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Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions

140 points by watchdogtimer 7y ago

mixmastamyk 7y ago
I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on “murder of the day” and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four. We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  What's 'next door'?
  - parrellel 7y ago
    Locality based mailing list / social network critter.
  - ultrarunner 7y ago
    A place for Concerned Citizens to alert the neighborhood about petty HOA violations and kids playing outdoors. Although I hear they're about to introduce a feature in which the local police department will be able to deliver their PR releases directly to your news feed. Also a good place to report stray cats as lost pets. It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.
    - seminatl 7y ago
      The ability of local agencies to just post to your feed has been a feature of Nextdoor for years. They can also close their posts to discussion, which is pretty irritating.
      - ultrarunner 7y ago
        Looks like the feature was just rolled out. It was to reset my opt-out settings for nextdoor emails so that I can now receive "Emergency Alerts" with the first such instance being a road 45 minutes away being closed because it rained. It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?
        seminatl 7y ago
        Nextdoor is bad because your neighbors are bad people, and it only takes a few to wreck it. Somewhere on your block lives a life-long racist, a chemtrail crackpot, and an insufferable busybody. Normally these people hide but for some reason they think Nextdoor is their safe space.
    - paulie_a 7y ago
      My county has an independent Facebook page called nosy neighbor. They alert ask questions and can be asked wtf us going on. They also give news rundowns responsibly. It actually is a pretty ideal setup. No sensation but gets the word out and asks and filters info properly
- cobbzilla 7y ago
  Agreed, local TV news has been heavy on fear with a sprinkling of cutesy feelgood for decades. It deserves to die. I do find it mildly ironic that TFA is also fear-based. Will they never learn?
- CallMeMarc 7y ago
  That's funny because "fear" sounds like the German word "vier" which stands for four and would make it sound like Channel Four again.
_delirium 7y ago
The end of the article mentions "newer, digitally focused outlets" as one possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that's one of the possible futures of local news. Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: https://inn.org/members/ https://inn.org/members/
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now? It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
"Lack of people buying newspapers bad" reports newspaper. I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious. If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.
heavyset_go 7y ago
I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has a refreshing take on news that doesn't depend on fearmongering or thinly-veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.
- crtccnt 7y ago
  Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair, I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying member.
  - cobbzilla 7y ago
    McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business Report were decent news programs, don’t remember a lot of bias, but I haven’t watched in a long while though.
    - StuffedParrot 7y ago
      There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of which stories to cover is inherently political. I don’t terribly mind PBS but the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn’t even make sense to me.
      - jasonjayr 7y ago
        Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned. If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
        _delirium 7y ago
dave_aiello 7y ago
I could make the argument that this article makes it clear that Apple's move in 2003 to set a price of $0.99 per track for recorded music was an act of cultural salvation, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-....
- Lapsa 7y ago
  Please do.
Lendal 7y ago
I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports, entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that's it. In other words, only the stuff that makes them money. I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment. The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that. What's the word for government by random chance?
- knolax 7y ago
  stochastocracy?/s Sounds like the type of catchy buzzword to write a book around.
- dmckeon 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    True sortition -- a random selection, preferably from a prequalified candidate pool -- can actually be a fairly useful tool. A vote-based system in the absence of an effective media to investigate and inform the electorate is not actually random, but is subject to sway and influence from any modestly motivated party, with no effective check from an at least putatively disinterested or nonbiased journalistic enterprise. You're not leaving selection up to chance, you're leaving it up the the most effective, least principled, least visible election manipulator.
    - Lendal 7y ago
      Sortition would actually be an improvement even if there was no manipulator. Right now local government seems to be a selection by most-recognizable-name. In Florida a Joe Smith will always get the nod over a Prayut Chan-o-cha if there's no local press covering the election or publishing any candidate bios.
kraig911 7y ago
I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses. Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.
- ShorsHammer 7y ago
  somewhat involved somehow with the newsmedia for a good portion of my life, regional papers in my country are doing absolutely fine, metro paper are on the verge of seppuku chaising eyeballs
chrisco255 7y ago
I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state. Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback. The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem. I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform. Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.
- choward 7y ago
  > I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. That's an interesting idea. I love getting paywalled by some web site because I clicked a headline, especially when it's some a local news site or some other site I'll probably never visit again. I'm not signing up to read one article that I might not even like. I thought pay per article might be a good idea, but that would just encourage click bait. And if the article is terrible, I still have to pay. However, with a subscription to all of the news none of this would be an issue as long as it was reasonably priced.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    Blendle works like this, aggregates news sites, offers subscription (10 euro/month) and deals out micropayments under the hood (moved away from pay-per-article). They operate in US, Netherlands, Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- 7y ago
davidw 7y ago
This article is very relevant: 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... It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.
SllX 7y ago
The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers). All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters. Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue. So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.
- abathur 7y ago
  This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value. The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one. I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - SllX 7y ago
    The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and services. The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
    - abathur 7y ago
      This just begs the question. People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.
Joakal 7y ago
Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but 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. Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat! Both of the points 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.
- cartoonworld 7y ago
  >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. I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?
  - Joakal 7y ago
    Essentially, second place in same constituencies. The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.
    - cartoonworld 7y ago
walkingolof 7y ago
Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It's beyond me why not regulators have stepped in...
scarejunba 7y ago
Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your time and money. It is no surprise you don't give them your time or your money. They have problem and solution reversed.
musicale 7y ago
I guess I'm lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc.. Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.
dang 7y ago
We changed the URL from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear-pen-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear-p..., which points to this.
stakhanov 7y ago
In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  Because some news has limited geographical relevance. Are you going to regularly read about things like city council meetings about a controversial local development projects some small city in the NYT? Hell no.
UglyToad 7y ago
In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies. While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable. I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1]. Relevant to the article: "And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985." He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system. [0]: https://www.flatearthnews.net/ https://www.flatearthnews.net/ [1]: https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/ https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth...
Merrill 7y ago
Local news is more available now than previously. There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc. More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.
- VLM 7y ago
  However, those new channels are not the incumbent, over employed, over advertised, legacy organizations who feel they have a right to a perpetually successful business model and that having a 90s era website in 2020 or saying "learn to code" is some kind of hate crime. Just hand over your money forever and they'll stop complaining.
- jeegsy 7y ago
  Thats an interesting take. It never even occurred to me. You are right, if you really want to know about the local stuff, you can. You might have to work a little bit more but most of the info is out there already.
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
The whole news model is becoming strange. At the beginning journalism shifted from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site owners
subpixel 7y ago
Craigslist, who ate local newspapers’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds in every Craigslist market. A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good antidote to the awareness issues. Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process. Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult. Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.
foob4r 7y ago
I'll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like. I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  Ditto. I have an NYT and WSJ online subscription, and I made a donation to a free weekly that covers hyperlocal news for my area. I understand paywalls are annoying. But if anyone wants to do anything, they need to figure out how to get micropayments to work or build a non-techgiant service [1] that can let you collectively subscribe to most of the news organizations at once for a reasonable fee. I understand those are both hard problems. [1] Can't be a techgiant because they've caused enough damage already, and giving them control of the subscription fees could be the coup de grâce. Honestly, the website should be a media-owned co-op or something.
- uncletaco 7y ago
  Honestly a lot of the work of local newspapers are picked up by our local television stations. Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down. I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker. The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.
  - lmkg 7y ago
    > The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down. There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...
t34543 7y ago
Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They’re a terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must follow.
acd 7y ago
Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.
technobabble 7y ago
I searched the thread and couldn’t find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I thought it was good while it lasted. What are the chances of reviving something like it?

140 points by watchdogtimer 7y ago

I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on “murder of the day” and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four. We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.

RickJWagner 7y ago
What's 'next door'?
- parrellel 7y ago
  Locality based mailing list / social network critter.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  A place for Concerned Citizens to alert the neighborhood about petty HOA violations and kids playing outdoors. Although I hear they're about to introduce a feature in which the local police department will be able to deliver their PR releases directly to your news feed. Also a good place to report stray cats as lost pets. It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.
  - seminatl 7y ago
    The ability of local agencies to just post to your feed has been a feature of Nextdoor for years. They can also close their posts to discussion, which is pretty irritating.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago
      Looks like the feature was just rolled out. It was to reset my opt-out settings for nextdoor emails so that I can now receive "Emergency Alerts" with the first such instance being a road 45 minutes away being closed because it rained. It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?
      - seminatl 7y ago
        Nextdoor is bad because your neighbors are bad people, and it only takes a few to wreck it. Somewhere on your block lives a life-long racist, a chemtrail crackpot, and an insufferable busybody. Normally these people hide but for some reason they think Nextdoor is their safe space.
  - paulie_a 7y ago
    My county has an independent Facebook page called nosy neighbor. They alert ask questions and can be asked wtf us going on. They also give news rundowns responsibly. It actually is a pretty ideal setup. No sensation but gets the word out and asks and filters info properly
cobbzilla 7y ago
Agreed, local TV news has been heavy on fear with a sprinkling of cutesy feelgood for decades. It deserves to die. I do find it mildly ironic that TFA is also fear-based. Will they never learn?
CallMeMarc 7y ago
That's funny because "fear" sounds like the German word "vier" which stands for four and would make it sound like Channel Four again.

_delirium 7y ago

The end of the article mentions "newer, digitally focused outlets" as one possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that's one of the possible futures of local news. Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: https://inn.org/members/ https://inn.org/members/

Mathnerd314 7y ago
In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now? It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.

IIAOPSW 7y ago

"Lack of people buying newspapers bad" reports newspaper. I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious. If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.

heavyset_go 7y ago

I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has a refreshing take on news that doesn't depend on fearmongering or thinly-veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.

crtccnt 7y ago
Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair, I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying member.
- cobbzilla 7y ago
  McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business Report were decent news programs, don’t remember a lot of bias, but I haven’t watched in a long while though.
  - StuffedParrot 7y ago
    There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of which stories to cover is inherently political. I don’t terribly mind PBS but the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn’t even make sense to me.
    - jasonjayr 7y ago
      Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned. If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
      - _delirium 7y ago

dave_aiello 7y ago

I could make the argument that this article makes it clear that Apple's move in 2003 to set a price of $0.99 per track for recorded music was an act of cultural salvation, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-....

Lapsa 7y ago
Please do.

Lendal 7y ago

I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports, entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that's it. In other words, only the stuff that makes them money. I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment. The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that. What's the word for government by random chance?

knolax 7y ago
stochastocracy?/s Sounds like the type of catchy buzzword to write a book around.
dmckeon 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  True sortition -- a random selection, preferably from a prequalified candidate pool -- can actually be a fairly useful tool. A vote-based system in the absence of an effective media to investigate and inform the electorate is not actually random, but is subject to sway and influence from any modestly motivated party, with no effective check from an at least putatively disinterested or nonbiased journalistic enterprise. You're not leaving selection up to chance, you're leaving it up the the most effective, least principled, least visible election manipulator.
  - Lendal 7y ago
    Sortition would actually be an improvement even if there was no manipulator. Right now local government seems to be a selection by most-recognizable-name. In Florida a Joe Smith will always get the nod over a Prayut Chan-o-cha if there's no local press covering the election or publishing any candidate bios.

kraig911 7y ago

I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses. Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.

ShorsHammer 7y ago
somewhat involved somehow with the newsmedia for a good portion of my life, regional papers in my country are doing absolutely fine, metro paper are on the verge of seppuku chaising eyeballs

chrisco255 7y ago

I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state. Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback. The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem. I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform. Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.

choward 7y ago
> I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. That's an interesting idea. I love getting paywalled by some web site because I clicked a headline, especially when it's some a local news site or some other site I'll probably never visit again. I'm not signing up to read one article that I might not even like. I thought pay per article might be a good idea, but that would just encourage click bait. And if the article is terrible, I still have to pay. However, with a subscription to all of the news none of this would be an issue as long as it was reasonably priced.
- rapnie 7y ago
  Blendle works like this, aggregates news sites, offers subscription (10 euro/month) and deals out micropayments under the hood (moved away from pay-per-article). They operate in US, Netherlands, Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
7y ago

davidw 7y ago

This article is very relevant: 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... It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.

SllX 7y ago

The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers). All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters. Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue. So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.

abathur 7y ago
This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value. The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one. I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
- deleted 7y ago
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- SllX 7y ago
  The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and services. The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
  - abathur 7y ago
    This just begs the question. People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.

Joakal 7y ago

Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but 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. Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat! Both of the points 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.

cartoonworld 7y ago
>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. I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?
- Joakal 7y ago
  Essentially, second place in same constituencies. The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.
  - cartoonworld 7y ago

walkingolof 7y ago

Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It's beyond me why not regulators have stepped in...

scarejunba 7y ago

Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your time and money. It is no surprise you don't give them your time or your money. They have problem and solution reversed.

musicale 7y ago

I guess I'm lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc.. Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.

dang 7y ago

We changed the URL from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear-pen-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear-p..., which points to this.

stakhanov 7y ago

In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?

CharlesColeman 7y ago
Because some news has limited geographical relevance. Are you going to regularly read about things like city council meetings about a controversial local development projects some small city in the NYT? Hell no.

UglyToad 7y ago

In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies. While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable. I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1]. Relevant to the article: "And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985." He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system. [0]: https://www.flatearthnews.net/ https://www.flatearthnews.net/ [1]: https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/ https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth...

Merrill 7y ago

Local news is more available now than previously. There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc. More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.

VLM 7y ago
However, those new channels are not the incumbent, over employed, over advertised, legacy organizations who feel they have a right to a perpetually successful business model and that having a 90s era website in 2020 or saying "learn to code" is some kind of hate crime. Just hand over your money forever and they'll stop complaining.
jeegsy 7y ago
Thats an interesting take. It never even occurred to me. You are right, if you really want to know about the local stuff, you can. You might have to work a little bit more but most of the info is out there already.

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

The whole news model is becoming strange. At the beginning journalism shifted from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site owners

subpixel 7y ago

Craigslist, who ate local newspapers’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds in every Craigslist market. A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good antidote to the awareness issues. Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process. Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult. Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.

foob4r 7y ago

I'll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like. I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
Ditto. I have an NYT and WSJ online subscription, and I made a donation to a free weekly that covers hyperlocal news for my area. I understand paywalls are annoying. But if anyone wants to do anything, they need to figure out how to get micropayments to work or build a non-techgiant service [1] that can let you collectively subscribe to most of the news organizations at once for a reasonable fee. I understand those are both hard problems. [1] Can't be a techgiant because they've caused enough damage already, and giving them control of the subscription fees could be the coup de grâce. Honestly, the website should be a media-owned co-op or something.
uncletaco 7y ago
Honestly a lot of the work of local newspapers are picked up by our local television stations. Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down. I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker. The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.
- lmkg 7y ago
  > The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down. There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...

t34543 7y ago

Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They’re a terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must follow.

acd 7y ago

Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.

technobabble 7y ago

I searched the thread and couldn’t find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I thought it was good while it lasted. What are the chances of reviving something like it?