed" you mean "the population knows the information the government wants it to know" then sure, I get that.
However, I don’t read American press, so not quite familiar with the state of media business in the country. I subscribe to the economist and the ken (the great source covering VC news in SEA and India). I want to reward journalist for high-quality material. They don’t have a fremium reading and the subscription is quite high indeed.
As for Spotify-like business model, I bet Medium has something in their roadmap. Also, out of States there multiple interesting products that try to to pay-once-read-all business-model: Yandex Zen in Russia and SmartNews in Japan.
Complete separation of state and church is pretty rare. They often gain some form of tax benefit. Their buildings often holds central position in towns and if there property tax then they are exempted. If there are government initiatives for children, for arts, or other social benefits then the church is often a common actor in the end. Very few religious organizations that I know depend exclusively on members fees, and I live in Sweden where church being separated from the state is a common perception by those who live here.
If we apply this to local media then a government supported model would not inherently be controlled by the government. You could have government information awareness initiatives with criteria for the actor to have independent journalism. The local news agency would then bid for the job.
We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.
It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.
It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?
I do find it mildly ironic that TFA is also fear-based. Will they never learn?
I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.
I understand paywalls are annoying. But if anyone wants to do anything, they need to figure out how to get micropayments to work or build a non-techgiant service [1] that can let you collectively subscribe to most of the news organizations at once for a reasonable fee. I understand those are both hard problems.
[1] Can't be a techgiant because they've caused enough damage already, and giving them control of the subscription fees could be the coup de grâce. Honestly, the website should be a media-owned co-op or something.
Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down.
I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker.
The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.
There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...
While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.
I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1].
Relevant to the article:
"And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985."
He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system.
[0]: https://www.flatearthnews.net/ [1]: https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth...
If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
On the U.S. side, intellectually oriented conservative media has really had trouble with the Trump era. The more highbrow outlets were never on board with Trump, but maintaining an anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical line on the U.S. right basically dooms you to irrelevance in the current climate, since only a smallish band of "never-Trumper" conservatives are still tuning in to that political position. There are a few of those, like The American Interest, which keep going on a small circulation.
For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones, counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are surely falling off the spectrum.
Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can’t help with specific examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far right wing shit (monarchism?, “racial realists”, “trumpists”).
One of those things is not like the others.
I can't remember ever seeing a "right-wing" viewpoint in Bloomberg's opinion pages. As far as I can tell the only op-eds they publish are pro-gun control, anti-income inequality or just generally anti-Trump.
There is a big gap between those sort of biases and Not-Trump-At-Any-Cost or Must-Sell-Public-Assets. Some biases are productive and have motivations which can be honestly articulated and are broadly reasonable.
That said, frontline occasionally covers things the news hour won’t and can be a serious investigative journalism outlet.
It may be as many as 80% of the population would support evidence-based biases, in theory. There are still problems but it is a big step up from inflexible partisanship.
Sure, the topics picked can very well be political, although that has degraded somewhat to topics that generate clicks. But that is nevertheless a huge problem and I believe correlated to the low trust in media overall.
Or look at elections. A press staunchly favoring a candidate wouldn't be able to hold that candidate accountable. That is another huge problem, because that is their primary raison d'être.
Some even go that far that a worse candidate is preferable in that situation if it means the press as representatives of the public reports critically. Could explain some things.
The last discussion about that has been with fundamentalists that had a similar critique about neutrality.
We could also talk about how feasible it is to achieve neutrality. But that wouldn't be the point in most cases.
In secular education for example neutrality has a specific meaning. That pupils are to be empowered to make choices and that views are not imposed on them. End of story.
It isn't that hard to transfer these principles to journalism. Does journalism try to inform as best as possible so people can make better decisions? Or should they be nudged towards certain perspectives.
The former variant would be the neutral approach. Pretty simple if you think about it.
And btw, I agree with your definition of neutrality. I just don’t think PBS markedly improves in this respect (empowering viewers) from any other cable news station, they simply have less obnoxious production value and are therefore a more palatable, or at best equally palatable, version of the other center to center left publications I listed.
1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those potential voters by going back to their lives.
2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username/password from local government with ID.
Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!
Both of the points require that the government recognise that some information is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc). Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely available', you guessed it, evil.
I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?
The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Do you have any more info about this type of voting? I would always be interested in reading more analysis of this topic.
For better proportional representation, here's this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.
Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: https://inn.org/members/
It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.
It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.
There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc.
More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.
Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.
Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.
Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process.
Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult.
Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.
Hell no.
All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.
Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.
So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.
The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one.
I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.
The local news is just another type of information, and if you don’t spend your money on it, you’re at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost because of how people weren’t spending their time and/or money, and due to the nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very vocal and visible manner.
I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of producing + consuming it.
It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl-clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production side. For example:
The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't necessarily linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.
Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in its place?
It's good for us, but no obvious short-term benefits. How can we make such things more compelling?
Exercise as a hobby has no intrinsic value though. You either do it for whatever reasons that you find compelling, or you don’t.
Getting back to the local news, I guess the way for it to be more compelling is for your local market to be more interesting, or for the people in that market to be more interested in their neighbors. I am struggling to find a niche in there that can’t be filled in other ways by a hundred other means. I think the case for local news these days is only when a market is so big that keeping tabs on the goings on of the city’s bureaucracy is a full time job, and even then, only to the extent that the bureaucracy has an effect on people’s daily lives. I think the market has already mostly optimized for this. You’re not going to make the product as it existed in the 20th Century any more compelling than it is now, unless conditions in the market change to allow for this. I think we’re going to have to collectively let go of our romantic notions of the local paper from times past.
Let’s break this down: 1. The performance of the local government. You can already see this when you talk with your neighbors or walk or drive around the streets. Are the potholes in your area getting filled? Are the police doing a decent job? Are houses burning down left and right? Are your kids coming home from school and not getting progressively more literate and numerate? To the extent that there is room in the market for even more coverage of the local government, it really depends on how big the local bureaucracy is.
2. Candidates in local elections. Did you know it was the job of candidates running for office to get themselves and their message in front of as many people in their constituency as they can? They have a message to sell, and if they are at all effective, they’ll sell it as widely as possible. If the local papers and broadcasters aren’t doing the job, they’ll find other ways to get their message out or else just lose the election. Anybody with any interest against this candidate will also be selling messages to get in front of you, in whatever channels you’re paying attention. I don’t think we’re any less informed about our politicians than we ever were, it’s simply a matter of how interested we are in what they do for us. For example, I care very much who is repping me on the Board of Supervisors, but without children of my own, I struggle to stay interested in school board elections, and I find it questionable that we are electing any judges at all.
3. Investigative journalism. This is a separate kind of informational product, and there is a generally competitive market here, but the trick is to see each story as a separate product. Organizations which attempt to specialize in this product tend to not bring in much revenue, but the investigative arm of an organization can bring prestige to the whole organization by putting out investigative products. In any case, investigative journalism does not stand on its own without a supporting organization, and brings in more revenue if you get a book deal.
I don’t think all we have is all that I outlined above. I think the market supports reporting and editorializing just fine, but for the local variants, there just isn’t a lot of demand for the same kind of reporting, maybe because the stakes are lower, maybe because people are just less interested in the community they live in, or maybe there’s less government, less stuff, to keep tabs on.
This is a myopic take that ignores externalities. Local news has significant positive externalities: better informed citizens (important for a democracy), anti-corruption effects, etc.
What are the chances of reviving something like it?
I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.
If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.