2 ms·

Isn't that like saying that exercise has no intrinsic value? It's good for us, but no obvious short-term benefits. How can we make such things more compelling?

• SllX 7y ago
  Not a great comparison. Of course exercise has intrinsic value! It’s just the grueling hard work that used to be life isn’t such grueling hard work anymore, and we haven’t yet adapted to that. It’s too easy to not work hard and make a good living, and a symptom of that is obesity. There’s still vocations out there that are hard, but most jobs don’t require you to lift more than 50 pounds and only infrequently at that. Exercise as a hobby has no intrinsic value though. You either do it for whatever reasons that you find compelling, or you don’t. Getting back to the local news, I guess the way for it to be more compelling is for your local market to be more interesting, or for the people in that market to be more interested in their neighbors. I am struggling to find a niche in there that can’t be filled in other ways by a hundred other means. I think the case for local news these days is only when a market is so big that keeping tabs on the goings on of the city’s bureaucracy is a full time job, and even then, only to the extent that the bureaucracy has an effect on people’s daily lives. I think the market has already mostly optimized for this. You’re not going to make the product as it existed in the 20th Century any more compelling than it is now, unless conditions in the market change to allow for this. I think we’re going to have to collectively let go of our romantic notions of the local paper from times past.