The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve | Hacker News Reader

The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve

theatlantic.com

18 pointsMattGaiser17 comments

The author argues that local news papers should be externally funded (government, NGOs) to keep them in existence. One main argument brought forth is that newspaper uncover scandals, which is for the public good and ultimately saves money by preventing and couteracting corruption.

This seems completly insane. The reason local newspapers are failing is because nobody reads them. People obviously do not care what is written in them to an extent that would keep the paper alive. Funding them will not make people read them.

The idea that state funded journalists should be recruited to uncover corruption and then report about it is unbelievable. The one reason journalists can uncover what the government can not is because they are independent of the goverment. If you want to fight corruption you don't need journalists in between.

I agree that government funding doesn’t make sense, but newspaper were dying because nobody read them. Many pivoted and are profitable but are now being killed by companies like Alden Capital. Denver Post has large readership and has been profitable for a long time, but it was gutted by private equity and forcibly, slowly, killed.

To add, there's also quite a bit of what recently has been described as "enshitification."

The news source starts out ok, somebody makes a metric [1] to describe "ok," sources start chasing metric, stories all start sounding like they're written by an algorithm, soon you wonder if they all got replaced by generative AI a while ago, and nobody noticed (kinda like radio DJs). Reuters exemplifies this. I used to read Reuters. Now I barely skim.

"ChatGPT, write me a generic story about a missile strike." "ChatGPT, write me a generic story about the Ukraine War, with absolutely no context, onsite reporters, or investigation."

"20,000 artillery rounds per day?" Seriously? Every 4 seconds? Does anybody on the news even look at how big a hole a 155mm artillery shell leaves? No. Just the same video reel of patriotic photos and then Zelensky photo shoots.

I saw one video the other day of a bomb squad trying to disarm a shell from WWII. Even with shielding, it still shook buildings for 100's of yards in every direction. 20,000 of those. Per day. Its like the only thing news sources can report on is stories with keyword "missile" because those used to get clicks. The algo says write this.

[1] Ex: viewers, view time, page views, ads, social reposts, qtr. profits, clicks, engagement length, ect...

>Many pivoted and are profitable but are now being killed by companies like Alden Capital.

Then the solution is to make money by running a locally owned newspaper.

>and forcibly, slowly, killed.

Nobody was trying to kill them. Even if large owners were killing them, they did not want to.

There are profitable local newspapers, like the Colorado Sun.

They were trying to kill the division of the newspapers that write and investigate local news. The newspaper have resources like brand recognition, local relationships, and sales people that are being used in ways that produce more profit than when they were strictly related to news. Look at digital first media / media news group / adtaxi as an example, there are similar doings for other groups. Buy local newspaper -> gut writers room -> use remaining resources to sell digital ads and other goods.

> The reason local newspapers are failing is because nobody reads them

I don't believe that's true. The subscription cost for most newspapers barely covered the printing and distribution costs. Small, local-focused newspapers were surprisingly largely kept alive by the massive margins on printing classified ads.

The person who used to spend $1-per-word at their local paper to advertise they were selling a car or having an estate sale can now list that for free on craigslist or facebook. And the local business can buy more targeted advertisements on facebook, google or twitter.

As odd as it seems, Craigslist probably did more to kill the local newspaper than social media, search engines or private equity firms.

   Ideally, investment in local news would come from the federal government,
   which has more freedom to think long-term than cash-strapped states 
   and municipalities do.

The problem I see there is "cash-strapped states and municipalities" which leads to a dependence on the federal government that is often unhealthy: for instance when a bridge washed out in my town they had to wait years to get a grant to fix it. Similarly the bus company has had a large number of buses fail inspection and, being cash-strapped, isn't going to be able to fix them until it gets help from outside.

If we had some model where states and municipalities weren't cash-strapped I think they'd end up saving money in the long term.

----

As for the media I was just looking at the 2009 book The Curse of the Mogul

https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Mogul-Worlds-Leading-Companies/...

which makes the case that media conglomerates had a history of structurally underperforming compared to smaller media companies. Around that time that book came out, Warren Buffet invested heavily in small newspapers but he took a huge loss on them in the end

https://newrepublic.com/article/156399/warren-buffett-terrib...

part of that story is the disappearance of classified ads and Google and Facebook becoming the new ad monopoly and choking off their revenue.

Around Ithaca our daily newspaper (owned by Gannett) has turned into garbage whereas we have three free weekly papers, two of which have paper editions and a third of which is online only. It strikes me as deeply unfair that the daily is still getting the "paper of record" legal notice business when it is not doing the work to cover local issues the way the other papers are.

Part of it is that the weekly really has a better model, most towns don't have enough going on to really fill up a daily and it is easier for advertisers to support a weekly since they get the same value in the end.

> dependence on the federal government that is often unhealthy

My town of ~16000 residents flew a delegation across the country a few years ago for the sole purpose of lobbying for a project grant from Washington. This was reported in the local paper in tones suggesting some sort of success had been achieved.

Antitrust law against media companies and we shut off the tap to red states. I solved it.

That mechanism exists, it’s known as “taxes”

Hmmm... maybe the government shouldn't have let conglomerates buy up everything.

He has a point. 40% of household media is produced by the Sinclair group. It's just an oligarchy. You can't really stop it.

This is why you should just turn off the TV and never watch the news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

I stopped consuming news when I realized NOTHING from the media has an impact on my life. Anything important always travels by word of mouth.

All you have done is outsource deciding what is important.

I still hear about what happened and I do not outsource the analysis of the situation.

Just have the Federal government pay for it?

That's not an easy solution, that's a simplistic solution.

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