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> 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.

> 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.
    - chopin 8y ago
      But which local outlet does that? The local news I have access to certainly not.
      - arrrg 8y ago
        They still provide summaries, meaning the needed time-investment to get a base level understanding of relevant topics is radically lower. I think somehow dreaming up a local newspaper that does the same in-depth reporting as, say, the New York Times is just dumb and and doesn’t really help someone arguing in favor of local journalism. Just summarizing the most important points that were discussed during a council meeting is actually plenty good enough. You could do better, but even just that provides quite a lot of value.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        In most cases they don't. Which is the issue. A number of years back, my town had a very good local newspaper that was sort of someone's labor of love but they became ill and, now, no newspaper. I basically have no knowledge of what's going on in town unless it rises to the level of importance where it gets coverage beyond the town lines. To be sure, I'm not really interested in most of what goes on but it would be nice to know.
- arrrg 8y ago
  You just focused on local reports adding information but I think even more important is that they summarize information and boil the issue down to a couple paragraphs of text, in turn making the information much more easily accessible. Watching an hour long meeting or reading pages of transcripts to extract the useful information is a very different time investment compared to just reading a couple of paragraphs about a topic. (I’m sure most people could do it and maybe even gain a better understanding of the issue compared to just reading a newspaper article but they definitely won’t since the time investment is just not worth it.) One of the most important functions of the news is to pick and chose which information is important and relevant and to present that information in an understandable way. To fulfill that function they do not even have to go digging for extra information (though that certainly helps and can also, crucially, help in actually picking what’s important and relevant).
jeromegv 8y ago
Yes and we all know that small cities that lost their only source of news finally got their social media activists to do that job. Or that didn't happen and mismanagement goes unnoticed for much longer.
spinach 8y ago
Journalists also help chew through raw material. A lot of it is lengthy and to the lay-person not easy to understand because they might lack context or jargon or history of the matters under discussion, so journalists can help make sense of things. Taking in raw politics is like chewing an unbaked potato for most, helps to have someone cook it first before digesting it.
- dingaling 8y ago
  Most UK newsrooms just play the he said / she said game and then move on to the next story without really digging. There are very few with the collective memory and insight of Private Eye, which often connects widely-spaced dots to make sense of politics. Interestingly Eye is very slim and only published fortnightly, which reflects the work involved in doing the job properly. And they are very seldom wrong.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Eye is slim, buts it’s dense. There’s more content in Priavte Eye than in two weeks of the Telegraph.
untog 8y ago
They can be. They've been able to be for a decade or so. They aren't. Some of that is budgetary, but a lot of it is that a lot of politicians don't actually have an interest in being held accountable, so you need someone to go down there and do it. Besides, how many people are going to read a full meeting transcript every month? Very few, and typically only those motivated and thus biased by what's going on. You need a summary for a broad audience and you certainly can't trust those running the meetings to make one.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
The real interesting part is not in the meeting anyway. The major just travells to vegs and plays cards against some building contractors- and they loose. And suddenly, without much discussion, that new road is assigned to that unlucky constractor. Stuff a normal newspaper didnt cover today, yesterday - anyday. Only after police and state-prosecutor get all up in this- do they jump on the bandwagon. Local news always was little more then lawyer-sanctioned gossip.
bluGill 8y ago
Even if it is live streamed and there is a perfect transcription, that is worthless. I don't have time to watch the stream or read the transcript. I have to do my day job, and then I go home and raise my kids. What I need is an accurate and neutral summary of the things I should care about so when it comes time to vote in a couple years I can decide if I want to keep the current government or not. Accurate and neutral is hard. Nobody is unbiased. The decision to cover/not cover something is both important and biased. Every project has pros-cons. The very first one is cost vs value: if you don't do the project you don't spend some money and taxes go down leaving more money for residents to do their own thing with, but they don't get the benefit of the project. Most of what I see online is a quote - probably taken out of context - that makes the someone person look bad. I don't care if a politician is a good speaker, I care if the ultimate policy is good and this is a complex question.

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.
  - chopin 8y ago
    But which local outlet does that? The local news I have access to certainly not.
    - arrrg 8y ago
      They still provide summaries, meaning the needed time-investment to get a base level understanding of relevant topics is radically lower. I think somehow dreaming up a local newspaper that does the same in-depth reporting as, say, the New York Times is just dumb and and doesn’t really help someone arguing in favor of local journalism. Just summarizing the most important points that were discussed during a council meeting is actually plenty good enough. You could do better, but even just that provides quite a lot of value.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      In most cases they don't. Which is the issue. A number of years back, my town had a very good local newspaper that was sort of someone's labor of love but they became ill and, now, no newspaper. I basically have no knowledge of what's going on in town unless it rises to the level of importance where it gets coverage beyond the town lines. To be sure, I'm not really interested in most of what goes on but it would be nice to know.
arrrg 8y ago
You just focused on local reports adding information but I think even more important is that they summarize information and boil the issue down to a couple paragraphs of text, in turn making the information much more easily accessible. Watching an hour long meeting or reading pages of transcripts to extract the useful information is a very different time investment compared to just reading a couple of paragraphs about a topic. (I’m sure most people could do it and maybe even gain a better understanding of the issue compared to just reading a newspaper article but they definitely won’t since the time investment is just not worth it.) One of the most important functions of the news is to pick and chose which information is important and relevant and to present that information in an understandable way. To fulfill that function they do not even have to go digging for extra information (though that certainly helps and can also, crucially, help in actually picking what’s important and relevant).

jeromegv 8y ago

Yes and we all know that small cities that lost their only source of news finally got their social media activists to do that job. Or that didn't happen and mismanagement goes unnoticed for much longer.

spinach 8y ago

Journalists also help chew through raw material. A lot of it is lengthy and to the lay-person not easy to understand because they might lack context or jargon or history of the matters under discussion, so journalists can help make sense of things. Taking in raw politics is like chewing an unbaked potato for most, helps to have someone cook it first before digesting it.

dingaling 8y ago
Most UK newsrooms just play the he said / she said game and then move on to the next story without really digging. There are very few with the collective memory and insight of Private Eye, which often connects widely-spaced dots to make sense of politics. Interestingly Eye is very slim and only published fortnightly, which reflects the work involved in doing the job properly. And they are very seldom wrong.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Eye is slim, buts it’s dense. There’s more content in Priavte Eye than in two weeks of the Telegraph.

untog 8y ago

They can be. They've been able to be for a decade or so. They aren't. Some of that is budgetary, but a lot of it is that a lot of politicians don't actually have an interest in being held accountable, so you need someone to go down there and do it. Besides, how many people are going to read a full meeting transcript every month? Very few, and typically only those motivated and thus biased by what's going on. You need a summary for a broad audience and you certainly can't trust those running the meetings to make one.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

The real interesting part is not in the meeting anyway. The major just travells to vegs and plays cards against some building contractors- and they loose. And suddenly, without much discussion, that new road is assigned to that unlucky constractor. Stuff a normal newspaper didnt cover today, yesterday - anyday. Only after police and state-prosecutor get all up in this- do they jump on the bandwagon. Local news always was little more then lawyer-sanctioned gossip.

bluGill 8y ago

Even if it is live streamed and there is a perfect transcription, that is worthless. I don't have time to watch the stream or read the transcript. I have to do my day job, and then I go home and raise my kids. What I need is an accurate and neutral summary of the things I should care about so when it comes time to vote in a couple years I can decide if I want to keep the current government or not. Accurate and neutral is hard. Nobody is unbiased. The decision to cover/not cover something is both important and biased. Every project has pros-cons. The very first one is cost vs value: if you don't do the project you don't spend some money and taxes go down leaving more money for residents to do their own thing with, but they don't get the benefit of the project. Most of what I see online is a quote - probably taken out of context - that makes the someone person look bad. I don't care if a politician is a good speaker, I care if the ultimate policy is good and this is a complex question.