When we edit down the civic value of local newspapers, what is there? What value does a local newspaper offer that, say, a subreddit for a city doesn't offer?<p>For common, everyday occurrences, usually they are parroting whatever press releases are made by the authorities. OK, we can share and get that information ourselves these days.<p>What's left is local investigative journalism. Most local newspapers are pretty gutted to the point they don't provide this. Yet many still do. We want someone to dig into some issues with high journalistic standards, and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another. If that's the gap, how do we achieve this at a local level? How do we fund that work? Are there other mechanisms that do this well?
A counterpoint to this is that local news is actually proving to be profitable (at least in the UK) on substack [1]. My guess would be that traditional local papers were too slow to adapt to the internet and also assumed that they would just be able to translate their business model to the internet with little adjustments. This often leads to awful, ad ridden hell holes like this monstrosity:<p><a href="https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/</a><p>Try using that site for 2 minutes without it crashing or you rage quitting from the constant rearranging of the page as it finally loads content. Even if you can use it, have a look at the quality of the articles. Case in point:<p><a href="https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/range-confirms-what-its-actually-4806957" rel="nofollow">https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/range-c...</a><p>The ironic thing is that, whilst the publication is local, it is part of a national group that owns a large part of local media in the UK that all share the same underlying core site just with the names and posts changed to represent the local content. Subsequently a large part of the UK has to deal with this absolute shite for their local news. Hopefully Joshi Herrmann will continue to see success and his model will spread across the country.<p>[1] <a href="https://read.substack.com/p/the-active-voice-8-joshi-herrmann#details" rel="nofollow">https://read.substack.com/p/the-active-voice-8-joshi-herrman...</a>
If local newspapers focused on corruption in local government, locals would be more likely to subscribe IMO. But in my experience, they don't; they won't report on contentious issues in local government.
<i>> By 2025, a third of them will be gone. If you’re not convinced that’s a doomsday-level threat to democracy</i><p>I beg to differ. As we've seen in the last 3 years, the large majority of them were in bed with the government. Democracy? A better word would be plutocracy. Let them die.
A big part of them problem is few of those stories are relevant to the average middle class person, the kind of person who would pay for news. More than half of these stories are about criminals, prisons, and natives.