22 ms·

The local news crisis is deepening America's divides

296 points by samizdis 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago
Wait, i thought "Nextdoor" etc were filling that niche with neighborhood vigilance and "my neighbor's sunflower is spying on me" posts. Also recall lots of words about how "filter bubbles" are bad and all forums must be acceptable to all society so that "badthink" doesn't grow. There's real, local and or interest focus forums still; I'm sure. Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best." This is absolutely a thing. I have servers hosted on my local tiny ISP that only permit my local ISP's CIDR blocks as there is really no need for others to access them. It's literally for the local community. I might set up a VPN endpoint for people that travel some day.
juanani 4y ago
dredmorbius 4y ago
Among the interesting developments is the growing set of non-profit newsrooms. There are the venerable institutions of PBS and NPR in the US, broadcasting on television and radio respectively, as well as increasingly online through video and podcasts. ProPublica is probably the best known of the recent arrivals, providing investigative journalism at a national level. I'd submitted a couple of items on Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ, acquiring one of the city's two remaining daily print papers, the Sun Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-times-acquisition-chicago-public-media-wbez https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-... The other, the Tribune, was acquired by the vampire-capital firm Alden Capital somewhat over a year ago and has been emitting coronal mass ejections of reporters, columnists, and staff, since, though many curiously remain on the paper's masthead...). WBEZ didn't pay for the acquisition, it was paid to take over the paper. Which might tell you something of the market for print news media presently. Another notable example is the Baltimore Banner, which officially launched two weeks ago on June 14. It's another non-profit, is looking to expand to 70 journalists. It is online-only. https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-officially-launches-plans-to-expand-to-70-journalist-by-end-of-year/ https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-offic... But both the Sun Times and the Banner are big-city papers. They're not papers reaching into small towns and rural areas, in which the news desert truly exists. I see two possible paths forward. One is for news-as-public-good, in which jouranlism is publicly (and preferably locally) supported. Another is a return to the partisan press of the past, notably the 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the dominance of right-wing talk radio, Fox, OANN, Breitbart, and similar organisations, it seems at least one political party is already largely there.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  We also enjoy a local not-for-profit news organization called Cityside which covers Oakland and Berkeley, which together is a city about the same size as Baltimore. "Local reporters" who are on the staff of the SF Chronicle and Bay Area News Group, the local legacy newspaper organizations, are always whining on Twitter about how locals don't support news any more, but the existence of these successful, award-winning nonprofit news outlets shows that people will support good reporting, but they won't support more of the same thing the big newspapers have been doing for decades.
  - carapace 4y ago
    In SF there was briefly something called The Bay Citizen that was funded by Warren Hellman. > The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the organization launched the website, baycitizen.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen But he passed away and it merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting. > The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California.[1] It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a million people weekly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Repor...
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I really think that anything started by a bazillionaire as an instant nonprofit enterprise is bound to fail. It goes for Warren Hellman and Mitch Kapor and the rest of them. Those that start with an immediately sustainable business model, like Cityside, seem to persist.
      - 4y ago
dangoor 4y ago
How did this whole article manage to avoid mentioning that Axios itself has local news?
- evtothedev 4y ago
  I was wondering this same thing! And honestly, I've found Axios's approach to be kind of inspirational.
elzbardico 4y ago
I always admire the self-importance journalists assign to themselves. Most local news was and would ever be utter trash. Small town journalism could only survive by peddling to some powerful local group or a political enterprise. With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Social media, maybe. Social (and other) ad-driven media? Certainly not.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  >> With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities. I just LOVE how you proclaim this, without first seeing (a) the cosequences of social media (good or bad) 30+ years from now, and (b) whatever disrupts current social media next.
uniqueuid 4y ago
In research on effects of local news, there is one really tricky part. We don't yet know what precisely the "local" benefit is. Many of the relevant studies investigate the effects of local newspapers closing (or opening, rarely). But they imply that there is something special about local reporting that can't be supplied by national news. The best answer comes from a ~10 year old study [1] that suggests there is a mutual reinforcing effect of local news, community embedding (i.e. social capital) and social engagement (i.e. volunteering etc.) I wish there was a better model of (1) what it is in particular in local news that is beneficial and (2) how it affects people (positively and negatively). [1] Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Friedland, L. A. (2011). A communicative approach to social capital. Journal of Communication, 61(4), 689–712.
- pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  Isn’t it simply based on experiencing reality? Local news is directly experienced, and when all news was within the sphere of experienced events, it was good. Modernity has stretched the sphere of news to events that are not directly experienced in reality and thus lead to here-say and bias to authority vs conviction of certainty through direct experience.
  - uniqueuid 4y ago
    That's one possibility. But you can always construct a scenario where the opposite holds. I.e. your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization. In other words, access to local news may help some people realize how little they connection feel towards their neighbors.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      > your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization It cannot possibly be worse than localized social media like Nextdoor.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I don’t know what the “solution” is, but it was really obvious when my “local” paper turned into a repeater for CNN. It used to be pretty poor, but it was never this bad. I don’t subscribe it to him particularly, but this Trump-Era literally broke a lot of people’s brains, it has a downstream effect.
- whatever1 4y ago
  It unpleasant to watch journalists who were screaming every day that the guy is tearing apart almost every US institution and irrecoverably destroys this country, with the ultimate goal of him staying in power. The journalists have seen these stories from other failed states, and they cannot unsee the similarities. And they were right. Just take a look at the proceedings of the Jan 6th committee. If it was not a dozen of people in the correct roles (mostly Republicans), on Jan 6th, he could had indeed achieved his goal. It is us who were closing our eyes for 4 years, reassuring ourselves that his presidency was a normal presidency. Nothing was normal.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Right, good post. Yea, I was talking about about the hyperbolic nonsense that we've saw for years, things that were not based in reality, but complete media created perception. But you make a compelling counter with Jan 6th and righteous fear.
jollybean 4y ago
My bet is that this education ratio issue has existed since the dawn of time.
anovikov 4y ago
Not very relevant to the topic but maybe not all is lost for the print media. I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because: - this way i can avoid popups, jumping pieces of content intentionally distracting me so i pay attention to ads - ads are not as stupid there (i don't live in the U.S. and i see US-centric ads which are totally, completely out of relevance to my demographic - from "senior living homes" to private jet flights - with every kind of crazy shit in between but nothing i ever buy or can think of buying) - content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y (because you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems to be written by actually literate people, not some peasants that seem to write online news pieces recently All in all, it dawns at me that at least for now, the Internet has been a failure. It failed to deliver any positive life changes we've been promised 25 years ago, and brought about many negative ones. There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork. Even of them, Upwork seems to be a detriment to developed nations (including U.S. that created it), serving mostly as a vehicle of scams for fraudsters from the poor ones. Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price alone down to the drain. Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one more form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank and buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my safe. News online brought "targeting" and "optimisation" through search bubbles and as a result, a society destroyed by political divisions. Taxis online? Only a benefit in poor countries or in terribly terribly overregulated ones in rich countries (think NYC). They killed livelihoods of millions of people and killed quality of service elsewhere. The list goes on. Internet seems to be more than just a failure - it is a pure evil. It confronted us with ourselves (as opposed to some polished, educated, even if overly rigid, central authority that served as an interface before), and we turned out to be monsters we had no idea we were. And because this thing has no way out of it, i am terrified at the realisation that only thing that can save us may be some form of communism, where the State will simply ban or mandate so many things it will not be a market economy anymore. Including, most probably, a ban on free speech. I can't see a way for free speech to work in a world of search bubbles and online anonymity. Craziest conspiracy theories will inevitably replace reality for a vast majority of people - who vote - this way. And democracy without free speech is a joke.
acd 4y ago
Younger generations need to pay for news. Local news is important for democracy since local news feeds alerts national news. Ad networks by providing news for free is destroying democracy.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  How does one incentivize this? Because younger generations ain't gonna do it for charity reasons; they don't have surplus income to donate to charity.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    Bring back pay per newspaper vending machines? They were awful and broken all the time before, and now they’re just free. If it’s cheap entertainment, I’d rather pay for that than iTunes movies.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      If people were willing to pay for them, why would they have been made free in the first place?
      - ironmagma 4y ago
        Probably because it’s cheaper to give them away than to keep repairing haphazardly designed vending machines. Maybe they should just make them like the snack vending machines.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Based on the fact that newspaper businesses had many, many decades to come up with a better machine, I would assume the cost of developing this machine is not worth it.
        ironmagma 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic. We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values. Even the notion of “blue America” and “red America” is misleading. What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in Baltimore. I noticed this acutely living in Atlanta for the better part of a decade. Politics was not a big deal when I lived there. Atlanta was “blue” and the rest of the state was “red” but politics was forward looking and productive. The mayor when I was there, Shirley Franklin, was truly put the city above partisanship. A Democrat, she endorsed Mary Norwood, an independent, in 2017, because the Democratic candidate was a protege of a mayor she believed to have been corrupt: https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-endorses-mary-norwood https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-e.... She waved aside criticism suggesting that she (a Black woman) should have endorsed the Black Democratic candidate instead of Norwood, a white woman. Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention. The state became a battleground in a proxy war between New York and Mississippi. Racialist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the New York Times and Washington Post (but notably, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was far more prudent). They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater, instead of a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents leaving California, Illinois, and New York, attracted by plentiful jobs, low taxes, and an excellent public university system. The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
- yojo 4y ago
  As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs. I’m not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you can count on readers to call bullshit.
  - michaelchisari 4y ago
    I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad Max had a violence baby. Can't count how many times the people saying this live in rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates than Chicago. The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer. Except for the winters. Those are awful.
dekken_ 4y ago
Is it even "local news" when it's owned by some corporation like Sinclair? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    We’re allowed to have knowledge outside of the specific thing being discussed in an article. Also, if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station? This is a questionable substitution. Local TV news is heavily watched by 55+ Americans, with over a third of 18 to 34-year olds having never watched it [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-of-watching-local-news-in-the-us-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-of-watc...
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Could you link a screenshot as Statista are paywalling / registration-walling that content? Thanks.
        Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        I can't share a screenshot of the statistics due to copyright restrictions, but I can confirm that what user JumpCrisscross said (about the statistics) is true.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Not a word about why media antitrust is important... even though the article casually mentions that "Newspapers continue to be consolidated by hedge funds and private investment firms that believe they can wring more profits from the papers through synergies as the industry declines." > "Axios is owned by Axios Media, whose investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Greycroft, and NBC News. NBC doubles up as Axios’ media partner." https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/ https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/ Not only that, people employed by today's media conglomerates are increasingly drawn from the 'wealthy liberal coastal elite' sector and are typically filtered through an unpaid internship process before getting hired, leading to non-representative 'journalists', which is probably doing as much damage (i.e pushing the populist perception of news media as a symbol of out-of-touch elitism) as the corporate consolidation is. Another side effect of this trend is the death of investigative journalism, which generally upsets the state and corporate power centers who are increasingly joined at the hip. For example, the last Washington Post investigative series of note was "Top Secret America" from about a decade ago, and now that Jeff Bezos owns the paper and AWS is actively seeking CIA and NSA contracts, forget about anything else like that.
- dgb23 4y ago
  Investigative, independent, long form, good journalism still exists, you have to pay for it though and it isn’t as popular as mainstream.
  - jarjoura 4y ago
    I used to be an avid Economist reader, but even they are increasingly moving away from long form non opinionated journalism towards more bite-sized, clearly biased takes on the world. They have made it know they clearly believe Brexit was a mistake and now they have made a point to go "see I told you so" more often than not.
    - shadytrees 4y ago
      I don't know much, if anything, about Brexit — but certainly Economist isn't the only publication that's been bearish on Brexit. I'm interested in reading someone that's bullish. Is there coverage of Brexit that you prefer?
FerretFred 4y ago
It's the same in the UK, by and large. We have a small group of <strikeout>advertisement sellers</strikeout> news media companies that absorb local papers and churn out overly-similar content with different newspaper names on the front page. The online versions of these are sooooo bad - practically no actual written content with any depth, interspersed with video "articles" which incorporate more ads. Then try and find the actual news in among the clickbait links. Want better access? "Simply register and answer some suspiciously personal questions"... I tried to do some research recently: could I consult their archives? "Nothing older than a couple of years", so no. Photographers? "If you have photos or videos please upload them to us". Timely coverage of local issues? "You won't believe what British Seniors aged 55-plus are buying today!!" As far as I'm concerned they can crash and burn, and maybe groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers, albeit online only.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers Social media is the killer, because in a perfect world it would serve precisely this purpose. But instead of replicating the means of production for each locality, you share one globally - which also helps concerned readers from different geographies pool their resources. A fine vision, and its true, but we see now how severe the downside is: the dissociation of reader from event is the wiggle room in which professional rhetoricians can form new and exciting memetic viruses. And virtually no-one has the psychic immune system to wade through it on a daily basis and not get infected with something. These viruses are designed to serve a narrow aim, and the side-effects are ignored, and this is what leads to the meltdown we have now. Of course, a simple behavior change can help: pay attention to news in proportion to its physical proximity to you! The knee-jerk reaction to see a national or global trend when anything bad happens is bad for the soul. We should be open to seeing trends, of course, but only slightly. At least a little bit of stubborn resistance to inferring a trend from two anecdotes is good for the soul, I think.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway8689 4y ago
ezekiel11 4y ago
- mpclark 4y ago
  The explanation is really, really easy though. Nearly all the advertising has gone away. There's no money in the business past chum boxes now. And the same is happening to the trade press and specialist magazines and all the other good media things we used to have. Not all progress is forward progress.
  - ezekiel11 4y ago
ck2 4y ago
Media doesn't make the divide. Ideology makes the divide. People don't drive around urban in massive trucks rolling coal and/or own a dozen guns because of their news source, their news source is because of what their "world view" is.
- xbar 4y ago
  Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know? The reinforcement and advertising loops are real and effective at creating and expanding the divide. Perhaps you don't recall a time before there was such a thing as Fox News. Back when the hardest new choice was: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, or Tom Brokaw?
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    >Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know? Not every media corporation can be right.
- padseeker 4y ago
  I totally agree with this, and I don't know why you are getting so many downvotes. When Fox news called Arizona for Biden, many of their viewers were mad and there were anti fox news protests because their typical audience was mad they weren't being told what they wanted to hear. In a capitalist nation where supply and demand is everything, some people treat the news and facts and information like a product, and when people hear things they don't like they'll find someone else to give them stories they want to hear like Trump won massively and this election was stolen.
djfobbz 4y ago
Yet no mention of Operation Mockingbird!
- irrational 4y ago
  The what?
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  Are the towns busted because they no longer have propagandists? Or, did the propagandists move on after the towns had already been bled dry, & were no longer worth the effort? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird I'm old and from the city. The newspaper has always been a puppet of hospitals, real estate brokerages, & car dealerships. Part of how these companies get away with murder is by putting the entirety of local media, print & broadcast, in their back pockets. Unless you're paying something in the ballpark of Bloomberg terminal prices, you're the product.
drorco 4y ago
To me it seems like this is the symptom of a dying industry, the newspaper industry. I can't think of many people who are willing to pay for newspapers or news websites, let alone watch their ads(!). Eventually these papers are for-profit businesses so it's either go bankrupt, or find a way to make money no matter what. It seems that those who survived so far, are picking the latter, each to its own extent. Hopefully, there'd be a new, sensible way of earning money for decent free press, and this is just a limbo stage.
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
thenerdhead 4y ago
Can’t honestly say I know anyone outside of my parents who reads the newspaper. Sounds like the newspaper is dying, not local news that has shifted to be digital.
- pgrote 4y ago
  >local news that has shifted to be digital. Our local newspaper has a few actual journalists reporting on what is happening in government at city, county and state level. Just a few since all the layoffs. Sports is hanging on, but has been taken over by The Athletic. Real journalism concerning business, arts and suburb cities is gone. The only time it is legitimately covered is if it is being covered elsewhere by local TV stations. The newspaper website is a malignant entity infecting everyone with trackers and ads. They are attempting video, but it lacks the content and production of even a mildly successful youtube creator. I still subscribe to the digital product to help support the remaining journalists.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sbf501 4y ago
  Still need journalists though, even for digital.
Clubber 4y ago
>"This is a crisis for our democracy and our society," said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement. Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of local newspapers.
xkbarkar 4y ago
Why is the closure of local news considered spurred by the pandemic though?? I personally stopped reading news outlets after the first Trump year. Every single news outlet was full of exactly the same Trump vitriol ( I lean left so, not strange ). And to make it worse, I am not even american in the US. Why read the exact same opEd in the local and the state news?? At least in my home country, since about 1 year after Trump I pretty much scaled from maybe 5 outlets to 2. Since covid times I read one left and one right ( I used to only read left ) and then subscribe to weekly papers that support investigative journalism. Honestly I feel local news shot themselves in the foot with Trump hysteria. Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident. I think it's this one. Local news has been in a death spiral for 20 years at least, I distinctly remember adults in the late 90s and early 00s bemoaning the demise of all the local papers, with one left standing but also dying. During Trump times they latched onto reporting about national news instead of local in a desperate bid for relevancy, but obviously couldn't compete with national news.
irrational 4y ago
I feel like, in some ways, Nextdoor has stepped into this void. I’ve even noticed that the local city government uses Nextdoor to try to get messages out. However, most of the content on Nextdoor is a dumpster fire: what were those police sirens for? What was that loud noise? Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am! These homeless camps are really driving down our property values! I saw coyotes walking down the street! These fireworks are upsetting Snookums!
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  >Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am! Both of those seem relevant to me if they're in my neighborhood or nearby. Crime is low where I live but when it happens, it tends to happen in sprees when one person or a small group of people get away with one thing and suddenly decide they can get away with it repeatedly. If there's a pattern of activity going on, I'd like to know about.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    Yeah, we used nextdoor to get back some stuff taken from our car. Apparently they walked across our small city and took/left stuff as they went along.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  I don’t understand why whose types of nextdoor posts are a dumpster fire? Those seem like exactly the kind of things people actually care about. If I hear a car crash down the street I’m gonna go take a look.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    Well for one thing, all of the things GP mentioned are fear-based posts. Furthermore, they attract the worst types of responses, which then sucks in empathetic posters who unwittingly respond to trolls and leads pretty directly to arguments. At least that’s what I’ve witnessed the few times I’ve logged in to check on things of local interest.
evtothedev 4y ago
I keep thinking this is a ripe space for a startup. I could see it being, "Infrastructure for local news" or perhaps "Local news in a box." For example, what would it take to have something like Berkleyside[1] for every small town in the country? Or what about something like Block Club[2] If anyone wants to spit ball ideas for this, I'd love to riff: https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=2022-07 https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=20... [1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/ https://blockclubchicago.org/
- adrianN 4y ago
  Who pays for local news? You need to have actual journalists sitting in boring local council meetings and reading boring reports to generate "news" stories. That is not free. Local news competes for attention with national news, global news, and a billion types of non-news entertainment. Ad money is probably too thin to cover the expensive legwork needed for local coverage.
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    I’d say to question those assumptions. Open source software exists but the congenital wisdom that engineers would never do work for free. You’d be surprised what people will volunteer for. Some people are already attending those things and perhaps they’d be willing to report back.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      It's a lot harder to get unbiased news if you solely rely on volunteers.
      - abirch 4y ago
        Can you imagine getting your news from a version of Richard Stallman.
        4y ago
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WhitneyLand 4y ago
The source material makes a weak case for the causation (rather than simply correlation) claimed in the title. Here’s a link to the actual report, for some reason it’s buried 3 or 4 levels deep from the article: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/report https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-... Notice the headline (clickbait?) topic is not the primary theme of the report. The report is primarily about the state of the newspaper business. In the key findings, “news deserts” causing a divide is only mentioned in one of the last points. I’m not trying to disagree necessarily, but they need to provide better support for the tie-in.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- in_cahoots 4y ago
  Agreed, this article provides clear evidence that the industry is declining but no evidence of it being linked to a growing divide. I’m sad, but not surprised, to see so few comments engaging with the contents of the article itself.
bilsbie 4y ago
I think a local news publication could be done as a non profit with mostly volunteers. Kind of like an open source project. There are enough people that enjoy sharing what’s going on and writing that it could be workable. Maybe someone here could set up a sort of franchise that makes it easier for local communities to get set up. (Idea for a ycombinator startup?)
bilsbie 4y ago
A big issue is major corporations buying up lots of local news stations too. I found this video extremely eye opening. Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  I assume they do that because local news isn't profitable and is always on the risk of failing?
xyst 4y ago
Nobody else to blame but the newspaper industry themselves. Failure to begin modernizing/digitizing their systems in the 1990s caused them to make very hasty decisions in the mid 2000s and 2010s (such as relying on advertising models created by Google/Facebook).
- mrkurt 4y ago
  The local newspapers failed, yes. But that's normal. Had there been a healthy market for local news, they'd have been replaced. What actually happened is that the revenue available to local news got consolidated. Classifieds and local ads got rolled up by Craigslist/Google/Facebook. None of these companies have an interest in local news. There's not much of a fix for this. Until we come up with a better way to pay for local news, there's no choice the "newspaper industry" could have made to thrive. Fighting consolidation is a good idea, though, and might help a new model emerge.
- abathur 4y ago
  Citation needed? How would digitizing their systems have saved the industry from all three of its primary revenue streams being hoovered up by free online classifieds, free debundled online news, and online advertising? If you're going to blame the industry, it seems weird to claim it's because of strategic mistakes made in the 2 decades after peak circulation and not the moment ad revenue became indispensable?
anewpersonality 4y ago
lvl102 4y ago
Who watches or reads local news? I haven't watched for years. Close to two decades. My guess is specific demographics. It’s selection bias.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  How do you figure out what’s going on around you then? Word of mouth (online or otherwise)?
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    I use local newspaper articles online and Reddit, but I mostly don't figure out what's going on around me. :D
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    For me word of mouth I suppose. If I don't hear about it from somebody else, it probably wasn't worth knowing. I think all this "news" people read/watch is mostly useless filler. I don't miss any of it.
webdoodle 4y ago
It's called Operation Mockingbird, which is coordinated at the yearly Billionaire's Summer Camp, A.K.A. the Sun Valley Conference, in Ketchum Idaho. This conference is where all the heads of the media companies come to get there marching orders and to further consolidate the media industry (See Disney). Parasites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Peter Theil, and many others attend this meeting. FYI - Ketchum Idaho is a small Ski resort community that sits in a very tight box canyon. 8 Bigs rigs could barricade the entire town, just by blocking a few bridges, or alternatively those points could be used by peaceful protestors to haze and voice there discontent to the very parasites that have destroyed this country and enslaved the minds of the masses. The weapons grade psychological warfare they conduct on us is being ignored by the politicians in Washington (both parties) because they also use those techniques to keep themselves in power. Now is the time to rise up against the lies and deceit. Please come join me in Sun Valley on July 6th, to shine some truth on the cretins that have buried us in disinformation and war propaganda.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Is there a point where Americans will give up on the Union or will it take a Yugoslavia war?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  If part of the country tried to split off, who'd go fight to take it back? I'm happy my successful state sends money to some of the less successful ones, because I think every American deserves their share of the pot, but I'm not going to go die for the privilege of sending it.
woodruffw 4y ago
For New Yorkers: Hell Gate[1] is a new group, focusing on local news and intrigue. I don’t believe they’re accepting money yet, but they’ve done some excellent local investigating. [1]: https://www.hellgatenyc.com/ https://www.hellgatenyc.com/
karaterobot 4y ago
People want gossip, blood, and vitriol. We created platforms where you can get a stream of it any time, day or night. The best (worst) of it, aggregated from around the world. People were free to choose, and chose that instead of waiting for the paper to arrive in the morning. They could in theory have done both, but they clearly only wanted the one thing. So that's what we have now. I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want.
- tsol 4y ago
  >I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want. It's hard to convince people to take responsibility when they cherish their freedom more than anything. We emphasize freedom so much that consequences are a barricade to us
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
towaway15463 4y ago
Is hyper-local news necessary anymore? If you think about the role that newspapers filled it was to distribute information broadly. We have many more ways of doing that now. Granted they aren’t as fully developed as newspapers eventually became but we seem to be on track to build these new institutions. I think we’re simply in a transitional phase where the old medium is dying and being replaced by a new one that is growing into its role.
seereadhack 4y ago
Axios is expanding into local news coverage. This is their PR and wow the bullet point approach sometimes really just doesn't do it for me. For a more involved take of the underlying topic, consider _News for the Rich, White, and Blue_ by Nikki Usher. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blue/9780231184663 http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blu... I don't agree with all of Usher's takeaways but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And as to the headline – yeah, sure, the "local news crisis" is partly causative in the polarization sure but lazy and biased coverage can compound all sorts of nasty dynamics. While I'm here, Mark Lamont-Hill and Todd Brewster's _Seen and Unseen_ would be my pick for a recent media read. Lots of great history, recent and less so, as well as analysis: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-Lamont-Hill/9781982180393 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-...
- pqdbr 4y ago
  If, like me, you read "Axios" as that js library, and PR as Pull Request, you too, my friend, need to take a break.
parkingrift 4y ago
Not sure I agree. I live in New York City and my family is scattered in suburban towns all over the south. They constantly ask me about the “violence in NYC” and whether it’s safe. The important issue here isn’t whether NYC is safe or violent. The issue is why are they reading about NYC? That’s the question we should be asking. Why and where is my mother finding out about a random act of subway violence? Social media. Why is this content being pushed to her? Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws? The problem isn’t a lack of local news. The problem is the nationalization of local news and algorithm driven 24/7 fear mongering on social media. Take a 30 day break from social media and the news and the world feels safer. Gee, I wonder why. Did the world change?
- dmix 4y ago
  > Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws? There should be laws telling media companies what to publish? So people don't read FUDy articles that people always seem to seek out and demand? And these laws exist for other mediums? When I was a kid our nightly news broadcast was full of crime and moral-panics news clips, people eat that stuff up always. I doubt it was much different in terms of gossip and social conversations.
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    We don’t need any new laws. We just need to apply existing publisher laws to social media companies which are outright acting as publishers.
- kevin_b_er 4y ago
  They are subject to an intense propaganda campaign. NYC is viewed as democratic, and so the propaganda attacks it by amplifying any problem or just fabricating them. You can see the top stories your parents are exposed to on FB, https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en The top ones are often propaganda outlets who feed them the lies.
  - 4y ago
betwixthewires 4y ago
I don't buy it. When you live in a small community, you get local news from your neighbors and friends, and Facebook if you have it (Facebook is essentially replacing the local news outlet in small towns, and that's worse than the problem stated in the article, but that's a different discussion). If it's important you'll hear about it. If it's unimportant you'll probably hear about it too. The same applies to national news. 90% of it is unimportant. If it is actually important, like the fact that your bread prices will go up due to a war in Ukraine, you'll hear about it.
- jarjoura 4y ago
  Sure, but what about medium sized communities? The Bay Area has lots of local news outlets and even more local "boots on the ground" community blogs run by volunteers. I don't know if that's true around the rest of the country though.
jarjoura 4y ago
For me, the biggest problem is that news media is allowed to control the narrative by injecting bias into the coverage. We all know language choice has a strong power to manipulate and shift people's perspectives on what needs to be raw facts. Everything is a crisis, everything is a Watergate, everything is leading up to WW3. In a journalism course I took at university, the "hello world" assignment is to write an article without bias. They teach journalists that writing emotionally was considered amateur and unprofessional. This is basic stuff that all these hundreds of thousands of professionals know on day one. Yet, here we are, we're now in a world where the more bias you can inject into the news, the better the ratings, and the deeper the divide goes.
zackmorris 4y ago
It's tempting to blame journalism for the ideological divide we're seeing in the US. But the very best headlines are the ones with a 50/50 split of public opinion (the most controversial). This is also where politicians gain the strongest foothold to push their agendas (wedge issues). Unfortunately, under capitalism there is tremendous pressure on investigative journalism to make rent. Which tends to push stories towards the divisive and cynical end of the spectrum. And politicians towards negative campaigning and mud slinging. I feel that Ronald Reagan abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s and Newt Gingrich legitimizing alternative facts and the glorification of ignorance in the 90s are what put us on this alternate timeline we find ourselves on today. We could add in the selection of GW Bush over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in the 2000s, which solidified moneyed/authoritarian interests and corruption over democracy for at least the next 2 decades, but looking like 3 now. Local news is one detail in this. But really I think the divide is about the transfer of power from the previous generation to young people. We're witnessing a fourth turning and even a flipping of the parties around certain issues, which is why they're acting crazier and crazier in their denial. Looking at popular news channels and public officials, I can't help but wonder where the adults are.
b3nji 4y ago
rr808 4y ago
Its worth subscribing to (yes Paying!) a local newspaper or two if you can find any that are decent. Especially local politicians really need some journalists to investigate and report on what they're up to.
BrainVirus 4y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Here is the full report from the original source, along with the methodology used. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/report/ https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-... https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/methodology/ https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...
phpisthebest 4y ago
One thing I have never understood is why Local news (both print and TV) web properties are soo terrible. I am they are objectively some of the worst designed sites on the internet, I want to consume my local news, they make it painful for me to consume their content online, that is the primary reason local news it dead, they are clinging to their obsolete distribution model of Over the Air Video, and Dead Trees Print.
rapjr9 4y ago
In the US it might help if the FCC got off its rear and opened a new license application window for Low Power FM (LPFM) radio stations. They gave out a few thousand licenses in 2013 and have not allowed any more licenses since then, despite a law from Congress.

296 points by samizdis 4y ago

Wait, i thought "Nextdoor" etc were filling that niche with neighborhood vigilance and "my neighbor's sunflower is spying on me" posts. Also recall lots of words about how "filter bubbles" are bad and all forums must be acceptable to all society so that "badthink" doesn't grow. There's real, local and or interest focus forums still; I'm sure. Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."

LinuxBender 4y ago
Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best." This is absolutely a thing. I have servers hosted on my local tiny ISP that only permit my local ISP's CIDR blocks as there is really no need for others to access them. It's literally for the local community. I might set up a VPN endpoint for people that travel some day.

juanani 4y ago

dredmorbius 4y ago

Among the interesting developments is the growing set of non-profit newsrooms. There are the venerable institutions of PBS and NPR in the US, broadcasting on television and radio respectively, as well as increasingly online through video and podcasts. ProPublica is probably the best known of the recent arrivals, providing investigative journalism at a national level. I'd submitted a couple of items on Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ, acquiring one of the city's two remaining daily print papers, the Sun Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-times-acquisition-chicago-public-media-wbez https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-... The other, the Tribune, was acquired by the vampire-capital firm Alden Capital somewhat over a year ago and has been emitting coronal mass ejections of reporters, columnists, and staff, since, though many curiously remain on the paper's masthead...). WBEZ didn't pay for the acquisition, it was paid to take over the paper. Which might tell you something of the market for print news media presently. Another notable example is the Baltimore Banner, which officially launched two weeks ago on June 14. It's another non-profit, is looking to expand to 70 journalists. It is online-only. https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-officially-launches-plans-to-expand-to-70-journalist-by-end-of-year/ https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-offic... But both the Sun Times and the Banner are big-city papers. They're not papers reaching into small towns and rural areas, in which the news desert truly exists. I see two possible paths forward. One is for news-as-public-good, in which jouranlism is publicly (and preferably locally) supported. Another is a return to the partisan press of the past, notably the 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the dominance of right-wing talk radio, Fox, OANN, Breitbart, and similar organisations, it seems at least one political party is already largely there.

jeffbee 4y ago
We also enjoy a local not-for-profit news organization called Cityside which covers Oakland and Berkeley, which together is a city about the same size as Baltimore. "Local reporters" who are on the staff of the SF Chronicle and Bay Area News Group, the local legacy newspaper organizations, are always whining on Twitter about how locals don't support news any more, but the existence of these successful, award-winning nonprofit news outlets shows that people will support good reporting, but they won't support more of the same thing the big newspapers have been doing for decades.
- carapace 4y ago
  In SF there was briefly something called The Bay Citizen that was funded by Warren Hellman. > The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the organization launched the website, baycitizen.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen But he passed away and it merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting. > The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California.[1] It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a million people weekly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Repor...
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I really think that anything started by a bazillionaire as an instant nonprofit enterprise is bound to fail. It goes for Warren Hellman and Mitch Kapor and the rest of them. Those that start with an immediately sustainable business model, like Cityside, seem to persist.
    - 4y ago

dangoor 4y ago

How did this whole article manage to avoid mentioning that Axios itself has local news?

evtothedev 4y ago
I was wondering this same thing! And honestly, I've found Axios's approach to be kind of inspirational.

elzbardico 4y ago

I always admire the self-importance journalists assign to themselves. Most local news was and would ever be utter trash. Small town journalism could only survive by peddling to some powerful local group or a political enterprise. With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities.

teddyh 4y ago
Social media, maybe. Social (and other) ad-driven media? Certainly not.
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities. I just LOVE how you proclaim this, without first seeing (a) the cosequences of social media (good or bad) 30+ years from now, and (b) whatever disrupts current social media next.

uniqueuid 4y ago

In research on effects of local news, there is one really tricky part. We don't yet know what precisely the "local" benefit is. Many of the relevant studies investigate the effects of local newspapers closing (or opening, rarely). But they imply that there is something special about local reporting that can't be supplied by national news. The best answer comes from a ~10 year old study [1] that suggests there is a mutual reinforcing effect of local news, community embedding (i.e. social capital) and social engagement (i.e. volunteering etc.) I wish there was a better model of (1) what it is in particular in local news that is beneficial and (2) how it affects people (positively and negatively). [1] Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Friedland, L. A. (2011). A communicative approach to social capital. Journal of Communication, 61(4), 689–712.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Isn’t it simply based on experiencing reality? Local news is directly experienced, and when all news was within the sphere of experienced events, it was good. Modernity has stretched the sphere of news to events that are not directly experienced in reality and thus lead to here-say and bias to authority vs conviction of certainty through direct experience.
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  That's one possibility. But you can always construct a scenario where the opposite holds. I.e. your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization. In other words, access to local news may help some people realize how little they connection feel towards their neighbors.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    > your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization It cannot possibly be worse than localized social media like Nextdoor.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

I don’t know what the “solution” is, but it was really obvious when my “local” paper turned into a repeater for CNN. It used to be pretty poor, but it was never this bad. I don’t subscribe it to him particularly, but this Trump-Era literally broke a lot of people’s brains, it has a downstream effect.

whatever1 4y ago
It unpleasant to watch journalists who were screaming every day that the guy is tearing apart almost every US institution and irrecoverably destroys this country, with the ultimate goal of him staying in power. The journalists have seen these stories from other failed states, and they cannot unsee the similarities. And they were right. Just take a look at the proceedings of the Jan 6th committee. If it was not a dozen of people in the correct roles (mostly Republicans), on Jan 6th, he could had indeed achieved his goal. It is us who were closing our eyes for 4 years, reassuring ourselves that his presidency was a normal presidency. Nothing was normal.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Right, good post. Yea, I was talking about about the hyperbolic nonsense that we've saw for years, things that were not based in reality, but complete media created perception. But you make a compelling counter with Jan 6th and righteous fear.

jollybean 4y ago

My bet is that this education ratio issue has existed since the dawn of time.

anovikov 4y ago

Not very relevant to the topic but maybe not all is lost for the print media. I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because: - this way i can avoid popups, jumping pieces of content intentionally distracting me so i pay attention to ads - ads are not as stupid there (i don't live in the U.S. and i see US-centric ads which are totally, completely out of relevance to my demographic - from "senior living homes" to private jet flights - with every kind of crazy shit in between but nothing i ever buy or can think of buying) - content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y (because you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems to be written by actually literate people, not some peasants that seem to write online news pieces recently All in all, it dawns at me that at least for now, the Internet has been a failure. It failed to deliver any positive life changes we've been promised 25 years ago, and brought about many negative ones. There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork. Even of them, Upwork seems to be a detriment to developed nations (including U.S. that created it), serving mostly as a vehicle of scams for fraudsters from the poor ones. Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price alone down to the drain. Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one more form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank and buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my safe. News online brought "targeting" and "optimisation" through search bubbles and as a result, a society destroyed by political divisions. Taxis online? Only a benefit in poor countries or in terribly terribly overregulated ones in rich countries (think NYC). They killed livelihoods of millions of people and killed quality of service elsewhere. The list goes on. Internet seems to be more than just a failure - it is a pure evil. It confronted us with ourselves (as opposed to some polished, educated, even if overly rigid, central authority that served as an interface before), and we turned out to be monsters we had no idea we were. And because this thing has no way out of it, i am terrified at the realisation that only thing that can save us may be some form of communism, where the State will simply ban or mandate so many things it will not be a market economy anymore. Including, most probably, a ban on free speech. I can't see a way for free speech to work in a world of search bubbles and online anonymity. Craziest conspiracy theories will inevitably replace reality for a vast majority of people - who vote - this way. And democracy without free speech is a joke.

acd 4y ago

Younger generations need to pay for news. Local news is important for democracy since local news feeds alerts national news. Ad networks by providing news for free is destroying democracy.

shadowgovt 4y ago
How does one incentivize this? Because younger generations ain't gonna do it for charity reasons; they don't have surplus income to donate to charity.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  Bring back pay per newspaper vending machines? They were awful and broken all the time before, and now they’re just free. If it’s cheap entertainment, I’d rather pay for that than iTunes movies.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    If people were willing to pay for them, why would they have been made free in the first place?
    - ironmagma 4y ago
      Probably because it’s cheaper to give them away than to keep repairing haphazardly designed vending machines. Maybe they should just make them like the snack vending machines.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Based on the fact that newspaper businesses had many, many decades to come up with a better machine, I would assume the cost of developing this machine is not worth it.
        ironmagma 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic. We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values. Even the notion of “blue America” and “red America” is misleading. What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in Baltimore. I noticed this acutely living in Atlanta for the better part of a decade. Politics was not a big deal when I lived there. Atlanta was “blue” and the rest of the state was “red” but politics was forward looking and productive. The mayor when I was there, Shirley Franklin, was truly put the city above partisanship. A Democrat, she endorsed Mary Norwood, an independent, in 2017, because the Democratic candidate was a protege of a mayor she believed to have been corrupt: https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-endorses-mary-norwood https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-e.... She waved aside criticism suggesting that she (a Black woman) should have endorsed the Black Democratic candidate instead of Norwood, a white woman. Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention. The state became a battleground in a proxy war between New York and Mississippi. Racialist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the New York Times and Washington Post (but notably, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was far more prudent). They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater, instead of a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents leaving California, Illinois, and New York, attracted by plentiful jobs, low taxes, and an excellent public university system. The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.

yojo 4y ago
As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs. I’m not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you can count on readers to call bullshit.
- michaelchisari 4y ago
  I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad Max had a violence baby. Can't count how many times the people saying this live in rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates than Chicago. The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer. Except for the winters. Those are awful.

dekken_ 4y ago

Is it even "local news" when it's owned by some corporation like Sinclair? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

ntoskrnl 4y ago
The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  We’re allowed to have knowledge outside of the specific thing being discussed in an article. Also, if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station? This is a questionable substitution. Local TV news is heavily watched by 55+ Americans, with over a third of 18 to 34-year olds having never watched it [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-of-watching-local-news-in-the-us-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-of-watc...
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Could you link a screenshot as Statista are paywalling / registration-walling that content? Thanks.
      - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        I can't share a screenshot of the statistics due to copyright restrictions, but I can confirm that what user JumpCrisscross said (about the statistics) is true.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Not a word about why media antitrust is important... even though the article casually mentions that "Newspapers continue to be consolidated by hedge funds and private investment firms that believe they can wring more profits from the papers through synergies as the industry declines." > "Axios is owned by Axios Media, whose investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Greycroft, and NBC News. NBC doubles up as Axios’ media partner." https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/ https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/ Not only that, people employed by today's media conglomerates are increasingly drawn from the 'wealthy liberal coastal elite' sector and are typically filtered through an unpaid internship process before getting hired, leading to non-representative 'journalists', which is probably doing as much damage (i.e pushing the populist perception of news media as a symbol of out-of-touch elitism) as the corporate consolidation is. Another side effect of this trend is the death of investigative journalism, which generally upsets the state and corporate power centers who are increasingly joined at the hip. For example, the last Washington Post investigative series of note was "Top Secret America" from about a decade ago, and now that Jeff Bezos owns the paper and AWS is actively seeking CIA and NSA contracts, forget about anything else like that.

dgb23 4y ago
Investigative, independent, long form, good journalism still exists, you have to pay for it though and it isn’t as popular as mainstream.
- jarjoura 4y ago
  I used to be an avid Economist reader, but even they are increasingly moving away from long form non opinionated journalism towards more bite-sized, clearly biased takes on the world. They have made it know they clearly believe Brexit was a mistake and now they have made a point to go "see I told you so" more often than not.
  - shadytrees 4y ago
    I don't know much, if anything, about Brexit — but certainly Economist isn't the only publication that's been bearish on Brexit. I'm interested in reading someone that's bullish. Is there coverage of Brexit that you prefer?

FerretFred 4y ago

It's the same in the UK, by and large. We have a small group of <strikeout>advertisement sellers</strikeout> news media companies that absorb local papers and churn out overly-similar content with different newspaper names on the front page. The online versions of these are sooooo bad - practically no actual written content with any depth, interspersed with video "articles" which incorporate more ads. Then try and find the actual news in among the clickbait links. Want better access? "Simply register and answer some suspiciously personal questions"... I tried to do some research recently: could I consult their archives? "Nothing older than a couple of years", so no. Photographers? "If you have photos or videos please upload them to us". Timely coverage of local issues? "You won't believe what British Seniors aged 55-plus are buying today!!" As far as I'm concerned they can crash and burn, and maybe groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers, albeit online only.

javajosh 4y ago
>groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers Social media is the killer, because in a perfect world it would serve precisely this purpose. But instead of replicating the means of production for each locality, you share one globally - which also helps concerned readers from different geographies pool their resources. A fine vision, and its true, but we see now how severe the downside is: the dissociation of reader from event is the wiggle room in which professional rhetoricians can form new and exciting memetic viruses. And virtually no-one has the psychic immune system to wade through it on a daily basis and not get infected with something. These viruses are designed to serve a narrow aim, and the side-effects are ignored, and this is what leads to the meltdown we have now. Of course, a simple behavior change can help: pay attention to news in proportion to its physical proximity to you! The knee-jerk reaction to see a national or global trend when anything bad happens is bad for the soul. We should be open to seeing trends, of course, but only slightly. At least a little bit of stubborn resistance to inferring a trend from two anecdotes is good for the soul, I think.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway8689 4y ago

ezekiel11 4y ago

mpclark 4y ago
The explanation is really, really easy though. Nearly all the advertising has gone away. There's no money in the business past chum boxes now. And the same is happening to the trade press and specialist magazines and all the other good media things we used to have. Not all progress is forward progress.
- ezekiel11 4y ago

ck2 4y ago

Media doesn't make the divide. Ideology makes the divide. People don't drive around urban in massive trucks rolling coal and/or own a dozen guns because of their news source, their news source is because of what their "world view" is.

xbar 4y ago
Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know? The reinforcement and advertising loops are real and effective at creating and expanding the divide. Perhaps you don't recall a time before there was such a thing as Fox News. Back when the hardest new choice was: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, or Tom Brokaw?
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  >Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know? Not every media corporation can be right.
padseeker 4y ago
I totally agree with this, and I don't know why you are getting so many downvotes. When Fox news called Arizona for Biden, many of their viewers were mad and there were anti fox news protests because their typical audience was mad they weren't being told what they wanted to hear. In a capitalist nation where supply and demand is everything, some people treat the news and facts and information like a product, and when people hear things they don't like they'll find someone else to give them stories they want to hear like Trump won massively and this election was stolen.

djfobbz 4y ago

Yet no mention of Operation Mockingbird!

irrational 4y ago
The what?
georgia_peach 4y ago
Are the towns busted because they no longer have propagandists? Or, did the propagandists move on after the towns had already been bled dry, & were no longer worth the effort? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird I'm old and from the city. The newspaper has always been a puppet of hospitals, real estate brokerages, & car dealerships. Part of how these companies get away with murder is by putting the entirety of local media, print & broadcast, in their back pockets. Unless you're paying something in the ballpark of Bloomberg terminal prices, you're the product.

drorco 4y ago

To me it seems like this is the symptom of a dying industry, the newspaper industry. I can't think of many people who are willing to pay for newspapers or news websites, let alone watch their ads(!). Eventually these papers are for-profit businesses so it's either go bankrupt, or find a way to make money no matter what. It seems that those who survived so far, are picking the latter, each to its own extent. Hopefully, there'd be a new, sensible way of earning money for decent free press, and this is just a limbo stage.

bumblebritches5 4y ago

thenerdhead 4y ago

Can’t honestly say I know anyone outside of my parents who reads the newspaper. Sounds like the newspaper is dying, not local news that has shifted to be digital.

pgrote 4y ago
>local news that has shifted to be digital. Our local newspaper has a few actual journalists reporting on what is happening in government at city, county and state level. Just a few since all the layoffs. Sports is hanging on, but has been taken over by The Athletic. Real journalism concerning business, arts and suburb cities is gone. The only time it is legitimately covered is if it is being covered elsewhere by local TV stations. The newspaper website is a malignant entity infecting everyone with trackers and ads. They are attempting video, but it lacks the content and production of even a mildly successful youtube creator. I still subscribe to the digital product to help support the remaining journalists.
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sbf501 4y ago
Still need journalists though, even for digital.

Clubber 4y ago

>"This is a crisis for our democracy and our society," said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement. Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of local newspapers.

xkbarkar 4y ago

Why is the closure of local news considered spurred by the pandemic though?? I personally stopped reading news outlets after the first Trump year. Every single news outlet was full of exactly the same Trump vitriol ( I lean left so, not strange ). And to make it worse, I am not even american in the US. Why read the exact same opEd in the local and the state news?? At least in my home country, since about 1 year after Trump I pretty much scaled from maybe 5 outlets to 2. Since covid times I read one left and one right ( I used to only read left ) and then subscribe to weekly papers that support investigative journalism. Honestly I feel local news shot themselves in the foot with Trump hysteria. Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident.

robonerd 4y ago
> Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident. I think it's this one. Local news has been in a death spiral for 20 years at least, I distinctly remember adults in the late 90s and early 00s bemoaning the demise of all the local papers, with one left standing but also dying. During Trump times they latched onto reporting about national news instead of local in a desperate bid for relevancy, but obviously couldn't compete with national news.

irrational 4y ago

I feel like, in some ways, Nextdoor has stepped into this void. I’ve even noticed that the local city government uses Nextdoor to try to get messages out. However, most of the content on Nextdoor is a dumpster fire: what were those police sirens for? What was that loud noise? Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am! These homeless camps are really driving down our property values! I saw coyotes walking down the street! These fireworks are upsetting Snookums!

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
>Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am! Both of those seem relevant to me if they're in my neighborhood or nearby. Crime is low where I live but when it happens, it tends to happen in sprees when one person or a small group of people get away with one thing and suddenly decide they can get away with it repeatedly. If there's a pattern of activity going on, I'd like to know about.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  Yeah, we used nextdoor to get back some stuff taken from our car. Apparently they walked across our small city and took/left stuff as they went along.
throwaway1777 4y ago
I don’t understand why whose types of nextdoor posts are a dumpster fire? Those seem like exactly the kind of things people actually care about. If I hear a car crash down the street I’m gonna go take a look.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  Well for one thing, all of the things GP mentioned are fear-based posts. Furthermore, they attract the worst types of responses, which then sucks in empathetic posters who unwittingly respond to trolls and leads pretty directly to arguments. At least that’s what I’ve witnessed the few times I’ve logged in to check on things of local interest.

evtothedev 4y ago

I keep thinking this is a ripe space for a startup. I could see it being, "Infrastructure for local news" or perhaps "Local news in a box." For example, what would it take to have something like Berkleyside[1] for every small town in the country? Or what about something like Block Club[2] If anyone wants to spit ball ideas for this, I'd love to riff: https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=2022-07 https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=20... [1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/ https://blockclubchicago.org/

adrianN 4y ago
Who pays for local news? You need to have actual journalists sitting in boring local council meetings and reading boring reports to generate "news" stories. That is not free. Local news competes for attention with national news, global news, and a billion types of non-news entertainment. Ad money is probably too thin to cover the expensive legwork needed for local coverage.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  I’d say to question those assumptions. Open source software exists but the congenital wisdom that engineers would never do work for free. You’d be surprised what people will volunteer for. Some people are already attending those things and perhaps they’d be willing to report back.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    It's a lot harder to get unbiased news if you solely rely on volunteers.
    - abirch 4y ago
      Can you imagine getting your news from a version of Richard Stallman.
      - 4y ago

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WhitneyLand 4y ago

The source material makes a weak case for the causation (rather than simply correlation) claimed in the title. Here’s a link to the actual report, for some reason it’s buried 3 or 4 levels deep from the article: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/report https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-... Notice the headline (clickbait?) topic is not the primary theme of the report. The report is primarily about the state of the newspaper business. In the key findings, “news deserts” causing a divide is only mentioned in one of the last points. I’m not trying to disagree necessarily, but they need to provide better support for the tie-in.

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in_cahoots 4y ago
Agreed, this article provides clear evidence that the industry is declining but no evidence of it being linked to a growing divide. I’m sad, but not surprised, to see so few comments engaging with the contents of the article itself.

bilsbie 4y ago

I think a local news publication could be done as a non profit with mostly volunteers. Kind of like an open source project. There are enough people that enjoy sharing what’s going on and writing that it could be workable. Maybe someone here could set up a sort of franchise that makes it easier for local communities to get set up. (Idea for a ycombinator startup?)

bilsbie 4y ago

A big issue is major corporations buying up lots of local news stations too. I found this video extremely eye opening. Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
I assume they do that because local news isn't profitable and is always on the risk of failing?

xyst 4y ago

Nobody else to blame but the newspaper industry themselves. Failure to begin modernizing/digitizing their systems in the 1990s caused them to make very hasty decisions in the mid 2000s and 2010s (such as relying on advertising models created by Google/Facebook).

mrkurt 4y ago
The local newspapers failed, yes. But that's normal. Had there been a healthy market for local news, they'd have been replaced. What actually happened is that the revenue available to local news got consolidated. Classifieds and local ads got rolled up by Craigslist/Google/Facebook. None of these companies have an interest in local news. There's not much of a fix for this. Until we come up with a better way to pay for local news, there's no choice the "newspaper industry" could have made to thrive. Fighting consolidation is a good idea, though, and might help a new model emerge.
abathur 4y ago
Citation needed? How would digitizing their systems have saved the industry from all three of its primary revenue streams being hoovered up by free online classifieds, free debundled online news, and online advertising? If you're going to blame the industry, it seems weird to claim it's because of strategic mistakes made in the 2 decades after peak circulation and not the moment ad revenue became indispensable?

anewpersonality 4y ago

lvl102 4y ago

Who watches or reads local news? I haven't watched for years. Close to two decades. My guess is specific demographics. It’s selection bias.

throwaway1777 4y ago
How do you figure out what’s going on around you then? Word of mouth (online or otherwise)?
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  I use local newspaper articles online and Reddit, but I mostly don't figure out what's going on around me. :D
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  For me word of mouth I suppose. If I don't hear about it from somebody else, it probably wasn't worth knowing. I think all this "news" people read/watch is mostly useless filler. I don't miss any of it.

webdoodle 4y ago

It's called Operation Mockingbird, which is coordinated at the yearly Billionaire's Summer Camp, A.K.A. the Sun Valley Conference, in Ketchum Idaho. This conference is where all the heads of the media companies come to get there marching orders and to further consolidate the media industry (See Disney). Parasites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Peter Theil, and many others attend this meeting. FYI - Ketchum Idaho is a small Ski resort community that sits in a very tight box canyon. 8 Bigs rigs could barricade the entire town, just by blocking a few bridges, or alternatively those points could be used by peaceful protestors to haze and voice there discontent to the very parasites that have destroyed this country and enslaved the minds of the masses. The weapons grade psychological warfare they conduct on us is being ignored by the politicians in Washington (both parties) because they also use those techniques to keep themselves in power. Now is the time to rise up against the lies and deceit. Please come join me in Sun Valley on July 6th, to shine some truth on the cretins that have buried us in disinformation and war propaganda.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Is there a point where Americans will give up on the Union or will it take a Yugoslavia war?

bee_rider 4y ago
If part of the country tried to split off, who'd go fight to take it back? I'm happy my successful state sends money to some of the less successful ones, because I think every American deserves their share of the pot, but I'm not going to go die for the privilege of sending it.

woodruffw 4y ago

For New Yorkers: Hell Gate[1] is a new group, focusing on local news and intrigue. I don’t believe they’re accepting money yet, but they’ve done some excellent local investigating. [1]: https://www.hellgatenyc.com/ https://www.hellgatenyc.com/

karaterobot 4y ago

People want gossip, blood, and vitriol. We created platforms where you can get a stream of it any time, day or night. The best (worst) of it, aggregated from around the world. People were free to choose, and chose that instead of waiting for the paper to arrive in the morning. They could in theory have done both, but they clearly only wanted the one thing. So that's what we have now. I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want.

tsol 4y ago
>I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want. It's hard to convince people to take responsibility when they cherish their freedom more than anything. We emphasize freedom so much that consequences are a barricade to us

Linda703 4y ago

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towaway15463 4y ago

Is hyper-local news necessary anymore? If you think about the role that newspapers filled it was to distribute information broadly. We have many more ways of doing that now. Granted they aren’t as fully developed as newspapers eventually became but we seem to be on track to build these new institutions. I think we’re simply in a transitional phase where the old medium is dying and being replaced by a new one that is growing into its role.

seereadhack 4y ago

Axios is expanding into local news coverage. This is their PR and wow the bullet point approach sometimes really just doesn't do it for me. For a more involved take of the underlying topic, consider _News for the Rich, White, and Blue_ by Nikki Usher. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blue/9780231184663 http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blu... I don't agree with all of Usher's takeaways but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And as to the headline – yeah, sure, the "local news crisis" is partly causative in the polarization sure but lazy and biased coverage can compound all sorts of nasty dynamics. While I'm here, Mark Lamont-Hill and Todd Brewster's _Seen and Unseen_ would be my pick for a recent media read. Lots of great history, recent and less so, as well as analysis: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-Lamont-Hill/9781982180393 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-...

pqdbr 4y ago
If, like me, you read "Axios" as that js library, and PR as Pull Request, you too, my friend, need to take a break.

parkingrift 4y ago

Not sure I agree. I live in New York City and my family is scattered in suburban towns all over the south. They constantly ask me about the “violence in NYC” and whether it’s safe. The important issue here isn’t whether NYC is safe or violent. The issue is why are they reading about NYC? That’s the question we should be asking. Why and where is my mother finding out about a random act of subway violence? Social media. Why is this content being pushed to her? Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws? The problem isn’t a lack of local news. The problem is the nationalization of local news and algorithm driven 24/7 fear mongering on social media. Take a 30 day break from social media and the news and the world feels safer. Gee, I wonder why. Did the world change?

dmix 4y ago
> Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws? There should be laws telling media companies what to publish? So people don't read FUDy articles that people always seem to seek out and demand? And these laws exist for other mediums? When I was a kid our nightly news broadcast was full of crime and moral-panics news clips, people eat that stuff up always. I doubt it was much different in terms of gossip and social conversations.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  We don’t need any new laws. We just need to apply existing publisher laws to social media companies which are outright acting as publishers.
kevin_b_er 4y ago
They are subject to an intense propaganda campaign. NYC is viewed as democratic, and so the propaganda attacks it by amplifying any problem or just fabricating them. You can see the top stories your parents are exposed to on FB, https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en The top ones are often propaganda outlets who feed them the lies.
- 4y ago

betwixthewires 4y ago

I don't buy it. When you live in a small community, you get local news from your neighbors and friends, and Facebook if you have it (Facebook is essentially replacing the local news outlet in small towns, and that's worse than the problem stated in the article, but that's a different discussion). If it's important you'll hear about it. If it's unimportant you'll probably hear about it too. The same applies to national news. 90% of it is unimportant. If it is actually important, like the fact that your bread prices will go up due to a war in Ukraine, you'll hear about it.

jarjoura 4y ago
Sure, but what about medium sized communities? The Bay Area has lots of local news outlets and even more local "boots on the ground" community blogs run by volunteers. I don't know if that's true around the rest of the country though.

jarjoura 4y ago

For me, the biggest problem is that news media is allowed to control the narrative by injecting bias into the coverage. We all know language choice has a strong power to manipulate and shift people's perspectives on what needs to be raw facts. Everything is a crisis, everything is a Watergate, everything is leading up to WW3. In a journalism course I took at university, the "hello world" assignment is to write an article without bias. They teach journalists that writing emotionally was considered amateur and unprofessional. This is basic stuff that all these hundreds of thousands of professionals know on day one. Yet, here we are, we're now in a world where the more bias you can inject into the news, the better the ratings, and the deeper the divide goes.

zackmorris 4y ago

It's tempting to blame journalism for the ideological divide we're seeing in the US. But the very best headlines are the ones with a 50/50 split of public opinion (the most controversial). This is also where politicians gain the strongest foothold to push their agendas (wedge issues). Unfortunately, under capitalism there is tremendous pressure on investigative journalism to make rent. Which tends to push stories towards the divisive and cynical end of the spectrum. And politicians towards negative campaigning and mud slinging. I feel that Ronald Reagan abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s and Newt Gingrich legitimizing alternative facts and the glorification of ignorance in the 90s are what put us on this alternate timeline we find ourselves on today. We could add in the selection of GW Bush over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in the 2000s, which solidified moneyed/authoritarian interests and corruption over democracy for at least the next 2 decades, but looking like 3 now. Local news is one detail in this. But really I think the divide is about the transfer of power from the previous generation to young people. We're witnessing a fourth turning and even a flipping of the parties around certain issues, which is why they're acting crazier and crazier in their denial. Looking at popular news channels and public officials, I can't help but wonder where the adults are.

b3nji 4y ago

rr808 4y ago

Its worth subscribing to (yes Paying!) a local newspaper or two if you can find any that are decent. Especially local politicians really need some journalists to investigate and report on what they're up to.

BrainVirus 4y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Here is the full report from the original source, along with the methodology used. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/report/ https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-... https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-of-local-news/methodology/ https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...

phpisthebest 4y ago

One thing I have never understood is why Local news (both print and TV) web properties are soo terrible. I am they are objectively some of the worst designed sites on the internet, I want to consume my local news, they make it painful for me to consume their content online, that is the primary reason local news it dead, they are clinging to their obsolete distribution model of Over the Air Video, and Dead Trees Print.

rapjr9 4y ago

In the US it might help if the FCC got off its rear and opened a new license application window for Low Power FM (LPFM) radio stations. They gave out a few thousand licenses in 2013 and have not allowed any more licenses since then, despite a law from Congress.