9 ms·
Local News Is Dying, Taking Small Town America With It
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bayesian_horse 8y agoMaybe small town America has to go? Not saying it should. But it may be a valid question.
- Kye 8y agoBut where will we put the odd little thrift shops and antique stores that only open a few hours on the weekend and don't seem to be economically viable despite lasting for years? They're fun to browse with a friend who appreciates your sense of humor.
- krapp 8y agoWhat if I told you it was possible to have "odd little thrift shops" even in large towns and cities, because at that scale, neighborhoods replace small towns culturally?
- Kye 8y agoIt's just not the same without the run-down boom town aesthetic. Big town stores might have things from the '60s/'70s/'80s/'90s, but not things that have been there since the '60s/'70s/'80s/'90s.
- CompelTechnic 8y agoIt has to stay. Farms, mines, and factories (usually in small towns, anyway) aren't going to run themselves and cannot all be outsourced.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- FussyZeus 8y agoThese seem like problems that could be solved with applications of proper mass transit.
- AmVess 8y agoYour solution to small town newspapers dying off is to make people ride hundreds of miles a day on buses?
- ajmurmann 8y agoWhere did he mention buses?
- cwbrandsma 8y agoDo you realize how spread apart farms are? They aren’t stackable. My parent’s farm is in a town of 2000 people, their land is a 10 minute drive from town if direct. The nearest city is 2 hours driving. If you had to bus all the farmers to their different fields that would take all day. Oh, and these guys will have multiple properties scattered all over the map to attend to. Really, the majority of America’s farm land is not near any city at all. Cities tend to push out and run farmers off. City planners see farm land as land that should be developed. Then there are the small town people themselves. And the end of the day, none of those people want to live in a city. I live in a city, frankly, city life sucks. If you switch to saying “we should do more urban farming”...which you should, please do. That works until you start talking about meat and dairy products. You probably don’t want animal operations inside a city (check out Chino, CA dairies), and even if you do, the feed for the animals will have to come from outside the city.
- ryneandal 8y agoThere's really no way to optimize public transit in such remote areas. A lot of farmers will have a few hundred acres in one section and another 800 a few miles away, they're constantly traveling around to where their crops are. Also, they can't fit their gear in a backpack like most office workers. There's really only one option when your payload varies from hundreds or thousands of lbs to a few lbs, and that's living reasonably near your land, not to mention the variety of equipment that requires driving.
- sehugg 8y agoLocal papers in cities like NYC and Baltimore are also shuttering, so this is more about local journalism than it is about small towns.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- snarfy 8y agoMy wife is on nextdoor. I hear all the local news.
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoThat works OK for gossip. But how does it solve the problem of keeping government honest? This was noted in the second paragraph of the article: Without journalists digging through property records or attending city council meetings, looking for official wrongdoing and revealing secret deals, local politicians will operate unchecked—with predictable consequences.
- rurcliped 8y agoIn my area, local journalism had a sharp decline as soon as the publisher began requiring Facebook authentication for comments on the online stories. Previously there had been at least a dozen comments on any major story and now there are always zero. Apparently throwaway accounts can be most critical when the audience is your closest neighbors, especially when a poster is associated with a local business. (Admittedly, there had been some abuse of the online comments and the publisher did save money in the short term by dropping any moderator effort from the payroll costs.)
- gowanus 8y agoIt's kind of unfortunate that there's no easy way to scope the internet down to a smaller group of participants, for small time operations like local news sites. Local news doesn't want to include audience participation from as far away as another time zone, or another state, but even then, geographic exclusions aren't an entirely correct exclusion criteria, since former residents of a local region may wish to participate from afar, because they still tune into home town news, after moving to new territory. Real world names freeze out lots of participation, because taking ownership of an "incorrect" (contentious) opinion can have permanent consequences to one's reputation. The real name and/or social credibility fix, is a blunt force trauma solution, to keep out obnoxious people, and isolate discourse to limited subgroups. But another problem is, even without being obnoxious, non-professional participants frequently go off-topic and off-script. Pseudonyms almost certainly require painstaking, labor intensive moderation, and a skillful attention devoted to selectively ascribing relevance to conversation. Most local operations just want to know there's an audience with a pulse, but providing that audience with a platform and a voice is another matter entirely.
- Eridrus 8y agoOne option is to do what illicit sites have done forever: require an invite, such that the bad deeds of the invitee reflect on the inviter. Doesn't require real names on the site, but the inviter knows who they are inviting.
- 8y ago
- jccalhoun 8y agoThis is interesting but it seems like it is just a baseline. I didn't see how the amount of local news now compares to the amount in the past?
- jcims 8y agoIs anyone else getting blocked with a Bloomberg ToS violation warning? Terms of Service Violation Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service. For inquiries related to this message please contact support. For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot by clicking "I'm not a robot" below. Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review the Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.
- alyandon 8y agoI get that as well and I tunnel all my web traffic through a cheap VPS. I get captcha challenges often since my IP address comes from commercial instead of residential range.
- mrep 8y agoNope, and I have ublock running. Do you have javascript disabled?
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoI run Firefox and NoScript and don't allow Javascript from Bloomberg. I've never had a problem viewing their articles. I'll guess it has more to do with the originating IP address (e.g. perhaps lots of requests from a single IP behind a firewall) or maybe something to do with cookies (I allow all but delete all at least once daily, so I never have old cookies lingering around). I'm in the USA so geolocation might enter into it as well.
- user5994461 8y agoIt happens from time to time.
- aalleavitch 8y agoYou should make the header start in helvetica and just imperceptibly slowly have the letters animate to drift apart
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PakG1 8y agoWhenever I hear the latest issues with local news and various attempts to solve it, I am reminded of Grisham's book The Last Juror. For whatever reason, it dramatized the effect that local news can have on a small community that made me really appreciate its potential as a nice public service, if for nothing else than to keep the community talking about things together.
- beeskneecaps 8y agoNextdoor seems like the place where local papers can join up as news pages to reboot their traffic.
- brightball 8y agoIMO local radio has the most potential to augment local news services. It’s a more natural fit.
- wallflower 8y agoIn case you've never encountered Clay Shirky's classic essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", it is a prescient look from 2009. > It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem... > Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
- isostatic 8y agoIt's a symptom of the fact that people on the whole do not want to pay for news. It's a failure of capitalism that the positive externalities of local news are not captured by the people who generate it (just like a failure of capitalism that the negative externalities of so many things aren't borne by those that generate it)
- njharman 8y agoWhat we get in USA is not news though. Esp on TV. It is weather, sports, gossip, fluff pieces, war/disaster/crime (typically non-local), political sound bites. With 1/3 to 50% ads depending on medium. All those news types have better and or free sources. With more depth and detail. Problem with tradituinal news orgs are that they attempt to serve everybody so is generic, shallow. And thus very low value. Very low.
- CM30 8y agoYeah, this pretty much sums up another media dilemma nowadays. The internet has made jack of all trades services obsolete, and so people don't need to rely on a single source for all that stuff any more. So the everyday newspaper or TV news network that tries to cover everything simply can't compete with a legion of experts covering their own specialities.
- isostatic 8y agoIn the past news organisations used to pay for those people to find out what's happening in Ruralton, TN, and let the people know. People now aren't willing to pay for those experts, so the only ones that cover the news are those with other agenda
- st26 8y agoPersonally I feel like I would happily pay small amounts for news, but nobody has figured out how to frictionlessly pay $0.00004 to read a news article I'm interested in. We're stuck right now with only two models, $15-30/mo subscriptions subsidizing hordes of non-payers, or ads.
- combatentropy 8y ago> "we need more at the policy level,” said Napoli, who believes public funding could alleviate the local news crisis Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government. Also, artificially propping up old ways of doing business is a rickety foundation. Newspapers as we know them occupy a narrow slice in world history. It's not like we have always had newspapers from the beginning of time up until now. Let's investigate natural ways to accomplish the same goal of newspapers, but with our current technology. The internet has obliterated costs to publish. Compare a building full of typesetters, Linotypes, and printing presses, to WordPress and server rental. Now that doesn't address all of a newspaper's old expenses. There is still the staff: reporters spending days and weeks investigating a story, editors organizing and refining. But what does the Press, invented from scratch with our current technology, look like? I think you have to consider the different sections of an old newspaper one at a time: 1. Product reviews. Seems that there is still plenty of that, between the various specialized websites and bloggers and vloggers. 2. Lifestyle. Again, we are drowning in such coverage, like on Youtube. 3. Sports. I don't know, I don't keep up with sports. How is sports news faring? 4. Business news. Again I don't know and don't care. Someone else comment. and finally, biggest of all: 5. The main example and, to many, the raison d'etre for news: keeping government and businesses honest, by sniffing out corruption. Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak himself.
- heartbreak 8y agoRegarding sports news, major collegiate and all professional sports are doing fine. Small collegiate and high school sports suffer without local media coverage. ESPN covers high school sports very, very selectively. The days of a mom clipping out the high school soccer coverage of her daughter or son are coming to and end.
- marcolussetti 8y agoIs that necessarily a bad thing though? It would seem to me (non-American) that high school sports news would at most of interest to the parents of those playing, so it doesn't seem feasible for it to obtain wide coverage. Thinking back to my hometown's newspaper, I don't think it ever covered high school sports, only professional sports.
- njharman 8y agoSupporting news with government money is horrible idea. Paying the fox to guard your henhouse and all that. Better move would be there force more government transparcy. So it doesn't require reporters digging around to find truth. Record sessions post all votes, actions, studies, proceeding etc. On line in easy to machine parse format. There are plenty of people who would analyse and report on that data for fun or out of sense of Civic duty. It happens now. It's not perfect but a big step.
- Kye 8y agoI like to think a fox who's smart enough to handle money is smart enough to know an hour or two of pay could buy plenty of chicken without being hunted down and turned into a scarf.
- hakfoo 8y agoOn a national level, I wonder if you can use international rivalries to balance state-funded news. You know that BBC or a directly-government-funded PBS has one set of biases, but if you add the also-biased coverage of the same event from Xinhua or RT, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't see it working for local news though-- there's not going to be multiple governments with balancing biases covering funds misappropiration in the local school district.
- mudetroit 8y agoYou are really dealing with a confluence of events that are affecting local news outlets of all forms: 1. Increased general interconnected nature of the world. People still care about local events of course, but there is a much greater concern for the big events of the whole world now. Your likelihood of being affected by the big news in some far away place has increased greatly and at an accelerating pace ever since the beginning of the 20th century. 2. That interconnected nature has become exponentially greater as the internet has rolled out. Before, your source to world events would still be your local newspaper/radio/television but primarily driven through aggregators (AP/UPI/major news TV/radio networks). Now people have the ability to get directly to the original more local sources. The odd secondary effect of this is that it has reduced the size of the local news sources in the first place. 3. Increased partisanship hasn't helped. People are much more likely to abandon a news source if they feel it is biased, true or not, ans they have other options now. All of these together mean that news of all varieties has been heavily disrupted, but the long term replacement hasn't become readily apparent. I can't think of a similar system of disruption in other industries.
- criddell 8y agoWas there ever a self-sustaining model for local news? Weren't most local news outlets mostly supported by their classified ads section?
- DanCarvajal 8y agoI think going non-profit is the best option for local news.
- briandear 8y agoMost of them already are non-profit, involuntary as that may be.
- ksdale 8y agoI'm assuming this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about what a non profit setup would look like, it would basically be a subscription model, which people have shown they don't really care to support, or businesses "sponsoring" the newspaper by basically paying for ads that aren't a great investment, which is also already happening. And none of it is enough to keep these papers afloat.
- drdeadringer 8y agoA few months ago Mercury News [I've heard AKA "The Murky News"] purged some journalists, including the one that had the beat of my local city area of Campbell; if Campbell was a rectangle, North and East and West are against San Jose with South being against Los Gatos. Now, at least it seams, the only coverage we get from Mercury News is the police blotter. That's it. Nothing more. If I want anything about Campbell I have to subscribe to Twitter, Campbell City specific website, Campbell City specific events website, Campbell City specific paper local newspaper [I'm not kidding], and I'll make an educated guess Facebook. I'd mention Reddit, but that's on questionable life support because of one or two users based on aforementioned sources sourced from myself included. My point is... the point of the article, if at least the Hacker News title, is correct. And I'm not even including stuff like "Patch" or "NextDoor" or other hyper-local internet-based networks there are. Subscriptions mushroom like a nuclear blast horror in the face of alternatives.
- threatofrain 8y agoLocal news died a long time ago, and in awful ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA.
- dwheeler 8y ago> “At the local level, news doesn’t stop when the news coverage goes away,” Lanane said. “Somebody has to do this work.” And there's the problem: No, somebody does NOT have to do this work. It is beneficial to society if someone does local journalism, agreed. But if there is no viable economic model for it, then it will disappear. Perhaps the most likely alternative right now, if there's going to be significant local new coverage, is government-subsidized journalism, but that clearly will not be doing any in-depth investigation of those in power in that government. And I don't think that most governments are thinking about doing that anyway. I think the most likely outcome is what is happening: local journalism will, for the most part, completely disappear. I also recommend Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" : http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking... - I think he clearly explains why this is happening, not because the newspapers didn't see it coming, but because the fundamental economic forces have proven irresistible.
- jrumbut 8y agoPeople can live in pretty awful situations, by that definition very few things are necessary. I disagree with the point made repeatedly in the comments here that government funded media can't work. NPR, PBS, the BBC, and CBC all routinely perform investigative reporting on the very governments that fund them. Additionally, it would take a pretty wild set of circumstances for a federal government official to squash reporting into a corrupt water board member in Utah. If that happens, maybe that stone will go unturned, but if we do nothing nearly every stone will go unturned. I would love to live in a world where it was possible not to have the conflict of interest that public funding creates, but it is abundantly clear that the options before us right now are publicly funded local news and very much less local news. I think public funding is the right answer. Maybe we'll get lucky and a plucky Stanford dropout will figure out a way to make local journalism profitable, but I'm not interested in waiting for that.
- mjevans 8y agoI think I'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I live there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but they're not really self-sufficient; in reality they're all previously far flung places that became tax-dodges for getting around being in the local major city. I would actually welcome these outlying areas being merged in to the core city and a policy of doing the transit transfer tracking at the ports/roadway edges that connect out to other regions. That should also discourage founding new small fiefdoms as tax-dodges. I would also finally be able to vote on things in the big city that affect my life, and maybe get those crazy anti-soda anti-cars/proper transit outside of the big city politicians replaced with someone that's looking at the big picture instead of a close-up.
- dionidium 8y ago>I think I'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I live there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but they're not really self-sufficient This is a problem plaguing almost all comparative writing about cities and why the OMB defines MSAs and CSAs for performing meaningful like-like comparisons. (It's also for this reason that most ranked city lists are useless garbage built on the false premise that political borders are a good way to delineate towns for anything beyond politics.)
- jrnichols 8y ago"You have 8 free articles remaining. Subscribe for unlimited access. " - Seeing this all over the web certainly doesn't help. Several of our local news sites went the same route, which has no doubt cut into their page views. People aren't interested in paying $5.99/week for news websites. Another reality is that in a lot of areas... well, there's just not much to report on to begin with. Slow news days are quite common. Our local news station will actually call the fire and EMS stations and ask if anything is going on. If there's nothing going on, you'll know because the Facebook feed ends up reposting momsdaily or simplemost blog articles.