7 ms·

Cost of government rises when local newspaper closes, study finds

125 points by santix 8y ago

xellisx 8y ago
I worked for a media company that had their hands in print, radio and TV. The community based news papers had way higher profit margins than the large news papers.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  Maybe I’m confused, but what’s the connection between the profit margin of newspapers and the linked article?
  - lgleason 8y ago
    Without profitability they cannot survive. The industry as a whole is in decline. People are not as willing to pay for content and ad revenue is not as profitable. But, more importantly, ad revenue also makes what little content is left more susceptible to manipulation vs actually reporting the facts. Compared to how many of these news outlets used to be, many of the local ones today are complete garbage. Lots of poorly written, if it bleeds it leads types of articles etc..
    - ramblerman 8y ago
      > Without profitability they cannot survive. clearly, but again, what is the link to the original statement?
      - xellisx 8y ago
        It was a random side note about how community news papers were more profitable than the ones that cover larger areas. The community ones also report on city goverment stuff, so losing one would just be a loss of another information outlet.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    There's a phenomenal article that hits on this point: The Bad News About the News [1] It's by Robert Kaiser, a 50 year veteran editor and reporter of the Washington Post that decided to retire shortly following Bezos' purchase of the company. I hate giving cliff notes of it since it's such a well written piece that should really be consumed as a whole, so don't take this post as cliff notes - but as some related asides. One important point is that in the past the media had an effective monopoly on information and that basically gave them a never ending faucet of money. The internet has changed all of this. Newspapers, or the media in general today, operate on thin to nonexistent margins. When times are good it's much easier to focus on things like journalistic integrity and quality. In the golden era of the media, monopolized as it was, could enjoy the luxury of having relatively little concern about how their readers would, for instance, react to their reporting. There was no need to pander to fashionable views or condemn unfashionable views. They could write as they saw with their guiding beacon being little more than the story itself. There's a fine quote in the article from another individual, "By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger that confronts us." Now the media is driven to compete against social media, and other media outlets who have 0 concern for anything other than feeding their own buzz. And social media, contrary to promises of uniting society and people, has instead fragmented people into ever more radically divided groups. And this is now reflected in the media as people have hovered to sources that primarily just confirm their own biases and tell them what they want to hear. One thing I will say as a counter to this all is that, peculiarly enough, even establishments that are supposed to be above monetary concerns have gone downhill. For instance the BBC was at one time the pinnacle of impartial reporting, yet they now are falling into the same trappings of partisanship, bias, and sensationalism that plagues the rest of the media in spite of the fact that (to my knowledge) they have 0 financial mandates. As I check the front page of that site this very moment (with a cleared cache) two of the top 5 displayed headlines are: "A world outraged over crispy chicken" and "How a YouTube beef shook the vegan world.". ... [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-news.html http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...
sbhn 8y ago
I kind of read the headline as, ‘pay the guardian a subscription fee or we’ll aggravate, and amplify, stories that make society feel more scared and under attack from forces that can only be resolved with less freedoms and more tax payer spending’. Perhaps the guardian should lobby to make non payment of ‘subscription’ a criminal offence and benefit from the same protections over competition that are awarded the bbc news.
- n4r9 8y ago
  That makes no sense. The Guardian is not a local newspaper, it wouldn't benefit from higher taxes, and you don't need a subscription to read the BBC news.
  - sbhn 8y ago
    I try to put as much information into a small amount text so it’s quick for you to read. I don’t need to write a 20 page essay to convince you. But I’ll give you a few points. The guardian is just another lobby with its own hopes and fears, but trying to convert all its readers to a subscription model, and it will use any click bait title and print any fud it can to convince you of the virtues of the subscription model. The bbc license fee, is illegal in England not to pay. The terms and conditions on license fee renewal cover all forms of media distribution and ways you might consume bbc content. And it’s illegal to reprint those terms and conditions in any other media format available so I can’t copy and paste it here for you. 50 percent of the criminals that pass through a British councils court houses, are there for non payment of bbc license fee. I get this info from my local paper public notices section. The bbc license fee creates a unlevel playing field for all other media organisations which who have media business models similar to the many media types the bbc produces. Bbc gets its money for free, many people, especially poor, receive criminal convictions for not paying it, it creates an anti competitive environment for competing media organisations, it’s lawyers are the best. At least local news outlets can print all the court cases it wins, if it’s still legal to. I heard that recently many more criminal convictions, let alone suspect investigations, are now subject to gag orders. This is England
    - 8y ago
classicsnoot 8y ago
I am ready to join any venture in creating local news. I am a capable writer with above average capability and means for generating local content. I have applied to every local paper in my area and have never once received a call/email back. I won't stop trying, but if anyone here is attempting a project even remotely pointed in the direction of local,online-or-paper news, i'd appreciate your consideration. I'm happy to start at minimum wage. I just want to write news in my spare time.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  You will probably get further by writing a story and then sending that story to local papers, rather than sending applications. If you're more interested in distribution than payment, Google is trying to build a tool for the general public to write news stories, get them published and indexed and surfaced to people: https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share
  - classicsnoot 8y ago
    Cool concept. If it comes to my city, i am totally doing it.
- eurticket 8y ago
  We have the internet reach the community you love to write about online.
  - classicsnoot 8y ago
    Love is rarely a part of what i have to write about... 40.72455679, -74.18459239
    - eurticket 8y ago
      well then, lets start a quick wordpress and self publish
- pouta 8y ago
mirimir 8y ago
OK, so they found that "the spread or yield of newly issued local municipal bonds increased" after local papers closed. But from the title, I was expecting some actual data on local government spending. But no, it's all based on borrowing costs. The stuff about local papers having acted as watchdog agents is just interpretation. Here's the abstract of the study cited in the article: > Local newspapers hold their governments accountable. We examine the effect of local newspaper closures on public finance for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, we find municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points in the long run. Identification tests illustrate that these results are not being driven by deteriorating local economic conditions. The loss of monitoring that results from newspaper closures is associated with increased government inefficiencies, including higher likelihoods of costly advance refundings and negotiated issues, and higher government wages, employees, and tax revenues.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Borrowing costs obviously are (part of) government spending. But, more importantly, the idea is to use the market as a sort of proxy, or research instrument: it's the best known structure to judge the financial future of various entities, including governments. Borrowing costs, in an efficient market, perfectly represent society's consensus opinion on those cities' financial future. While it's possible that markets aren't perfect in pricing these bonds, they are almost certainly better at it than any single research team could ever hope to be.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Until they aren't anyway. Look at the AAA rated junk mortgage backed securities. Or Theranos - due diligence from a biology processor making money on the side could have told you that not all blood is sourced equal and the statistical minimum sizes to be able to detect certain components of low concentration accurately. Attempting to screen blood noninvasively would be more possible and that is a far harder problem that would call for several chained breakthroughs. Forget a research team - one person could beat the market without so much as cracking a book! A perfect market requires perfect knowledge which in addition to requiring science fiction predictive abilities would have very weird implications given causality issues. Like loans being marginal in rates or not granted (if you know ahead of time they will be good for it is guaranteed profit and everyone with capital could give a small but net winning offer). If they knew they would lose nobody would give a lossy loan. The stock market would be bizarrely illiquid or obsolete as funding is already guaranteed. Few would sell for what they see as a worse investment. Being able to tell if loaning five billion to an eccentric scientist would pay off or not. Interesting hypotheticals aside it is important to remember that while good at managing supply and demand usually the market is not an oracle nor a god. Going against what everyone thinks is worthless is one way to strike it rich.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
verelo 8y ago
Probably true, but just an opportunity for someone to produce something local and not paper based. Most products are designed for mass markets, it'd be great to see something work for a large group of smaller community in the way newspapers did in the past. Also i wonder if this is in part due to the fact that online news is more easily manipulated and therefore corruption is easier to get away with.
- graeme 8y ago
  The article specifically addressed your suggestion. It said people had been suggesting that ever since community papers declined, but there's been no replacement. It's still good to look for a replacement, but I think you may be being a bit blasé about it.
  - verelo 8y ago
    I never said it would be easy, and i certainly don’t have a solution. Having worked very closely with old school media companies, being acquired by one, and trying to contribute to the issues...yeah, maybe I’m just exhausted by the problem, but i stand by staying it’s a big opportunity when someone finally gets it right.
- Animats 8y ago
  There was "patch.com". But now it just seems to be a scraper of news sites.
- askafriend 8y ago
  Nextdoor.com is used for this in my neighborhood. Lots of people debating local issues, local news stations posting relevant news, people buying and selling stuff (like the classifieds in a newspaper), local real estate etc. I think that sounds close to what you're describing.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Google's Bulletin is hyperlocal, https://searchengineland.com/google-bulletin-hyperlocal-news-nextdoor-comptetitor-290499 https://searchengineland.com/google-bulletin-hyperlocal-news...
Proven 8y ago
And therefore the taxpayer should fund a local paper

125 points by santix 8y ago

I worked for a media company that had their hands in print, radio and TV. The community based news papers had way higher profit margins than the large news papers.

grandmczeb 8y ago
Maybe I’m confused, but what’s the connection between the profit margin of newspapers and the linked article?
- lgleason 8y ago
  Without profitability they cannot survive. The industry as a whole is in decline. People are not as willing to pay for content and ad revenue is not as profitable. But, more importantly, ad revenue also makes what little content is left more susceptible to manipulation vs actually reporting the facts. Compared to how many of these news outlets used to be, many of the local ones today are complete garbage. Lots of poorly written, if it bleeds it leads types of articles etc..
  - ramblerman 8y ago
    > Without profitability they cannot survive. clearly, but again, what is the link to the original statement?
    - xellisx 8y ago
      It was a random side note about how community news papers were more profitable than the ones that cover larger areas. The community ones also report on city goverment stuff, so losing one would just be a loss of another information outlet.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There's a phenomenal article that hits on this point: The Bad News About the News [1] It's by Robert Kaiser, a 50 year veteran editor and reporter of the Washington Post that decided to retire shortly following Bezos' purchase of the company. I hate giving cliff notes of it since it's such a well written piece that should really be consumed as a whole, so don't take this post as cliff notes - but as some related asides. One important point is that in the past the media had an effective monopoly on information and that basically gave them a never ending faucet of money. The internet has changed all of this. Newspapers, or the media in general today, operate on thin to nonexistent margins. When times are good it's much easier to focus on things like journalistic integrity and quality. In the golden era of the media, monopolized as it was, could enjoy the luxury of having relatively little concern about how their readers would, for instance, react to their reporting. There was no need to pander to fashionable views or condemn unfashionable views. They could write as they saw with their guiding beacon being little more than the story itself. There's a fine quote in the article from another individual, "By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger that confronts us." Now the media is driven to compete against social media, and other media outlets who have 0 concern for anything other than feeding their own buzz. And social media, contrary to promises of uniting society and people, has instead fragmented people into ever more radically divided groups. And this is now reflected in the media as people have hovered to sources that primarily just confirm their own biases and tell them what they want to hear. One thing I will say as a counter to this all is that, peculiarly enough, even establishments that are supposed to be above monetary concerns have gone downhill. For instance the BBC was at one time the pinnacle of impartial reporting, yet they now are falling into the same trappings of partisanship, bias, and sensationalism that plagues the rest of the media in spite of the fact that (to my knowledge) they have 0 financial mandates. As I check the front page of that site this very moment (with a cleared cache) two of the top 5 displayed headlines are: "A world outraged over crispy chicken" and "How a YouTube beef shook the vegan world.". ... [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-news.html http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

sbhn 8y ago

I kind of read the headline as, ‘pay the guardian a subscription fee or we’ll aggravate, and amplify, stories that make society feel more scared and under attack from forces that can only be resolved with less freedoms and more tax payer spending’. Perhaps the guardian should lobby to make non payment of ‘subscription’ a criminal offence and benefit from the same protections over competition that are awarded the bbc news.

n4r9 8y ago
That makes no sense. The Guardian is not a local newspaper, it wouldn't benefit from higher taxes, and you don't need a subscription to read the BBC news.
- sbhn 8y ago
  I try to put as much information into a small amount text so it’s quick for you to read. I don’t need to write a 20 page essay to convince you. But I’ll give you a few points. The guardian is just another lobby with its own hopes and fears, but trying to convert all its readers to a subscription model, and it will use any click bait title and print any fud it can to convince you of the virtues of the subscription model. The bbc license fee, is illegal in England not to pay. The terms and conditions on license fee renewal cover all forms of media distribution and ways you might consume bbc content. And it’s illegal to reprint those terms and conditions in any other media format available so I can’t copy and paste it here for you. 50 percent of the criminals that pass through a British councils court houses, are there for non payment of bbc license fee. I get this info from my local paper public notices section. The bbc license fee creates a unlevel playing field for all other media organisations which who have media business models similar to the many media types the bbc produces. Bbc gets its money for free, many people, especially poor, receive criminal convictions for not paying it, it creates an anti competitive environment for competing media organisations, it’s lawyers are the best. At least local news outlets can print all the court cases it wins, if it’s still legal to. I heard that recently many more criminal convictions, let alone suspect investigations, are now subject to gag orders. This is England
  - 8y ago

classicsnoot 8y ago

I am ready to join any venture in creating local news. I am a capable writer with above average capability and means for generating local content. I have applied to every local paper in my area and have never once received a call/email back. I won't stop trying, but if anyone here is attempting a project even remotely pointed in the direction of local,online-or-paper news, i'd appreciate your consideration. I'm happy to start at minimum wage. I just want to write news in my spare time.

Eridrus 8y ago
You will probably get further by writing a story and then sending that story to local papers, rather than sending applications. If you're more interested in distribution than payment, Google is trying to build a tool for the general public to write news stories, get them published and indexed and surfaced to people: https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share
- classicsnoot 8y ago
  Cool concept. If it comes to my city, i am totally doing it.
eurticket 8y ago
We have the internet reach the community you love to write about online.
- classicsnoot 8y ago
  Love is rarely a part of what i have to write about... 40.72455679, -74.18459239
  - eurticket 8y ago
    well then, lets start a quick wordpress and self publish
pouta 8y ago

mirimir 8y ago

OK, so they found that "the spread or yield of newly issued local municipal bonds increased" after local papers closed. But from the title, I was expecting some actual data on local government spending. But no, it's all based on borrowing costs. The stuff about local papers having acted as watchdog agents is just interpretation. Here's the abstract of the study cited in the article: > Local newspapers hold their governments accountable. We examine the effect of local newspaper closures on public finance for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, we find municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points in the long run. Identification tests illustrate that these results are not being driven by deteriorating local economic conditions. The loss of monitoring that results from newspaper closures is associated with increased government inefficiencies, including higher likelihoods of costly advance refundings and negotiated issues, and higher government wages, employees, and tax revenues.

matt4077 8y ago
Borrowing costs obviously are (part of) government spending. But, more importantly, the idea is to use the market as a sort of proxy, or research instrument: it's the best known structure to judge the financial future of various entities, including governments. Borrowing costs, in an efficient market, perfectly represent society's consensus opinion on those cities' financial future. While it's possible that markets aren't perfect in pricing these bonds, they are almost certainly better at it than any single research team could ever hope to be.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Until they aren't anyway. Look at the AAA rated junk mortgage backed securities. Or Theranos - due diligence from a biology processor making money on the side could have told you that not all blood is sourced equal and the statistical minimum sizes to be able to detect certain components of low concentration accurately. Attempting to screen blood noninvasively would be more possible and that is a far harder problem that would call for several chained breakthroughs. Forget a research team - one person could beat the market without so much as cracking a book! A perfect market requires perfect knowledge which in addition to requiring science fiction predictive abilities would have very weird implications given causality issues. Like loans being marginal in rates or not granted (if you know ahead of time they will be good for it is guaranteed profit and everyone with capital could give a small but net winning offer). If they knew they would lose nobody would give a lossy loan. The stock market would be bizarrely illiquid or obsolete as funding is already guaranteed. Few would sell for what they see as a worse investment. Being able to tell if loaning five billion to an eccentric scientist would pay off or not. Interesting hypotheticals aside it is important to remember that while good at managing supply and demand usually the market is not an oracle nor a god. Going against what everyone thinks is worthless is one way to strike it rich.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

verelo 8y ago

Probably true, but just an opportunity for someone to produce something local and not paper based. Most products are designed for mass markets, it'd be great to see something work for a large group of smaller community in the way newspapers did in the past. Also i wonder if this is in part due to the fact that online news is more easily manipulated and therefore corruption is easier to get away with.

graeme 8y ago
The article specifically addressed your suggestion. It said people had been suggesting that ever since community papers declined, but there's been no replacement. It's still good to look for a replacement, but I think you may be being a bit blasé about it.
- verelo 8y ago
  I never said it would be easy, and i certainly don’t have a solution. Having worked very closely with old school media companies, being acquired by one, and trying to contribute to the issues...yeah, maybe I’m just exhausted by the problem, but i stand by staying it’s a big opportunity when someone finally gets it right.
Animats 8y ago
There was "patch.com". But now it just seems to be a scraper of news sites.
askafriend 8y ago
Nextdoor.com is used for this in my neighborhood. Lots of people debating local issues, local news stations posting relevant news, people buying and selling stuff (like the classifieds in a newspaper), local real estate etc. I think that sounds close to what you're describing.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Google's Bulletin is hyperlocal, https://searchengineland.com/google-bulletin-hyperlocal-news-nextdoor-comptetitor-290499 https://searchengineland.com/google-bulletin-hyperlocal-news...

Proven 8y ago

And therefore the taxpayer should fund a local paper