9 ms·

This is a problem for all of us: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/ https://www.citylab.

by davidw 8y ago

This is a problem for all of us: 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... And it's one that requires money to solve, because to cover local politics well, you need someone who sits through the local city council meetings, with their hours of discussion of things like 'sign ordinances' to write up a summary, or maybe bring attention to something that they're spending a lot of money on.

mr_toad 8y ago
Make them livestream all their meetings. Then you could employ specialists to pick through the proceedings. Sometimes I think that the arrangement of local governments makes more sense for the days of horses and telegrams than it does today.
- davidw 8y ago
  > Then you could employ specialists to pick through the proceedings. You just reinvented journalists, because it doesn't really matter if they're in the room or not. It's the picking through hours and hours of meetings and making something meaningful from those pickings, and maybe talking to some people outside the room too. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734588
  - parthchoudhary 8y ago
    These could then be replaced by AI, preferably one that was built in an open manner.
    - mijamo 8y ago
      How will your train your AI for that? How far as I know there is no AI remotely able to identify the important bits, put them in context and explain them clearly. This is very far away.
      - parthchoudhary 8y ago
        I agree, but it would have the data all previous recordings and news generated from it. Plus by open manner I meant that people (think the larger masses) would help in training it in the future as well.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Eventually, but most likely not in the next decade or two, or three.
em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
> need someone who sits through the local city council meetings City council meetings can be lived-streamed, auto-transcribed, and their agenda can be posted. People will still of course offer their opinions on the subject on their social medias. We don't need newspapers to do this.
- SllX 8y ago
  The real role that media plays, for good or for ill, is to direct the masses attention. Want to cast the goings on, all of them, of your local council meetings into darkness? Have them do exactly what you just described without any journalists around to catch it.
- yasth 8y ago
  Rarely does a good local reporter just sit in on the meetings generally they also get some background from parties presenting, and on the council. Often they even develop sources that provide a bit more insider information. And most importantly they follow up. The meeting is the start. Ihe rest is follow through. If the council are approving a special zoning permit, they go out and talk to neighbors, or the contractors previous special work, etc. To say that you can just get some text is a bit like suggesting that wget is a good replacement for a web browser. Sure it does some of the stuff, but it isn't the real deal.
  - davidw 8y ago
    Yes! And really, how many people are going to sit there through 4/5/6 hours of streaming at every meeting to get the interesting nuggets?
    - tjr 8y ago
      ...or even understand why the interesting nuggets are interesting? One thing I appreciate about (good) journalism is highlighting implications that I would not have thought of myself, because I lack sufficient background knowledge.
askafriend 8y ago
This is why I'm bullish on Nextdoor.com for making inroads into local news and local reporting. I think they're well positioned and best incentivized to pick up the hyperlocal online distribution. Facebook, Twitter, Snap, etc are all too saturated with content that's scoped so globally that local content has a tough time penetrating through. Nextdoor on the other hand is built for local and has the perfect geographic and privacy model to take things really really local in a way that others can't. They'll be able to make money in a way that independent local newspapers can't, but they'll also hopefully be able to drive demand enough to incentivize local journalists, reporters and even super engaged citizens. Nextdoor doesn't fill this use-case super well today, but I think they can pull it off if they choose to focus on it. They certainly have all the right ingredients.
- davidw 8y ago
  I discuss our local situation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501 I guess if Nextdoor wanted to get in on that, they could hire journalists, but it is a reasonable outlay of money if you want to scale it, and something they don't currently do. Journalists need editors, and people to manage them who know how to hire the good ones, and probably other stuff that someone like me unfamiliar with the industry isn't even thinking of. This is not something that can be 'crowdsourced'. Any citizen that sits through some portion of a city council meeting is probably there because they're interested in - and opinionated about - some local issue. This makes them less than ideal 'reporters'.
  - CompelTechnic 8y ago
    I think that this problem, that you fear will cause no local reporting to happen, will cause local reporting to still happen. It's just that the local reporting will be poor quality.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  I just checked them out. Looks like their German clone nebenan.de (pretty much a direct translation of "next door") is the winner here. My neighborhood (southern city bowl of a pop 200k town) doesn't yet exist on nextdoor, while nebenan lists 1767 "active neighbors"
rorykoehler 8y ago
Surely an ML pipeline could 1) listen to audio, 2) Identify the public official speaker from the tonality of their voice 3) transcribe it, 4) summarise it? We may want a human in there to verify and edit but it would reduce costs significantly.
- thekyle 8y ago
  Machine summarization is still a very active research topic and is nowhere close to being robust enough to produce a full write up. The state of the art is able to write headlines correctly most of the time but not much more.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Machine written articles are a large part of why news in general is virtually worthless to me these days. Especially in finance, I frequently read things that betray a total lack of understanding of the content. This has a knock-on effect that might not be obvious. As a journalist, you might think, well, why don't I read a reputable source like the WSJ - isn't good journalism more valuable when there is more bad stuff about? But people are getting clicks and selling ads with the automatically produced garbage, and therefore I know that traditionally trustworthy media has neither the incentive nor the morale to live up to their past standards. And thus, I have no interest any more in subscribing to even the best. For years, I've watched how under modern competitive conditions, a good brand (in any industry) is not worth maintaining any more, but rather it's become optimal to strip mine it to a husk. It's not really some mysterious decline of society, but a direct result of better data analysis. If someone says "we won Pulitzer prizes!" it doesn't soften me a bit - they only want me to pay them for what they did in the past, and that means nothing.
ericd 8y ago
I think news could be funded with a spotify-style subscription, where people pay $10/mo for paywall-free access to a large number of papers, and those papers get a fraction of that persons' subscription, based on how long they spent reading that paper's articles. Call it NewsPass. The challenge is convincing the big papers that charge more than that for their subscription that they'll make more in aggregate, as many more people become paying subscribers.
- atupis 8y ago
  Yeah that might work, but it is still uphill battle. Spotify succeed because piracy was eating record labels profits and they had to do jump.
  - ericd 8y ago
    Well, I would say that news organizations are pretty incentivized to find a new revenue source, too. But yeah, the marquee papers might be harder to get, and those would be the main motivator for subscribers. But maybe you could start with more niche publications like The Economist, Consumer Reports, which are already heavily paywalled but could benefit from a larger paying audience, build up an initial audience, and then go for NYT/WSJ.
    - atupis 8y ago
      Or you could try get big but very local publications like Aftonbladet.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      Another way to bootstrap this immensely desirable "spotify for news" model could be a platform (trusted third party) for mutual co-subscriptions. Subscribe with publication A, also gain access (metered behind the scenes, redistributing some predetermined part of the subscription fee according to measured consumption) to otherwise equally paywalled publications B,C and D. But something like that will only happen when attractiveness for publications is maximised, which requires, amongst other things, that the platform avoids consumer facing lock-in or even just branding, because that would make publications (rightly) fear that they hand over whatever pre-existing digital subscriptions they already have to an exploitative intermediary. This in turn pretty much rules out the VC model for starting the platform, since eventually becoming exploitative is a required ingredient of the risk equation. But I see no reason why this could not work as a cooperative, because all the platform marketing would be directed at potential members. Consumer marketing, something in which a cooperative would tend to be inferior to a metrics-driven VC project (by a wide margin I suspect), would be left entirely to publications, who subsequently get to "own" the subscriptions they pulled in. Important design parameters would be the ratio between pooled and unpooled fees and the exact rules about weigh and how much content member publications would be allowed to keep exclusive to their direct subscribers. Outside of implementation, the biggest challenge would be to convince publications that few people would ever subscribe directly to multiple channels (how many people had now than one daily newspaper?) and that therefore, the content made available to subscribers of their peers would not cannibalize potential direct subscriptions very much.
rocky1138 8y ago
> And it's one that requires money to solve, because to cover local politics well, you need someone who sits through the local city council meetings, with their hours of discussion of things like 'sign ordinances' to write up a summary, or maybe bring attention to something that they're spending a lot of money on. Do you, though? Can't a computer do that better than a human, what with machine learning and the like?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Do you have any examples of anyone who has managed that?
  - rocky1138 8y ago
    I don't. Sorry! It was more of a pipedream...
swiley 8y ago
I don't know, I don't think grepping the minutes on my own is that hard. I feel like setting this up to watch your local government (provided they post the minutes online, which maybe should be required now) would only take a few lines of shell script.
ekanes 8y ago
Micropayments (with one-off tips or payments along with the usual subscriptions) solves this, because on top of that idea can be built ways for citizens to pick up and report on things that interest them, and if they do a good job, they can make a living at it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rjf72 8y ago
I think this misses the point. Newspapers can do fine when people read them. Ad sales, sponsorships, etc provide more than enough revenue for a local paper that has a at least a moderate readership. The reason newspapers are failing is because they aren't finding that moderate readership - people aren't reading them. And this is the exact same reason that ad sales/revenue are declining. So it's not like if you externally fund a newspaper, you fix the problem. You simply end up with a well funded paper that nobody reads. And ultimately I see no way to save newspapers. Why would I read one handful of journalists' takes on events that happened 24+ hours ago, when I could instead see the views of not only countless journalists but even real people and specialists takes on issues, as they unfold? And as the article mentions the times of finding jobs or local sales in the newspaper is completely gone as well. To a degree this will also lead to a paradoxical decline of online outlets. They, like local papers, need loyal viewers to survive. But there's no inherent reason to offer loyalty to any given news outlet in era of the internet. This is, in my opinion, why most media has gone full-on partisan and op-ed type stuff. It tries to turn the news into entertainment to draw a recurring audience like a weekday sitcom in times past. Suffice to say this is not a viable long term strategy - fanaticism invariably destroys itself in the long run.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  A reason you do not want news as it unfolds is because while it is happening there is a lot of unknowns and misunderstanding which means social media live news is often false or misleading. Fake news is much worse than delayed news.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    Nonsense. Breaking news has been a thing for a long time (Extra! Extra!). Now it's just decentralized.
- ericd 8y ago
  I actually take the totally opposite tack - I avoid all unfolding news, and wait for a magazine like the Economist to analyze it a bit later after the corrections come out. There's usually not much value in knowing about what's going on right now outside of your locality, and breaking news is too bent on emotional manipulation and being first, even if it means being inaccurate. Junk food for your brain.
amrrs 8y ago
Hidden Brain (NPR) had a nice episode on the same https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchdog-who-foots-the-bill-when-newspapers-disappear https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchd...
ddebernardy 8y ago
Couldn't opposition party council members also do those things? And given the current developments in AI, is it not only a matter of time before these meetings get transcribed and summarized automatically?
- untog 8y ago
  The opposition party is clearly motivated to misrepresent what they see, though. If you think trust in media is bad, this would be exponentially worse. And as nice as it is to think that technology is the answer, it already isn't. All meetings could be livestreamed online very cheaply but very few are. It's going to be a long time before automatic transcription technology has any kind of impact. At least part of this is because many politicians don't want to be held accountable, so they're not about to help these efforts.
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    However much opposition misrepresents what they see, it give matters some scrutiny, and that results in others' involvement. The big problem at the moment, as I understood things, actually is that opposition is not doing its job by publicly calling out BS when it sees it at the local governance level.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
Train a summary NN Net on it? Add a Corruption discovery NN in addition?
Pigo 8y ago
I remember visiting the local newspaper as a kid, seeing the presses working. The people had a lot of pride in their job. I don't know what the answer is, but it makes me sad that it's becoming less important to people.
milquetoastaf 8y ago
MEh. People go to these meetings still. They still tweet. This information is all public. The "labor" that a journalist does is becoming a commodity

by davidw 8y ago

mr_toad 8y ago

Make them livestream all their meetings. Then you could employ specialists to pick through the proceedings. Sometimes I think that the arrangement of local governments makes more sense for the days of horses and telegrams than it does today.

davidw 8y ago
> Then you could employ specialists to pick through the proceedings. You just reinvented journalists, because it doesn't really matter if they're in the room or not. It's the picking through hours and hours of meetings and making something meaningful from those pickings, and maybe talking to some people outside the room too. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734588
- parthchoudhary 8y ago
  These could then be replaced by AI, preferably one that was built in an open manner.
  - mijamo 8y ago
    How will your train your AI for that? How far as I know there is no AI remotely able to identify the important bits, put them in context and explain them clearly. This is very far away.
    - parthchoudhary 8y ago
      I agree, but it would have the data all previous recordings and news generated from it. Plus by open manner I meant that people (think the larger masses) would help in training it in the future as well.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Eventually, but most likely not in the next decade or two, or three.

em3rgent0rdr 8y ago

> need someone who sits through the local city council meetings City council meetings can be lived-streamed, auto-transcribed, and their agenda can be posted. People will still of course offer their opinions on the subject on their social medias. We don't need newspapers to do this.

SllX 8y ago
The real role that media plays, for good or for ill, is to direct the masses attention. Want to cast the goings on, all of them, of your local council meetings into darkness? Have them do exactly what you just described without any journalists around to catch it.
yasth 8y ago
Rarely does a good local reporter just sit in on the meetings generally they also get some background from parties presenting, and on the council. Often they even develop sources that provide a bit more insider information. And most importantly they follow up. The meeting is the start. Ihe rest is follow through. If the council are approving a special zoning permit, they go out and talk to neighbors, or the contractors previous special work, etc. To say that you can just get some text is a bit like suggesting that wget is a good replacement for a web browser. Sure it does some of the stuff, but it isn't the real deal.
- davidw 8y ago
  Yes! And really, how many people are going to sit there through 4/5/6 hours of streaming at every meeting to get the interesting nuggets?
  - tjr 8y ago
    ...or even understand why the interesting nuggets are interesting? One thing I appreciate about (good) journalism is highlighting implications that I would not have thought of myself, because I lack sufficient background knowledge.

askafriend 8y ago

This is why I'm bullish on Nextdoor.com for making inroads into local news and local reporting. I think they're well positioned and best incentivized to pick up the hyperlocal online distribution. Facebook, Twitter, Snap, etc are all too saturated with content that's scoped so globally that local content has a tough time penetrating through. Nextdoor on the other hand is built for local and has the perfect geographic and privacy model to take things really really local in a way that others can't. They'll be able to make money in a way that independent local newspapers can't, but they'll also hopefully be able to drive demand enough to incentivize local journalists, reporters and even super engaged citizens. Nextdoor doesn't fill this use-case super well today, but I think they can pull it off if they choose to focus on it. They certainly have all the right ingredients.

davidw 8y ago
I discuss our local situation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501 I guess if Nextdoor wanted to get in on that, they could hire journalists, but it is a reasonable outlay of money if you want to scale it, and something they don't currently do. Journalists need editors, and people to manage them who know how to hire the good ones, and probably other stuff that someone like me unfamiliar with the industry isn't even thinking of. This is not something that can be 'crowdsourced'. Any citizen that sits through some portion of a city council meeting is probably there because they're interested in - and opinionated about - some local issue. This makes them less than ideal 'reporters'.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  I think that this problem, that you fear will cause no local reporting to happen, will cause local reporting to still happen. It's just that the local reporting will be poor quality.
Semaphor 8y ago
I just checked them out. Looks like their German clone nebenan.de (pretty much a direct translation of "next door") is the winner here. My neighborhood (southern city bowl of a pop 200k town) doesn't yet exist on nextdoor, while nebenan lists 1767 "active neighbors"

rorykoehler 8y ago

Surely an ML pipeline could 1) listen to audio, 2) Identify the public official speaker from the tonality of their voice 3) transcribe it, 4) summarise it? We may want a human in there to verify and edit but it would reduce costs significantly.

thekyle 8y ago
Machine summarization is still a very active research topic and is nowhere close to being robust enough to produce a full write up. The state of the art is able to write headlines correctly most of the time but not much more.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  Machine written articles are a large part of why news in general is virtually worthless to me these days. Especially in finance, I frequently read things that betray a total lack of understanding of the content. This has a knock-on effect that might not be obvious. As a journalist, you might think, well, why don't I read a reputable source like the WSJ - isn't good journalism more valuable when there is more bad stuff about? But people are getting clicks and selling ads with the automatically produced garbage, and therefore I know that traditionally trustworthy media has neither the incentive nor the morale to live up to their past standards. And thus, I have no interest any more in subscribing to even the best. For years, I've watched how under modern competitive conditions, a good brand (in any industry) is not worth maintaining any more, but rather it's become optimal to strip mine it to a husk. It's not really some mysterious decline of society, but a direct result of better data analysis. If someone says "we won Pulitzer prizes!" it doesn't soften me a bit - they only want me to pay them for what they did in the past, and that means nothing.

ericd 8y ago

I think news could be funded with a spotify-style subscription, where people pay $10/mo for paywall-free access to a large number of papers, and those papers get a fraction of that persons' subscription, based on how long they spent reading that paper's articles. Call it NewsPass. The challenge is convincing the big papers that charge more than that for their subscription that they'll make more in aggregate, as many more people become paying subscribers.

atupis 8y ago
Yeah that might work, but it is still uphill battle. Spotify succeed because piracy was eating record labels profits and they had to do jump.
- ericd 8y ago
  Well, I would say that news organizations are pretty incentivized to find a new revenue source, too. But yeah, the marquee papers might be harder to get, and those would be the main motivator for subscribers. But maybe you could start with more niche publications like The Economist, Consumer Reports, which are already heavily paywalled but could benefit from a larger paying audience, build up an initial audience, and then go for NYT/WSJ.
  - atupis 8y ago
    Or you could try get big but very local publications like Aftonbladet.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    Another way to bootstrap this immensely desirable "spotify for news" model could be a platform (trusted third party) for mutual co-subscriptions. Subscribe with publication A, also gain access (metered behind the scenes, redistributing some predetermined part of the subscription fee according to measured consumption) to otherwise equally paywalled publications B,C and D. But something like that will only happen when attractiveness for publications is maximised, which requires, amongst other things, that the platform avoids consumer facing lock-in or even just branding, because that would make publications (rightly) fear that they hand over whatever pre-existing digital subscriptions they already have to an exploitative intermediary. This in turn pretty much rules out the VC model for starting the platform, since eventually becoming exploitative is a required ingredient of the risk equation. But I see no reason why this could not work as a cooperative, because all the platform marketing would be directed at potential members. Consumer marketing, something in which a cooperative would tend to be inferior to a metrics-driven VC project (by a wide margin I suspect), would be left entirely to publications, who subsequently get to "own" the subscriptions they pulled in. Important design parameters would be the ratio between pooled and unpooled fees and the exact rules about weigh and how much content member publications would be allowed to keep exclusive to their direct subscribers. Outside of implementation, the biggest challenge would be to convince publications that few people would ever subscribe directly to multiple channels (how many people had now than one daily newspaper?) and that therefore, the content made available to subscribers of their peers would not cannibalize potential direct subscriptions very much.

rocky1138 8y ago

> And it's one that requires money to solve, because to cover local politics well, you need someone who sits through the local city council meetings, with their hours of discussion of things like 'sign ordinances' to write up a summary, or maybe bring attention to something that they're spending a lot of money on. Do you, though? Can't a computer do that better than a human, what with machine learning and the like?

baroffoos 8y ago
Do you have any examples of anyone who has managed that?
- rocky1138 8y ago
  I don't. Sorry! It was more of a pipedream...

swiley 8y ago

I don't know, I don't think grepping the minutes on my own is that hard. I feel like setting this up to watch your local government (provided they post the minutes online, which maybe should be required now) would only take a few lines of shell script.

ekanes 8y ago

Micropayments (with one-off tips or payments along with the usual subscriptions) solves this, because on top of that idea can be built ways for citizens to pick up and report on things that interest them, and if they do a good job, they can make a living at it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

rjf72 8y ago

I think this misses the point. Newspapers can do fine when people read them. Ad sales, sponsorships, etc provide more than enough revenue for a local paper that has a at least a moderate readership. The reason newspapers are failing is because they aren't finding that moderate readership - people aren't reading them. And this is the exact same reason that ad sales/revenue are declining. So it's not like if you externally fund a newspaper, you fix the problem. You simply end up with a well funded paper that nobody reads. And ultimately I see no way to save newspapers. Why would I read one handful of journalists' takes on events that happened 24+ hours ago, when I could instead see the views of not only countless journalists but even real people and specialists takes on issues, as they unfold? And as the article mentions the times of finding jobs or local sales in the newspaper is completely gone as well. To a degree this will also lead to a paradoxical decline of online outlets. They, like local papers, need loyal viewers to survive. But there's no inherent reason to offer loyalty to any given news outlet in era of the internet. This is, in my opinion, why most media has gone full-on partisan and op-ed type stuff. It tries to turn the news into entertainment to draw a recurring audience like a weekday sitcom in times past. Suffice to say this is not a viable long term strategy - fanaticism invariably destroys itself in the long run.

baroffoos 8y ago
A reason you do not want news as it unfolds is because while it is happening there is a lot of unknowns and misunderstanding which means social media live news is often false or misleading. Fake news is much worse than delayed news.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Nonsense. Breaking news has been a thing for a long time (Extra! Extra!). Now it's just decentralized.
ericd 8y ago
I actually take the totally opposite tack - I avoid all unfolding news, and wait for a magazine like the Economist to analyze it a bit later after the corrections come out. There's usually not much value in knowing about what's going on right now outside of your locality, and breaking news is too bent on emotional manipulation and being first, even if it means being inaccurate. Junk food for your brain.

amrrs 8y ago

Hidden Brain (NPR) had a nice episode on the same https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchdog-who-foots-the-bill-when-newspapers-disappear https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchd...

ddebernardy 8y ago

Couldn't opposition party council members also do those things? And given the current developments in AI, is it not only a matter of time before these meetings get transcribed and summarized automatically?

untog 8y ago
The opposition party is clearly motivated to misrepresent what they see, though. If you think trust in media is bad, this would be exponentially worse. And as nice as it is to think that technology is the answer, it already isn't. All meetings could be livestreamed online very cheaply but very few are. It's going to be a long time before automatic transcription technology has any kind of impact. At least part of this is because many politicians don't want to be held accountable, so they're not about to help these efforts.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  However much opposition misrepresents what they see, it give matters some scrutiny, and that results in others' involvement. The big problem at the moment, as I understood things, actually is that opposition is not doing its job by publicly calling out BS when it sees it at the local governance level.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

Train a summary NN Net on it? Add a Corruption discovery NN in addition?

Pigo 8y ago

I remember visiting the local newspaper as a kid, seeing the presses working. The people had a lot of pride in their job. I don't know what the answer is, but it makes me sad that it's becoming less important to people.

milquetoastaf 8y ago

MEh. People go to these meetings still. They still tweet. This information is all public. The "labor" that a journalist does is becoming a commodity