4 ms·

When the Student Newspaper Is the Only Daily Paper in Town

55 points by danso 7y ago

irrational 7y ago
Wait, there are still towns with daily papers? I live in a town with 100,000 people (if I include the immediately surrounding towns, there are over half a million people within 5 miles of my house) and we haven't had a daily paper in... I can't even remember how long.
- realbarack 7y ago
  What town is that? Is there a daily news blog or something?
- farrarstan 7y ago
  You live in a city homie
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Some towns can get really large but never become cities for whatever reason.
    - mkl 7y ago
      "over half a million people within 5 miles of my house" is more people and more densely populated than many cities though, so it seems a little silly not to call it one. There is only one city in my country with more people than that, and it's not as dense.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        In many countries 'city' is a formal thing, and not related to the number of people living there. The smallest city in the UK has 1,797 people, and the largest town has 466,266 people, for example.
  - irrational 7y ago
    I don't think so. No buildings are more than 2 stories tall. For me, it's hard to think of a place as a city that has no city infrastructure.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Im my country, towns with 10000 people have their daily newspapers, albeit short ones. 100000 seems really a lot to have no media, that's the size of my home city and we had like.. 5 competing newspapers, IIRC (today there are dozens of competing websites)
mgoblu3 7y ago
Wrote for the Daily in college from 2012-2016. Was a really cool experience, and something that’s stuck with me a long time.
rmason 7y ago
Sometimes you can have a daily newspaper and it isn't much help. The Lansing State Journal costs me $60 a month and the stories of importance to me are either days late or not there at all. It was the local counter culture weekly, The City Pulse, that first broke the story of Dr. Naser, the MSU sexual predator. The City Pulse was also the only press that reported Sparrow Hospital had failed a federal inspection and was in danger of losing their certification. Sparrow execs went out and confiscated every paper they could find in a ten mile radius of the hospital to prevent the story from spreading. Personal note Ed Vielmetti quoted in the article is a friend who helped me write the the open data legislation we're trying to pass here in Michigan.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  The Michigan Daily is more like an alt weekly than a traditional local newspaper, it’s just that the traditional newspaper in Ann Arbor went under, erasing a lot of this contrast.
- planetzero 7y ago
  Sure, the Lansing State Journal might be behind. But it sounds like stories were reported on before all of the facts came out and just so happened to be correct...which shouldn't be confused with good journalism. I find that smaller newspapers don't have the money to perform real investigations and will push stories out based on rumor and speculation.
brohoolio 7y ago
The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t great, but we do have quality reporting. MLive has brought lots of awareness around PFAs in the Ann Arbor water supply. Here’s a twitter thread from Crains Detroit which talks about how the quality of this article is kind of crappy. https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904?s=21 https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904...
- claudeganon 7y ago
  >The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t great, but we do have quality reporting. MLive is addressed in the article. I lived in Ann Arbor when the old paper went under and after. MLive was and is worse by a far margin. It’s always been of the same ilk as the low-quality, corporate media consolidation going on across the country.
Joakal 7y ago
The lack of news are going to destroy democracy everywhere because voters are increasingly getting less and less alternative sources and eventually none. Some new age media possibilities I had been thinking of: 1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those potential voters by going back to their lives. 2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username/password from local government with ID. Both of these require that the government recognise that some information is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc). Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely available', you guessed it, evil.
- roenxi 7y ago
  We live in the best age that has ever existed for abundant news. Never before have multiple perspectives of current issues been as freely available as they are today. Realistically the major impediment is the old news media. Although they have done admirable work keeping everyone informed they are simply not as able to provide the same quick response time, relevance and breadth of opinion as some combination of twitter/specialist websites/the emerging podcast circuits. Democracy will be fine. If anything, the media is an impediment to democracy making it harder for polities to communicate directly. That was fine in the past when there was no better option; but that has changed.
  - Joakal 7y ago
    Not sure how to explain the lack of journalism being an issue but I would say that there's abundant information, not news. It used to be that a person can only get news from several sources, now with Internet, we find so much more sources! The trouble is that sources are shrinking but we don't notice it due to the abundant information or re-distributors of news. As in, global amount of original sources are shrinking every year (aside from PRs). So, while you're seeing more sources personally, it's actually getting harder to get the fine details and local news all over world because information is so cheap to distribute. My suggestions essentially offer a platform for distribution and paid defacto journalists (politicians).

55 points by danso 7y ago

Wait, there are still towns with daily papers? I live in a town with 100,000 people (if I include the immediately surrounding towns, there are over half a million people within 5 miles of my house) and we haven't had a daily paper in... I can't even remember how long.

realbarack 7y ago
What town is that? Is there a daily news blog or something?
farrarstan 7y ago
You live in a city homie
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Some towns can get really large but never become cities for whatever reason.
  - mkl 7y ago
    "over half a million people within 5 miles of my house" is more people and more densely populated than many cities though, so it seems a little silly not to call it one. There is only one city in my country with more people than that, and it's not as dense.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      In many countries 'city' is a formal thing, and not related to the number of people living there. The smallest city in the UK has 1,797 people, and the largest town has 466,266 people, for example.
- irrational 7y ago
  I don't think so. No buildings are more than 2 stories tall. For me, it's hard to think of a place as a city that has no city infrastructure.
TomMarius 7y ago
Im my country, towns with 10000 people have their daily newspapers, albeit short ones. 100000 seems really a lot to have no media, that's the size of my home city and we had like.. 5 competing newspapers, IIRC (today there are dozens of competing websites)

mgoblu3 7y ago

Wrote for the Daily in college from 2012-2016. Was a really cool experience, and something that’s stuck with me a long time.

rmason 7y ago

Sometimes you can have a daily newspaper and it isn't much help. The Lansing State Journal costs me $60 a month and the stories of importance to me are either days late or not there at all. It was the local counter culture weekly, The City Pulse, that first broke the story of Dr. Naser, the MSU sexual predator. The City Pulse was also the only press that reported Sparrow Hospital had failed a federal inspection and was in danger of losing their certification. Sparrow execs went out and confiscated every paper they could find in a ten mile radius of the hospital to prevent the story from spreading. Personal note Ed Vielmetti quoted in the article is a friend who helped me write the the open data legislation we're trying to pass here in Michigan.

claudeganon 7y ago
The Michigan Daily is more like an alt weekly than a traditional local newspaper, it’s just that the traditional newspaper in Ann Arbor went under, erasing a lot of this contrast.
planetzero 7y ago
Sure, the Lansing State Journal might be behind. But it sounds like stories were reported on before all of the facts came out and just so happened to be correct...which shouldn't be confused with good journalism. I find that smaller newspapers don't have the money to perform real investigations and will push stories out based on rumor and speculation.

brohoolio 7y ago

The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t great, but we do have quality reporting. MLive has brought lots of awareness around PFAs in the Ann Arbor water supply. Here’s a twitter thread from Crains Detroit which talks about how the quality of this article is kind of crappy. https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904?s=21 https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904...

claudeganon 7y ago
>The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t great, but we do have quality reporting. MLive is addressed in the article. I lived in Ann Arbor when the old paper went under and after. MLive was and is worse by a far margin. It’s always been of the same ilk as the low-quality, corporate media consolidation going on across the country.

Joakal 7y ago

The lack of news are going to destroy democracy everywhere because voters are increasingly getting less and less alternative sources and eventually none. Some new age media possibilities I had been thinking of: 1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those potential voters by going back to their lives. 2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because, the government will forever host it vs losing information when the company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is simply getting username/password from local government with ID. Both of these require that the government recognise that some information is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc). Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely available', you guessed it, evil.

roenxi 7y ago
We live in the best age that has ever existed for abundant news. Never before have multiple perspectives of current issues been as freely available as they are today. Realistically the major impediment is the old news media. Although they have done admirable work keeping everyone informed they are simply not as able to provide the same quick response time, relevance and breadth of opinion as some combination of twitter/specialist websites/the emerging podcast circuits. Democracy will be fine. If anything, the media is an impediment to democracy making it harder for polities to communicate directly. That was fine in the past when there was no better option; but that has changed.
- Joakal 7y ago
  Not sure how to explain the lack of journalism being an issue but I would say that there's abundant information, not news. It used to be that a person can only get news from several sources, now with Internet, we find so much more sources! The trouble is that sources are shrinking but we don't notice it due to the abundant information or re-distributors of news. As in, global amount of original sources are shrinking every year (aside from PRs). So, while you're seeing more sources personally, it's actually getting harder to get the fine details and local news all over world because information is so cheap to distribute. My suggestions essentially offer a platform for distribution and paid defacto journalists (politicians).