Interesting tidbit that countered my assumptions:<p>> None of this was inevitable: At the time of the sale to GateHouse, The Hawk Eye wasn’t struggling financially. Far from it. In the years leading up to the sale, the paper was seeing profit margins ranging from the mid-teens to the high 20s. Gannett has dedicated much of its revenue to servicing and paying off loans associated with the merger, rather than reinvesting in local journalism.<p>Like many of us I'm sure, my local (Gannett-owned) news website is awful. On the news page, you might get a handful of stories a week related to the actual town.<p>It's high school sports results, PR for new businesses (or remodeling of existing ones), some crime reports, health code violations. Granted there may not be much happening in a small town, but it's very surface level. I get the impression the journalists are told to live off a diet of aggregated reports sent to them rather than getting out to speak to anyone.<p>Like the linked piece suggests, it bears no relationship to what locals are talking about in Facebook and NextDoor groups. The community chats about constant flooding in certain areas, discussions related to Covid including staffing, the changing weather, personal allegations which if were true would be scandalous but go unchecked, the availability of public services.
On a related note, <i>Index on Censorship</i> published an entire issue dedicated to this topic in 2019: <a href="https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-all-the-local-news/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-a...</a><p>A couple of the articles are available for free online.
> Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle.<p>Reading the article gives the feeling that reporters are psychopaths. The first thing when they heard of the disaster was not to go see if they could help anyone, but how can they publish a story that sells. Along with “if it bleeds, it leads” there is a sense of profiting of other people’s misery and voyeurism in the psyche of the industry.