Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions

I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports, entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that&#x27;s it. In other words, only the stuff that makes them money.<p>I don&#x27;t blame them. I won&#x27;t pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can&#x27;t afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment.<p>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.<p>What&#x27;s the word for government by random chance?

I&#x27;m not a fan of government-funded media. I think I&#x27;d like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I&#x27;d like the church to remain separate from the state.<p>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.<p>The digital newspapers I&#x27;ve used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They&#x27;ve got a great app, it&#x27;s streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don&#x27;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.<p>I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today&#x27;s world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we&#x27;ve seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user&#x27;s time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.<p>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&#x27;re willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.

I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on “murder of the day” and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four.<p>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.

I&#x27;ll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like.<p>I&#x27;m sub&#x27;d to nyt, 3 local paper&#x2F;publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.

In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies.<p>While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.<p>I&#x27;m sure the full text is available online but there&#x27;s an excerpt here [1].<p>Relevant to the article:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don&#x27;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.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flatearthnews.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flatearthnews.net&#x2F;</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nickdavies.net&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;05&#x2F;introducing-flat-earth-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nickdavies.net&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;05&#x2F;introducing-flat-earth...</a>

I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has a refreshing take on news that doesn&#x27;t depend on fearmongering or thinly-veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.

Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but are increasingly getting less and less alternative sources and eventually none. Some new age media possibilities I had been thinking of:<p>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.<p>2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs&#x2F;columns&#x2F;newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company&#x2F;individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username&#x2F;password from local government with ID.<p>Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!<p>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 &#x27;information needs to be free and widely available&#x27;, you guessed it, evil.

Craigslist, who ate local newspapers’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds in every Craigslist market.<p>A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.

The end of the article mentions &quot;newer, digitally focused outlets&quot; as one possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that&#x27;s one of the possible futures of local news.<p>Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inn.org&#x2F;members&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inn.org&#x2F;members&#x2F;</a>

This article is very relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer&#x2F;561422&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;study-when-local-news...</a><p>It&#x27;s a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it&#x27;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.

Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It&#x27;s beyond me why not regulators have stepped in...

Local news is more available now than previously.<p>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.<p>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.

I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses.<p>Most local businesses don&#x27;t like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.

I could make the argument that this article makes it clear that Apple&#x27;s move in 2003 to set a price of $0.99 per track for recorded music was an act of cultural salvation, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2003&#x2F;04&#x2F;28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2003&#x2F;04&#x2F;28Apple-Launches-the-...</a>.

I guess I&#x27;m lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc..<p>Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren&#x27;t that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend&#x2F;dining guide is much better than Yelp.

Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good antidote to the awareness issues.<p>Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process.<p>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.<p>Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.

Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They’re a terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must follow.

We changed the URL from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;us&#x2F;local-news-disappear-pen-america.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;us&#x2F;local-news-disappear-p...</a>, which points to this.

In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?

The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are <i>paying</i> to get a message in front of you (advertisers).<p>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.<p>Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people <i>can</i> adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.<p>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.

I searched the thread and couldn’t find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I thought it was good while it lasted.<p>What are the chances of reviving something like it?

Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.

The whole news model is becoming strange. At the beginning journalism shifted from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site owners

Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your time and money. It is no surprise you don&#x27;t give them your time or your money. They have problem and solution reversed.

&quot;Lack of people buying newspapers bad&quot; reports newspaper.<p>I&#x27;m pay-walled out and probably shouldn&#x27;t waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.<p>If you&#x27;re not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you&#x27;re not a political staffer who&#x27;s job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you&#x27;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.