5 ms·

Gannett and the Death of Local Newspapers

35 points by woldemariam 5y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle. Reading the article gives the feeling that reporters are psychopaths. The first thing when they heard of the disaster was not to go see if they could help anyone, but how can they publish a story that sells. Along with “if it bleeds, it leads” there is a sense of profiting of other people’s misery and voyeurism in the psyche of the industry.
- clarkevans 5y ago
  Reporters act like a nervous system. It's not their job to help repair a wound, it's their job to spread news about the wound so that others can come and help. It's not psychopathic behavior, it's having a critical role and executing on it. I think if there's psychopathy, it's in what they choose to cover, and how they cover it.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    That is what they tell themselves. Did they sell the newspaper talking about the story? Did they run ads in the newspaper? No, their motive was profit and playing off people’s voyeurism.
    - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
      Having spent 3 years working on the tech side for a large newspaper, I can assure you that this is a purely sensationalized mindset that really has no basis in reality. It's like wondering aloud if all hackers wear black hoods and Guy Fawkes masks and still live in their parents' basement, it's silly. Seriously, please spend some time actually researching and trying to understand the nuances of that industry before throwing around accusations that they play off people's voyeurism. I'm not saying that it's perfect, but it amazes how many otherwise-intelligent people make completely ignorant, emotionally-driven comments like this.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I think that sells short good samaritans who very often are not professional rescuers or medics yet try to the best of their ability to assist those in peril. They too could say, I’m just a taxi driver, I’m just a teacher, etc. Newspeople to some degree are attracted to tragedy. While it may be a minority some will seek out thinks like war correspondence sometimes because they want to present a neutral side or counter narrative but also for the inherent thrill of danger and the action and boredom, etc.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  The first thing when they heard of the disaster was not to go see if they could help anyone, but how can they publish a story A bit off topic, but with all the current debate on the nature of social media and its affect on mental health, I've been wondering if this tendency to want to tell horrid stories is some deep rooted part of human nature? Because even today, you see it all around the world when we whip out our cell phones to livestream instead of going to help anyone when a calamity happens. It never fails, people on scene will almost universally record instead of rendering aid. From the smallest calamity such as a subway argument or fight, right on up to a building collapse. Are we just drawn to calamity? It's weird.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Is it psychopathic that when you, yourself, hear about a disaster, you don't drop everything to see if you can help, you just go to work as if it didn't happen?
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    The doing my job part is not psychopathic. It is getting excited about the disaster and thinking how much money I can make from the disaster and how many people will see my article on the disaster that is psychopathic. In the article the people were not talking about how it was a tragedy but how excited they were, that this was a career highlight, and how it was good for the newspaper. That is psychopathic.
    - allturtles 5y ago
      I don't think it's any more psychopathic than anyone getting excited about their work even though it involves others' suffering: firefighters, police officers, EMTs, ER doctors, soldiers. By the way, according to the article the grain elevator just injured a few workers (though it's not clear how badly), we're not talking about 9/11 here. edit: according to [0], there were 2 people hospitalized. [0]: https://www.thehawkeye.com/story/news/local/2020/07/29/iconic-grain-silos-on-burlington-riverfront-turned-to-rubble/42037085/ https://www.thehawkeye.com/story/news/local/2020/07/29/iconi...
helipad 5y ago
Interesting tidbit that countered my assumptions: > None of this was inevitable: At the time of the sale to GateHouse, The Hawk Eye wasn’t struggling financially. Far from it. In the years leading up to the sale, the paper was seeing profit margins ranging from the mid-teens to the high 20s. Gannett has dedicated much of its revenue to servicing and paying off loans associated with the merger, rather than reinvesting in local journalism. Like many of us I'm sure, my local (Gannett-owned) news website is awful. On the news page, you might get a handful of stories a week related to the actual town. It's high school sports results, PR for new businesses (or remodeling of existing ones), some crime reports, health code violations. Granted there may not be much happening in a small town, but it's very surface level. I get the impression the journalists are told to live off a diet of aggregated reports sent to them rather than getting out to speak to anyone. Like the linked piece suggests, it bears no relationship to what locals are talking about in Facebook and NextDoor groups. The community chats about constant flooding in certain areas, discussions related to Covid including staffing, the changing weather, personal allegations which if were true would be scandalous but go unchecked, the availability of public services.
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  This seems to be part of a more general phenomenon of businesses being run by people who don't know that area of business, and who direct all focus away from the quality of the product, doing things such as cutting costs even when the resulting lower quality makes the company less profitable, not more. (For instance, Shamus Young has written a fair bit[1] about this phenomenon in the video game industry, although there cost-cutting does not seem to be its primary manifestation.) It's not entirely clear what's to be done about this; we generally assume that businesses might disregard others' well-being in pursuing their own interest, but what do you do when instead they're just stupidly destructive, serving nobody's interest? (Of course part of what's going on here seems to be that, due to principal/agent problems, it's not really serving nobody's interest; the shareholders lose out, but the executives, who are paid a salary, and thus rely not on the impersonal evaluation of the market but their own ability to convince people they're doing a good job, do not seem to lose out in the same way...) [1] For instance, here: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eas-problem-isnt-greed/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eas-problem-isnt-greed/
DicIfTEx 5y ago
On a related note, Index on Censorship published an entire issue dedicated to this topic in 2019: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-all-the-local-news/ https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-a... A couple of the articles are available for free online.

35 points by woldemariam 5y ago

> Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle. Reading the article gives the feeling that reporters are psychopaths. The first thing when they heard of the disaster was not to go see if they could help anyone, but how can they publish a story that sells. Along with “if it bleeds, it leads” there is a sense of profiting of other people’s misery and voyeurism in the psyche of the industry.

clarkevans 5y ago
Reporters act like a nervous system. It's not their job to help repair a wound, it's their job to spread news about the wound so that others can come and help. It's not psychopathic behavior, it's having a critical role and executing on it. I think if there's psychopathy, it's in what they choose to cover, and how they cover it.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  That is what they tell themselves. Did they sell the newspaper talking about the story? Did they run ads in the newspaper? No, their motive was profit and playing off people’s voyeurism.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    Having spent 3 years working on the tech side for a large newspaper, I can assure you that this is a purely sensationalized mindset that really has no basis in reality. It's like wondering aloud if all hackers wear black hoods and Guy Fawkes masks and still live in their parents' basement, it's silly. Seriously, please spend some time actually researching and trying to understand the nuances of that industry before throwing around accusations that they play off people's voyeurism. I'm not saying that it's perfect, but it amazes how many otherwise-intelligent people make completely ignorant, emotionally-driven comments like this.
- mc32 5y ago
  I think that sells short good samaritans who very often are not professional rescuers or medics yet try to the best of their ability to assist those in peril. They too could say, I’m just a taxi driver, I’m just a teacher, etc. Newspeople to some degree are attracted to tragedy. While it may be a minority some will seek out thinks like war correspondence sometimes because they want to present a neutral side or counter narrative but also for the inherent thrill of danger and the action and boredom, etc.
bilbo0s 5y ago
The first thing when they heard of the disaster was not to go see if they could help anyone, but how can they publish a story A bit off topic, but with all the current debate on the nature of social media and its affect on mental health, I've been wondering if this tendency to want to tell horrid stories is some deep rooted part of human nature? Because even today, you see it all around the world when we whip out our cell phones to livestream instead of going to help anyone when a calamity happens. It never fails, people on scene will almost universally record instead of rendering aid. From the smallest calamity such as a subway argument or fight, right on up to a building collapse. Are we just drawn to calamity? It's weird.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 5y ago
Is it psychopathic that when you, yourself, hear about a disaster, you don't drop everything to see if you can help, you just go to work as if it didn't happen?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  The doing my job part is not psychopathic. It is getting excited about the disaster and thinking how much money I can make from the disaster and how many people will see my article on the disaster that is psychopathic. In the article the people were not talking about how it was a tragedy but how excited they were, that this was a career highlight, and how it was good for the newspaper. That is psychopathic.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    I don't think it's any more psychopathic than anyone getting excited about their work even though it involves others' suffering: firefighters, police officers, EMTs, ER doctors, soldiers. By the way, according to the article the grain elevator just injured a few workers (though it's not clear how badly), we're not talking about 9/11 here. edit: according to [0], there were 2 people hospitalized. [0]: https://www.thehawkeye.com/story/news/local/2020/07/29/iconic-grain-silos-on-burlington-riverfront-turned-to-rubble/42037085/ https://www.thehawkeye.com/story/news/local/2020/07/29/iconi...

helipad 5y ago

Interesting tidbit that countered my assumptions: > None of this was inevitable: At the time of the sale to GateHouse, The Hawk Eye wasn’t struggling financially. Far from it. In the years leading up to the sale, the paper was seeing profit margins ranging from the mid-teens to the high 20s. Gannett has dedicated much of its revenue to servicing and paying off loans associated with the merger, rather than reinvesting in local journalism. Like many of us I'm sure, my local (Gannett-owned) news website is awful. On the news page, you might get a handful of stories a week related to the actual town. It's high school sports results, PR for new businesses (or remodeling of existing ones), some crime reports, health code violations. Granted there may not be much happening in a small town, but it's very surface level. I get the impression the journalists are told to live off a diet of aggregated reports sent to them rather than getting out to speak to anyone. Like the linked piece suggests, it bears no relationship to what locals are talking about in Facebook and NextDoor groups. The community chats about constant flooding in certain areas, discussions related to Covid including staffing, the changing weather, personal allegations which if were true would be scandalous but go unchecked, the availability of public services.

Sniffnoy 5y ago
This seems to be part of a more general phenomenon of businesses being run by people who don't know that area of business, and who direct all focus away from the quality of the product, doing things such as cutting costs even when the resulting lower quality makes the company less profitable, not more. (For instance, Shamus Young has written a fair bit[1] about this phenomenon in the video game industry, although there cost-cutting does not seem to be its primary manifestation.) It's not entirely clear what's to be done about this; we generally assume that businesses might disregard others' well-being in pursuing their own interest, but what do you do when instead they're just stupidly destructive, serving nobody's interest? (Of course part of what's going on here seems to be that, due to principal/agent problems, it's not really serving nobody's interest; the shareholders lose out, but the executives, who are paid a salary, and thus rely not on the impersonal evaluation of the market but their own ability to convince people they're doing a good job, do not seem to lose out in the same way...) [1] For instance, here: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eas-problem-isnt-greed/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eas-problem-isnt-greed/

DicIfTEx 5y ago

On a related note, Index on Censorship published an entire issue dedicated to this topic in 2019: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-all-the-local-news/ https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/03/magazine-is-this-a... A couple of the articles are available for free online.