7 ms·

Why local US newspapers are sounding the alarm

109 points by prostoalex 8y ago

User23 8y ago
It’s not surprising that a business based on providing printouts of yesterday’s wire stories plus classified ads isn’t doing well.
- presidente20 8y ago
  It's surprising that the BBC think it's surprising.
  - fludlight 8y ago
    I wonder what the local news situation is in the UK.
    - CM30 8y ago
      Apparently it's struggling over here as well: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43106436 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43106436 That said, I suspect there's more chance of local newspapers surviving in the UK than the US, if only because we tend to like tradition more over here and because local papers in many UK towns are well... locally owned. For instance, the main one in my town is (as far as I can tell) run by the community, written by regular people there and funded by ads almost entirely placed by local businesses. So there's less chance of a bean counter closing it down because the company's bottom line is at risk. Overall though, they're also not doing so hot overall.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Do many local stories appear on the news wires?
  - shanecleveland 8y ago
    No. The point being made is that many smaller papers, which are mostly owned by large publishers, have some original, local content with the rest being non-local wire stories.
- ghaff 8y ago
  My town had a local newspaper for a while which went away. Now I have basically no source of information about local planning, zoning, etc. board meetings. I suppose I could more regularly attend town meetings and so forth but that often isn't really an option.
  - ianmcgowan 8y ago
    nextdoor.com? Though mine seems to be filled with people complaining about things, and lost dogs...
    - ghaff 8y ago
      It's a 7,000 person largely rural town. There's the occasional piece on wickedlocal but basically nothing systematic.
      - sjg007 8y ago
        My small town has a Facebook group that’s been filled with trump trolls. It’s disheartening.
  - qubax 8y ago
    Your town/municipality doesn't have a website with all that info? Granted, most town websites are horrid to navigate, but the information should be there.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Not really. There's no consistent source of information about upcoming issues, votes, etc. There is info about upcoming meetings but then you need to personally attend.
    - tcbawo 8y ago
      Facebook groups + alderman + local FOIA by activist citizens is what has been developing here.
    - 8y ago
dahdum 8y ago
Civic engagement dropped by ~5%, with p<.05, per the study linked the article. The way it was written I expected a drastic drop. I didn't see any other years compared to see if that kind of variance is typical. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/10584609.2012.762817?scroll=top&needAccess=true https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/10584609.2012...
EGreg 8y ago
I am gonna say it... In my experience there are three systems to organize human behavior: 1) Democracy. People vote for one policy that is then enforced for everyone. This is ok and worked in history but not as good at making progress and building wealth than the next two. 2) Capitalism. This is where people have unlimited private ownership of whatever they make and it is enforced using force. It has been much better than democracy at moving things forward, because there is competition among sellers, and they fill different niches. There is far more variety and innovation. 3) Collaboration. I think ultimately this wins out. Science. Open source. Wikipedia. They beat patents, closed source, and encyclopedia Britannica. It takes a while to get started but in the end, open information where anyone can add something without getting hit over the head beats closed competing systems. I think that if self driving cars would be done in a collaborative way instead of competitive way, then people would not get killed as much because they’d work out the kinks sooner. But then Waymo’s investors wouldn’t make as much money. Cryptocurrency is ushering in a revolution in that open source can actuallu be paid for by having the original authors have a token sale to the first customers, and then there isn’t any more rent extraction like with VC funded centralized companies. It is also better for the end users whose data is only decrypted at the edges, thus they can trust the network not to get hacked, snooped in bulk, have information asymmetry, close their account, take down their website etc. So when it comes to news, something like a wikinews for each community would be far superior at getting things going. Already citizen journalists can take photos and videos of the events in their neighborhood. Why do we need people risking their lives going to a dangerous area for the “prestige” when the locals can document it and an uncensorable network can carry images to other countries? I would say that humanity will progress to #3 for most things and automation will eventually take over and UBI will pay for people’s needs. People will collaborate and the era of individual achievement (Mozart, etc.) will be in the past.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kanox 8y ago
  Is this trolling?
  - 8y ago
1996 8y ago
Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease?
msie 8y ago
In my town both the major newspapers are owned by one company. That one company also laid off a lot of reporting staff and saved money by using syndicated content in both papers. It's sad to see how less diverse the opinions are. We are just being told what to think now.
- Accioni 8y ago
  Yeah, similar here. It really sucks.
russellbeattie 8y ago
I started my career as a journalist at a small daily paper before moving into tech in the 1990s. As a young reporter - still in college - I got horrible assignments like having to attend local budget meetings, going down to the police station to copy the blotter, sitting in on school board meetings, updating the local calendar and reporting on the high school sports teams, among other tasks. This stuff was boring, tedious and rarely ever generated "news" of anything beyond an informational synopses of the goings on around town. It didn't matter - the paper was picked up and read daily by thousands of readers. Many read it cover to cover. It's truly an important service to any community. In fact, I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all. Newspapers traditionally bring people together and provide a sense of belonging and regional awareness and even pride. This stuff isn't sexy, nor particularly profitable, but it has to be done! Someone needs to keep track of these events, summarize and disseminate this information. Even the most boring, mundane happenings need to be recorded and publicized for well-functioning society. Without that effort, the things happening around us become opaque, and being informed relies literally on word of mouth. Sadly, pretty much every effort to digitally replicate the services provided by local papers has failed to my knowledge. As a result, I know more about what's happening in London than I do about my home city. No idea what the solution is, and a lot of people much smarter than myself have tried for years. But what I do know is the long term consequences of small newspapers closing is a lot more dire than I think most people realize.
- sjg007 8y ago
  The future is probably an AI aggregator that takes meeting minutes and summarizes them. Then every public event / happening gets posted to Facebook. The one journalist turns into the content creators themselves themselves. Maybe someone like Facebook could geofence sites and aggregate them into something like My Town.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I'm actually working on a project similar to this, using an AI to generate local news articles. The problem with this is every town does it differently, and some do it so awfully that getting anything of value from the minutes takes a lot of work for a human who was actually at the meeting itself. For example, my town doesn't publish its meeting minutes online for three months. I can get the minutes in person the week after, but by then the once-weekly newspaper has "scooped" my AI because they had a human there. And even after I get the minutes, oftentimes the note will say "approved PUD conversion from C-2 for [Business X]. Motion from [Councilmember Y] seconded by [Councilmember Z]". Without knowing the discussion surrounding that decision, the minutes are dry and would produce an even drier news article. I've tried to work with other area towns as well, and many of them don't put their meeting minutes online at all. The most reliable council meeting notes come from bigger cities, which don't need an AI to write their news for them.
hsthompson3829 8y ago
There is no such thing as a "journalist". They are activists paid to advance the interest of the corporation they work for. I feel sorry for those who fall for the old "objective journalism" canard, it's laughable.
davidw 8y ago
In my town, there's still a local paper, and they send out that one person, who is reasonably neutral, to report on what happens during, say, city council meetings. Without that person, you just have what the councilors say, what Angry Neighbors report (the parking! won't someone think of the parking!), or maybe a long, long, tedious recording that no sane person can sit through to make heads or tails of what happened. That's super important stuff and has a lot more impact on my life than many things in DC. From the article: > Susan's a Daily Camera subscriber, but she mentions Boulder's local paper recently raised the subscription price by 25%. This is, in part, a result of tariffs by the Trump administration: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-publishers-worry-about-pricier-newsprint-new-tariffs-n865416 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-publishers-worry-ab...
- vkou 8y ago
  For a few years, I was that person in my village. At least, I like to think I was neutral in my writing. There were two political cliques, and one of them occasionally behaved in incredibly jerkish ways (And would regularly have between 0 and 40% of the council seats).
- lurquer 8y ago
  How much is due to the tariff?
shoguning 8y ago
> But nationwide, there's been no mass replacement of local newspapers. Non-profit online sites are largely based in major metro areas. Is this really true? I've heard of at least a couple of non-profit newspapers opening in small towns including the one I'm from, and I don't really pay that close of attention to this stuff. For enterprising journalists there are a lot of people willing to pay/donate to these causes. Optimistically, the funding can move from ad/subscription more to donations/grants and the local reporting can continue.
- exotree 8y ago
  It is very true. And a journalist can’t do the job of being a journalist if they have to spend hours in city council meetings in addition to wooing subscribers. This business is tough.
corysama 8y ago
There have been studies showing that without local papers acting as watchdogs, local government costs go up. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280712 https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-local-news.php https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-loc... https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  When nobody guards the guards the guards screw off and waste resources.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  this must only really work in small communities as most larger cities are pretty much immune to monitoring except corruption. anecdotal, in Atlanta we tend to see the local TV news doing a lot of investigation with one partnered with the local paper (AJC). They tend to focus on corruption more than costs of city programs. However the one expense they never ever will touch is how cities are getting buried by pension costs to where even the pension systems are threatened. (Chicago's system will be out of money by 2021) too rich of benefits and more retirees than active is to much of a burden
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    > this must only really work in small communities as most larger cities are pretty much immune to monitoring except corruption You are wrong, didn't read the link, don't make any arguments about its findings, and don't offer any evidence for your claims. "To further account for within-state cross county variation, we control for county-level differences in population, population growth, per capita income, and employment growth." Was it really so important that you say "this study is wrong" and share your personal anecdote that you couldn't have spent a few minutes reading it first? Commenting on HackerNews isn't a race and the level of discourse usually goes up when people aren't in a rush to comment. Is sharing a personal anecdote on HackerNews with strangers more valuable than learning something new?
simplecomplex 8y ago
News is no longer what a local paper publishes. It's the latest Instagram story from your friends. It's the Facebook post from a local school informing parents of a PTA meeting. It's the Twitter status update from the President. It's a Reddit post discussing problems with the latest MacBook keyboards. Why is the newspaper dying? Because updates about what is happening in people's world is no longer constrained by what is published in the local paper! And everyone involved in the old industry still can't wrap their minds around it. The newspaper was a medium for communication. The World Wide Web is a medium for communication. News didn't die, but what constitutes news is no longer defined by what the local paper decides to publish.
- pretendscholar 8y ago
  A Facebook post doesn't cover the PTA meeting and compile what occurred. A twitter update from the president is national news and just a snippet where an article about the tweet would provide a larger context about what he's talking about. Reddit is so likely to be astroturfed by big companies that it is becoming increasingly misinformation.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Why is the newspaper dying? Because updates about what is happening in people's world is no longer constrained by what is published in the local paper! And everyone involved in the old industry still can't wrap their minds around it. This is simply not true. There is a huge demand, perhaps now moreso than ever, for trustworthy sources of consolidated information about current events. I don't follow Trump or the White House on Twitter. I don't follow Apple news on Reddit. I don't attend PTA meetings and I don't follow them on Facebook. Do you expect me to start doing all those things to replace reading the paper?
  - simplecomplex 8y ago
    I don't expect you to do anything. I was explaining why the newspaper is dying: Because people (in general, in aggregate) are preferring other forms of communication. It's obvious that in a world where the newspaper is your only option for "updates on things happening that are relevant to you", that it would do better than in a world where there are many more options to fill that need. The number of Americans reading print newspapers has been declining since the web became popular. The average age of a newspaper reader is somewhere north of 55.
a3n 8y ago
It's odd that newspapers are dying because their old business model, ad support, has gone away, but Facebook and Google thrive on ads.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Facebook and Google have the eyeballs, so their ad space is perceived to be valuable. Newspapers... don't. In the Boston area, the Herald just went under this year, and apparently the Globe has less than a million daily readers. And the Globe is a major, flagship paper. But, as with the Globe's ownership's other major concern (The Red Sox), they're catering to a graying, aging, dying audience.
- mudil 8y ago
  GoogleFB thrive on ads because they violate privacy. Say I am from Springfield. Normally, the newspaper would show the ads for Springfield businesses. Now Google shows the ads for Springfield businesses on Candy Crush Saga. The same effect happens to specialty, niche publications. I am running a medical technologies site aimed at doctors for 15 years, and we can barely stay afloat. Google violates privacy and thrives on ads, but people that actually create the content are suffering. I call it the Google's War on Journalism. PS To be sure, Google learned that our readers are doctors from our site and related sites. Now, Google shows them doctor-related ads on Candy Crush Saga. How's that for fairness?!
- mrweasel 8y ago
  Facebook and Google are outliers. Your average website (if there is such a thing anymore) with 10.000 - 100.000 aren't thriving on ads, they struggle to survive as well, at least the for profit sites.
alienreborn 8y ago
> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption." -- David Simon (Creator of The Wire) on the necessity of local newspapers which are quickly disappearing. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wire-newspapers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...
jackfoxy 8y ago
There may be hope for automating the dissemination of local and state government information and news when agencies use services like opengov.com. The problem is still getting this information to venues people will notice and pay attention to. This will still probably come down to social media. In many ways social media is taking the place of local newspapers.
moorhosj 8y ago
Pew found a 35% decline in reporters covering statehouses from 2003 to 2014. This is a scary lack of information for voters and watchdogs. http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-statehouse-press/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-state... ==Less than a third of U.S. newspapers assign any kind of reporter—full time or part time—to the statehouse. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, only 30% of the 801 daily papers it monitor send a staffer to the statehouse for any period of time. In Massachusetts, whose capital is the largest city (Boston), just 6% of the state’s newspapers have any reporting presence at the statehouse—the lowest percentage of newspaper representation of any state.==
katzgrau 8y ago
A number of comments here are along the lines of "I'm more informed today than I was before the web, no problem here." You're probably more informed on the whole, but there are fewer and fewer eyes watching our elected officials and shining lights into dark places. A strong and free press is critical in maintaining a healthy democracy. Support your local papers or hyperlocal bloggers if you see them doing good work - you and your community will benefit in the long term.
- wmeredith 8y ago
  People are more informed about sensationalist clickbait bullshit and national news that depresses and enrages us because that’s what gets “shared”. But people don’t know their neighbors. It’s sad.
- kingofhdds 8y ago
  "Press" is just a technical method of information dissemination which certainly can become outdated. Democracy needs freedom of speech and expression.
  - katzgrau 8y ago
    Kind of a weird nitpick there. Democracy needs someone working to uncover things that the public needs to know to make informed voting decisions.
    - kingofhdds 8y ago
      "Someone uncovering things" appears because in an environment where free speech is not suppressed political, economical, and ideological competitions create incentives to do it. Is it a newspaper, a TV channel, a blog, social network, telepathy, or something else which is used to disseminate information then is a purely technical issue.
      - katzgrau 8y ago
        Just because free speech is possible doesn't mean someone will take up the role of investigative reporter
kalleboo 8y ago
Sweden had the same problem of local newspapers shutting down in the 50's and 60's, and introduced a system of press support where the government directly subsidizes newspapers to keep competition available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support
- ravenstine 8y ago
  Doesn't that create a conflict of interest?
  - kingofhdds 8y ago
    Of course it does.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that. Rather than try or pretend to be neutral, Swedish newspapers tend to outright state their political affiliations/biases. (e.g. "Skånska Dagbladet is close to the Centre Party"[0] "Aftonbladet describes itself as an independent social-democratic newspaper"[1]). This results in the newspapers having protection of the parties they support, rather than the legislature-du-jour, and an attempt by the government to influence an opposing newspaper would quickly gain political attention. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skånska_Dagbladet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skånska_Dagbladet [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet
EGreg 8y ago
I wrote an extensive comment as to why I consider the capitalist funding model for news to be suboptimal and not resilient in the face of the Internet. I described an alternative in terms of collaborative efforts like wikinews, user-submitted content, and fact checking and analysis as a community effort. It tried to be as detailed and helpful as possible in a reasonable space. It was downvoted (fine) and then flagged and killed. Also replies to it that agreed with it were flagged even more and killed. My question is - why was it flagged? Can anyone explain? Is it because it suggested a non-capitalist approach to news? Or because it made a broader point? I really think the “flag” feature should require an explanation.
kingofhdds 8y ago
If taxi drivers were in the same way connected to social studies people as journos are, we would be reading laments about oldschool taxi services as a cornerstone of society now.
ramblerman 8y ago
The biggest loss to newspapers imo is the fact that they got just 1 chance every day to publish their articles. It was harder to spy on what the other was doing, unless you wanted to be a day behind them. This allowed people to come up with more original opinions, and less hivemind behavior that you see with the constantly updating/mutating articles online.

109 points by prostoalex 8y ago

It’s not surprising that a business based on providing printouts of yesterday’s wire stories plus classified ads isn’t doing well.

presidente20 8y ago
It's surprising that the BBC think it's surprising.
- fludlight 8y ago
  I wonder what the local news situation is in the UK.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Apparently it's struggling over here as well: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43106436 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43106436 That said, I suspect there's more chance of local newspapers surviving in the UK than the US, if only because we tend to like tradition more over here and because local papers in many UK towns are well... locally owned. For instance, the main one in my town is (as far as I can tell) run by the community, written by regular people there and funded by ads almost entirely placed by local businesses. So there's less chance of a bean counter closing it down because the company's bottom line is at risk. Overall though, they're also not doing so hot overall.
chrisseaton 8y ago
Do many local stories appear on the news wires?
- shanecleveland 8y ago
  No. The point being made is that many smaller papers, which are mostly owned by large publishers, have some original, local content with the rest being non-local wire stories.
ghaff 8y ago
My town had a local newspaper for a while which went away. Now I have basically no source of information about local planning, zoning, etc. board meetings. I suppose I could more regularly attend town meetings and so forth but that often isn't really an option.
- ianmcgowan 8y ago
  nextdoor.com? Though mine seems to be filled with people complaining about things, and lost dogs...
  - ghaff 8y ago
    It's a 7,000 person largely rural town. There's the occasional piece on wickedlocal but basically nothing systematic.
    - sjg007 8y ago
      My small town has a Facebook group that’s been filled with trump trolls. It’s disheartening.
- qubax 8y ago
  Your town/municipality doesn't have a website with all that info? Granted, most town websites are horrid to navigate, but the information should be there.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Not really. There's no consistent source of information about upcoming issues, votes, etc. There is info about upcoming meetings but then you need to personally attend.
  - tcbawo 8y ago
    Facebook groups + alderman + local FOIA by activist citizens is what has been developing here.
  - 8y ago

dahdum 8y ago

Civic engagement dropped by ~5%, with p<.05, per the study linked the article. The way it was written I expected a drastic drop. I didn't see any other years compared to see if that kind of variance is typical. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/10584609.2012.762817?scroll=top&needAccess=true https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/10584609.2012...

EGreg 8y ago

I am gonna say it... In my experience there are three systems to organize human behavior: 1) Democracy. People vote for one policy that is then enforced for everyone. This is ok and worked in history but not as good at making progress and building wealth than the next two. 2) Capitalism. This is where people have unlimited private ownership of whatever they make and it is enforced using force. It has been much better than democracy at moving things forward, because there is competition among sellers, and they fill different niches. There is far more variety and innovation. 3) Collaboration. I think ultimately this wins out. Science. Open source. Wikipedia. They beat patents, closed source, and encyclopedia Britannica. It takes a while to get started but in the end, open information where anyone can add something without getting hit over the head beats closed competing systems. I think that if self driving cars would be done in a collaborative way instead of competitive way, then people would not get killed as much because they’d work out the kinks sooner. But then Waymo’s investors wouldn’t make as much money. Cryptocurrency is ushering in a revolution in that open source can actuallu be paid for by having the original authors have a token sale to the first customers, and then there isn’t any more rent extraction like with VC funded centralized companies. It is also better for the end users whose data is only decrypted at the edges, thus they can trust the network not to get hacked, snooped in bulk, have information asymmetry, close their account, take down their website etc. So when it comes to news, something like a wikinews for each community would be far superior at getting things going. Already citizen journalists can take photos and videos of the events in their neighborhood. Why do we need people risking their lives going to a dangerous area for the “prestige” when the locals can document it and an uncensorable network can carry images to other countries? I would say that humanity will progress to #3 for most things and automation will eventually take over and UBI will pay for people’s needs. People will collaborate and the era of individual achievement (Mozart, etc.) will be in the past.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kanox 8y ago
Is this trolling?
- 8y ago

1996 8y ago

Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease?

msie 8y ago

In my town both the major newspapers are owned by one company. That one company also laid off a lot of reporting staff and saved money by using syndicated content in both papers. It's sad to see how less diverse the opinions are. We are just being told what to think now.

Accioni 8y ago
Yeah, similar here. It really sucks.

russellbeattie 8y ago

I started my career as a journalist at a small daily paper before moving into tech in the 1990s. As a young reporter - still in college - I got horrible assignments like having to attend local budget meetings, going down to the police station to copy the blotter, sitting in on school board meetings, updating the local calendar and reporting on the high school sports teams, among other tasks. This stuff was boring, tedious and rarely ever generated "news" of anything beyond an informational synopses of the goings on around town. It didn't matter - the paper was picked up and read daily by thousands of readers. Many read it cover to cover. It's truly an important service to any community. In fact, I would go so far as to say that without a local newspaper an area isn't a community at all. Newspapers traditionally bring people together and provide a sense of belonging and regional awareness and even pride. This stuff isn't sexy, nor particularly profitable, but it has to be done! Someone needs to keep track of these events, summarize and disseminate this information. Even the most boring, mundane happenings need to be recorded and publicized for well-functioning society. Without that effort, the things happening around us become opaque, and being informed relies literally on word of mouth. Sadly, pretty much every effort to digitally replicate the services provided by local papers has failed to my knowledge. As a result, I know more about what's happening in London than I do about my home city. No idea what the solution is, and a lot of people much smarter than myself have tried for years. But what I do know is the long term consequences of small newspapers closing is a lot more dire than I think most people realize.

sjg007 8y ago
The future is probably an AI aggregator that takes meeting minutes and summarizes them. Then every public event / happening gets posted to Facebook. The one journalist turns into the content creators themselves themselves. Maybe someone like Facebook could geofence sites and aggregate them into something like My Town.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I'm actually working on a project similar to this, using an AI to generate local news articles. The problem with this is every town does it differently, and some do it so awfully that getting anything of value from the minutes takes a lot of work for a human who was actually at the meeting itself. For example, my town doesn't publish its meeting minutes online for three months. I can get the minutes in person the week after, but by then the once-weekly newspaper has "scooped" my AI because they had a human there. And even after I get the minutes, oftentimes the note will say "approved PUD conversion from C-2 for [Business X]. Motion from [Councilmember Y] seconded by [Councilmember Z]". Without knowing the discussion surrounding that decision, the minutes are dry and would produce an even drier news article. I've tried to work with other area towns as well, and many of them don't put their meeting minutes online at all. The most reliable council meeting notes come from bigger cities, which don't need an AI to write their news for them.

hsthompson3829 8y ago

There is no such thing as a "journalist". They are activists paid to advance the interest of the corporation they work for. I feel sorry for those who fall for the old "objective journalism" canard, it's laughable.

davidw 8y ago

In my town, there's still a local paper, and they send out that one person, who is reasonably neutral, to report on what happens during, say, city council meetings. Without that person, you just have what the councilors say, what Angry Neighbors report (the parking! won't someone think of the parking!), or maybe a long, long, tedious recording that no sane person can sit through to make heads or tails of what happened. That's super important stuff and has a lot more impact on my life than many things in DC. From the article: > Susan's a Daily Camera subscriber, but she mentions Boulder's local paper recently raised the subscription price by 25%. This is, in part, a result of tariffs by the Trump administration: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-publishers-worry-about-pricier-newsprint-new-tariffs-n865416 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-publishers-worry-ab...

vkou 8y ago
For a few years, I was that person in my village. At least, I like to think I was neutral in my writing. There were two political cliques, and one of them occasionally behaved in incredibly jerkish ways (And would regularly have between 0 and 40% of the council seats).
lurquer 8y ago
How much is due to the tariff?

shoguning 8y ago

> But nationwide, there's been no mass replacement of local newspapers. Non-profit online sites are largely based in major metro areas. Is this really true? I've heard of at least a couple of non-profit newspapers opening in small towns including the one I'm from, and I don't really pay that close of attention to this stuff. For enterprising journalists there are a lot of people willing to pay/donate to these causes. Optimistically, the funding can move from ad/subscription more to donations/grants and the local reporting can continue.

exotree 8y ago
It is very true. And a journalist can’t do the job of being a journalist if they have to spend hours in city council meetings in addition to wooing subscribers. This business is tough.

corysama 8y ago

There have been studies showing that without local papers acting as watchdogs, local government costs go up. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280712 https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-local-news.php https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-loc... https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
When nobody guards the guards the guards screw off and waste resources.
Shivetya 8y ago
this must only really work in small communities as most larger cities are pretty much immune to monitoring except corruption. anecdotal, in Atlanta we tend to see the local TV news doing a lot of investigation with one partnered with the local paper (AJC). They tend to focus on corruption more than costs of city programs. However the one expense they never ever will touch is how cities are getting buried by pension costs to where even the pension systems are threatened. (Chicago's system will be out of money by 2021) too rich of benefits and more retirees than active is to much of a burden
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  > this must only really work in small communities as most larger cities are pretty much immune to monitoring except corruption You are wrong, didn't read the link, don't make any arguments about its findings, and don't offer any evidence for your claims. "To further account for within-state cross county variation, we control for county-level differences in population, population growth, per capita income, and employment growth." Was it really so important that you say "this study is wrong" and share your personal anecdote that you couldn't have spent a few minutes reading it first? Commenting on HackerNews isn't a race and the level of discourse usually goes up when people aren't in a rush to comment. Is sharing a personal anecdote on HackerNews with strangers more valuable than learning something new?

simplecomplex 8y ago

News is no longer what a local paper publishes. It's the latest Instagram story from your friends. It's the Facebook post from a local school informing parents of a PTA meeting. It's the Twitter status update from the President. It's a Reddit post discussing problems with the latest MacBook keyboards. Why is the newspaper dying? Because updates about what is happening in people's world is no longer constrained by what is published in the local paper! And everyone involved in the old industry still can't wrap their minds around it. The newspaper was a medium for communication. The World Wide Web is a medium for communication. News didn't die, but what constitutes news is no longer defined by what the local paper decides to publish.

pretendscholar 8y ago
A Facebook post doesn't cover the PTA meeting and compile what occurred. A twitter update from the president is national news and just a snippet where an article about the tweet would provide a larger context about what he's talking about. Reddit is so likely to be astroturfed by big companies that it is becoming increasingly misinformation.
nerdponx 8y ago
Why is the newspaper dying? Because updates about what is happening in people's world is no longer constrained by what is published in the local paper! And everyone involved in the old industry still can't wrap their minds around it. This is simply not true. There is a huge demand, perhaps now moreso than ever, for trustworthy sources of consolidated information about current events. I don't follow Trump or the White House on Twitter. I don't follow Apple news on Reddit. I don't attend PTA meetings and I don't follow them on Facebook. Do you expect me to start doing all those things to replace reading the paper?
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  I don't expect you to do anything. I was explaining why the newspaper is dying: Because people (in general, in aggregate) are preferring other forms of communication. It's obvious that in a world where the newspaper is your only option for "updates on things happening that are relevant to you", that it would do better than in a world where there are many more options to fill that need. The number of Americans reading print newspapers has been declining since the web became popular. The average age of a newspaper reader is somewhere north of 55.

a3n 8y ago

It's odd that newspapers are dying because their old business model, ad support, has gone away, but Facebook and Google thrive on ads.

megaman22 8y ago
Facebook and Google have the eyeballs, so their ad space is perceived to be valuable. Newspapers... don't. In the Boston area, the Herald just went under this year, and apparently the Globe has less than a million daily readers. And the Globe is a major, flagship paper. But, as with the Globe's ownership's other major concern (The Red Sox), they're catering to a graying, aging, dying audience.
mudil 8y ago
GoogleFB thrive on ads because they violate privacy. Say I am from Springfield. Normally, the newspaper would show the ads for Springfield businesses. Now Google shows the ads for Springfield businesses on Candy Crush Saga. The same effect happens to specialty, niche publications. I am running a medical technologies site aimed at doctors for 15 years, and we can barely stay afloat. Google violates privacy and thrives on ads, but people that actually create the content are suffering. I call it the Google's War on Journalism. PS To be sure, Google learned that our readers are doctors from our site and related sites. Now, Google shows them doctor-related ads on Candy Crush Saga. How's that for fairness?!
mrweasel 8y ago
Facebook and Google are outliers. Your average website (if there is such a thing anymore) with 10.000 - 100.000 aren't thriving on ads, they struggle to survive as well, at least the for profit sites.

alienreborn 8y ago

> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption." -- David Simon (Creator of The Wire) on the necessity of local newspapers which are quickly disappearing. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wire-newspapers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...

jackfoxy 8y ago

There may be hope for automating the dissemination of local and state government information and news when agencies use services like opengov.com. The problem is still getting this information to venues people will notice and pay attention to. This will still probably come down to social media. In many ways social media is taking the place of local newspapers.

moorhosj 8y ago

Pew found a 35% decline in reporters covering statehouses from 2003 to 2014. This is a scary lack of information for voters and watchdogs. http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-statehouse-press/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-state... ==Less than a third of U.S. newspapers assign any kind of reporter—full time or part time—to the statehouse. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, only 30% of the 801 daily papers it monitor send a staffer to the statehouse for any period of time. In Massachusetts, whose capital is the largest city (Boston), just 6% of the state’s newspapers have any reporting presence at the statehouse—the lowest percentage of newspaper representation of any state.==

katzgrau 8y ago

A number of comments here are along the lines of "I'm more informed today than I was before the web, no problem here." You're probably more informed on the whole, but there are fewer and fewer eyes watching our elected officials and shining lights into dark places. A strong and free press is critical in maintaining a healthy democracy. Support your local papers or hyperlocal bloggers if you see them doing good work - you and your community will benefit in the long term.

wmeredith 8y ago
People are more informed about sensationalist clickbait bullshit and national news that depresses and enrages us because that’s what gets “shared”. But people don’t know their neighbors. It’s sad.
kingofhdds 8y ago
"Press" is just a technical method of information dissemination which certainly can become outdated. Democracy needs freedom of speech and expression.
- katzgrau 8y ago
  Kind of a weird nitpick there. Democracy needs someone working to uncover things that the public needs to know to make informed voting decisions.
  - kingofhdds 8y ago
    "Someone uncovering things" appears because in an environment where free speech is not suppressed political, economical, and ideological competitions create incentives to do it. Is it a newspaper, a TV channel, a blog, social network, telepathy, or something else which is used to disseminate information then is a purely technical issue.
    - katzgrau 8y ago
      Just because free speech is possible doesn't mean someone will take up the role of investigative reporter

kalleboo 8y ago

Sweden had the same problem of local newspapers shutting down in the 50's and 60's, and introduced a system of press support where the government directly subsidizes newspapers to keep competition available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support

ravenstine 8y ago
Doesn't that create a conflict of interest?
- kingofhdds 8y ago
  Of course it does.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that. Rather than try or pretend to be neutral, Swedish newspapers tend to outright state their political affiliations/biases. (e.g. "Skånska Dagbladet is close to the Centre Party"[0] "Aftonbladet describes itself as an independent social-democratic newspaper"[1]). This results in the newspapers having protection of the parties they support, rather than the legislature-du-jour, and an attempt by the government to influence an opposing newspaper would quickly gain political attention. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skånska_Dagbladet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skånska_Dagbladet [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet

EGreg 8y ago

I wrote an extensive comment as to why I consider the capitalist funding model for news to be suboptimal and not resilient in the face of the Internet. I described an alternative in terms of collaborative efforts like wikinews, user-submitted content, and fact checking and analysis as a community effort. It tried to be as detailed and helpful as possible in a reasonable space. It was downvoted (fine) and then flagged and killed. Also replies to it that agreed with it were flagged even more and killed. My question is - why was it flagged? Can anyone explain? Is it because it suggested a non-capitalist approach to news? Or because it made a broader point? I really think the “flag” feature should require an explanation.

kingofhdds 8y ago

If taxi drivers were in the same way connected to social studies people as journos are, we would be reading laments about oldschool taxi services as a cornerstone of society now.

ramblerman 8y ago

The biggest loss to newspapers imo is the fact that they got just 1 chance every day to publish their articles. It was harder to spy on what the other was doing, unless you wanted to be a day behind them. This allowed people to come up with more original opinions, and less hivemind behavior that you see with the constantly updating/mutating articles online.