19 ms·
What do historians lose with the decline of local news?
- AlbertCory 3y agoI had a subscription to newspapers.com for research in Inventing the Future. It was pretty valuable. You could also see how the LA Times was raking in the advertising bucks back in the day. 30 pages of story crammed into 200 pages of paper. Not very searchable, though. I think if future historians can search NextDoor and all the little neighborhood newspapers, they'll be better off. That's a big IF, considering the paywalls.
- nerdponx 3y agoI'll take 200 pages of ads that can't intensively surveil me over a few banner ads that can.
- knaik94 3y agoI've noticed news sites have some of the most horrendous dark patterns and third party cookies I come across on the internet. Nothing frustrates me more than the video pop up on sites like CBS news. It makes me have a lot less sympathy for news organizations.
- deltree7 3y agoAn LLM built from actual conversations of people about local things Nextdoor/FB is a better history recorder than Newspapers with an agenda
- CodexArcana 3y agoUh oh not an AgEnDa! Because no one on Facebook/Nextdoor has an agenda, they're definitely not regurgitating the newspapers agenda at all either.
- deltree7 3y agoFacebook and Nextdoor at least has voice of the people, however wrong it is. It truly has both sides opinions. It captures the zeitgeist. I'll take that over any elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people writing about stuff through their biased lenses
- mulmen 3y agoI have some bad news for you. “Elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people” write about stuff through their biased lenses everywhere, including Nextdoor.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoThe point isn't that those people aren't contributing, it's that you get multiple perspectives, even if all of them are skew. You can get extremely accurate positions with many highly unreliable datapoints. because even if they're individually highly inaccurate, where they overlap (and/or where their centroid is) is more accurate than any individual measurement.
- deltree7 3y agoThen we really don't local news then. We capture university-brainwashed liberal perspectives in our NextDoor dataset. You clearly aren't getting my point. I'm arguing for 100 biased-perspectives over 1 biased-perspective
- slyall 3y agoExcept that 100 people are Nextdoor are not doing the "oversight of courts, local councils and school boards" except in exception circumstances. They probably aren't even reporting the final numbers in the local council election. Assuming NextDoor's dataset is around in 100 years (probably not) there will be some topics well represented. But you are going to have huge gaps in others.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
- midoridensha 3y agoIf you think the stuff Microsoft Tay spewed was bad, just wait until we have LLMs built with actual conversations on Nextdoor. You will find no greater hive of scum and villainy than Nextdoor.
- AlbertCory 3y agoNo, there are much worse. They are just stupid, at least on mine.
- carlosjobim 3y agoNewspapers will make and publish stories and reports a lot of times without an agenda because their profession is publishing news, and there are stories where they just don't have any personal interest and therefore no agenda to tout. If you were tasked with writing a story about something you really have no interest in, then you'd write it without an agenda. Contrast that with the common public, who will of course not waste their time writing about or discussing matters that they do not have any interest in.
- tonymet 3y agothere's also more source material: video from youtube, tiktok; emails, twitter .
- catiopatio 3y agoThere is, but it’s not a replacement for actually calling people and performing news-gathering. Articles sourced from Twitter threads and TikTok videos do not provide anything resembling objective reporting.
- plaguepilled 3y agoSincere question: why do we consider "news" objective in this context? By any other measure it isn't. Edit: getting a lot of down votes but not a lot of discussion below. This isn't just a "whatever maaaaaan I'm not a part of this system" post. It's also not a thinly veiled attempt to push a political view. I really am talking about objectivity. For example, even among publications that share my general bias, it is easy to identify that they are omitting information that could be relevant in the name of cohesion and persuasion. I am not willing to ascribe a certain motive for it because there is truthfully a lot of potential motivations. But that doesn't change the fact that the bias exists, and we cannot call it objective as a result.
- catiopatio 3y agoJournalistic objectivity is an intentional and aspirational goal, not something that’s guaranteed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#His...
- plaguepilled 3y agoDoes that actually translate into deliverables though? I'm not convinced it does which is why the question was posed
- 3y ago
- butterbeanies 3y agoLocal news is staffed by the same prettyface, knownothing anchors as mainstream network. What’s lost? What’s gained in what bullshit passes the censors in online comments these days? Most are inorganic anyway.
- __loam 3y agoThis attitude probably isn't helping the situation lol.
- explorer83 3y agoYeah but it's true. Daily program breakdown: 1.)Daily national propaganda piece. Local car dealer commercial. 2.)Regionally Local piece on what's being done or not done about potholes. Pharmaceutical commercial showing active and happy people 3.)Traffic. 4.)Weather. Regional bathtub installer commercial 5.)Sports. Pharmaceutical commercial showing active and happy people 6.)Regionally Local person goes to court and/or prison Fast food commercial 7.)Feel good fluff piece about a puppy that got saved from traffic. Viewer now feels 'informed'.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- knaik94 3y agoI also hate how emotionally charged the music has become in certain segments or transitions. Watching a story on mute with subtitles, and watching it with sound is a completely different experience. There has also been an increase in labelling everything "breaking news" and "top story", and the stories themselves have become sensationalized and rage baiting. The audio transitions into "breaking" stories prime you to feel a certain way even before hearing the story. I stopped seeing positive fluff, those time slots are replaced by things that feel like ad/sponsored segments or actual ads. At one point I realized that watching the news left me emotionally exhuasted, so I stopped watching it. Surprisingly my older relatives have done the same in the last couple of years. When I asked, they also called it too exhausting to watch. They are anxious about using technology, they aren't getting information through a different medium instead. They told me, "if I need to know about it, someone will bring it up."
- mfragin 3y agoThis is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum. I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to. It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug. /rant I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm. rant/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> rats nest of legal issues Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.
- ggm 3y agoThere has been a kerfuffle in the Australian National Library over continuance of funding for digitisation of the records. Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done. Firstly, all data digital or mechanical or physical demands maintenance, Secondly, it's never done, as more materials always arise requiring archival assessment and inclusion.
- lazystar 3y ago> Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done. That was the mindset back in the 00's - just put everything on a cd or hdd and it'll be there forever, then you can get rid of the bulky source material. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. lost backups, ransomware, incompatible media files....
- techdragon 3y ago… Low resolution scans using older image processing technology… black and white only scans of photocopies… shakes fist at several publicly accessible US government department archives
- 7speter 3y agoThis reminds me of the old articles I ran into at some point from the 80s and maybe early 90s where the writers talked about how many floors from a library you could fit on a hard drive or a floppy disk or a maybe a cd. Of course, that’s just text…
- jawns 3y agoFor more than a century, local newspapers served as the primary medium through which obituaries were published. But nowadays, more and more families are opting to memorialize their loved ones with a digital-only obituary. One unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors. Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot. Obituaries that appeared in print newspapers during the 20th century were easily disseminated and decentrally archived (typically by loved ones and libraries), making them relatively rot-tolerant. In contrast, digital obituaries in the 21th century tend to be centrally archived and often behind paywalls, making them susceptible to digital rot and difficult for organizations acting in the public interest to archive. The for-profit company Legacy.com controls a strikingly large share of the market for digital obituaries. Unfortunately, the newspapers and funeral homes themselves often don’t maintain their own copies of the obituaries. And while some of the deceased’s loved ones might print out hard copies of a digital obituary, others might simply bookmark the URL and assume that the content will always be there. What happens if Legacy.com or one of the smaller memorial sites goes out of business or experiences some sort of data loss? Because of the centralized nature of how these digital obituaries are stored, it’s possible that very few other organizations will have archived copies of the content.
- throwaway892238 3y agoListen to the podcast The Past Times (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZpxxEwKUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZpxxEwKUI). Newspapers were fucking insane, ridiculous, just bizarrely biased and terribly organized. But they did record how, like, judges and lawyers would regularly get shitfaced in a pub and decide cases until 3 in the morning. So maybe it's more useful than we think.
- atdrummond 3y agoPicking an episode with Adam Conover is a great way to discourage people from listening to the podcast.
- user_7832 3y agoGenuine question- why do people dislike him?
- DiscourseFan 3y agoI don't dislike him but I find that he comes off as very in-your-face and preachy, not offering you ideas to think about and consider on your own.
- jmkni 3y agoWhy do people dislike the ‘I am right about everything’ guy who frequently gets things wrong?
- jccalhoun 3y agoI haven't heard this podcast but whenever someone says "news used to be objective!" it just proves they don't know what they are talking about.
- catiopatio 3y agoFor a brief but significant period of US history, the news-gathering field at least endeavored towards objectivity. Now they don’t even try. That’s what people are complaining about.
- drak0n1c 3y agoIn Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments. https://communityimpact.com/ https://communityimpact.com/ They’re doing very well and are popular.
- skrause 3y ago"Business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments" is exactly what I would want from local news. However my local news basically consists of reporting what crimes happened in my area (republishing the police's press reports) and the results of my local handball club I don't care about. No wonder I don't read my local news.
- tivert 3y ago> In Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments. There's a similar free paper in my (suburban) area. They also include pretty thorough news about the local school districts: https://adamspg.com https://adamspg.com. I don't know how well they're doing through, since they every once in a while send solicitations for donations to fund their operations (and I think they're a for-profit).
- shortformblog 3y agoI worry about this a lot, given that my newsletter Tedium relies on old newspapers to tell stories and we've effectively gutted the farm system in interest of big business. I think the internet is going to have a rough long-term effect on history because, while information is easy to present online, preserving it can be nearly impossible. In an ephemeral world, it's easier than ever to destroy the ephemera. That scares me. It should scare you too.
- DamnInteresting 3y agoI am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead. Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.
- shortformblog 3y agoIt’s disappointing to see that my comment was voted down. I wasn’t trying to self-promo, but rather trying to highlight that my point of view was valuable to this discussion. Like DamnInteresting, I literally work in this space. I see these issues up close. And I think that there is a real risk that we’re going to have echoes of what actually happened long-term because of link rot and similar factors. I once did a piece about an early internet-era book in which, as an experiment, I tested to see if the links worked. Most of them were dead. But the book was still with us. That is the real problem with internet culture. All the stuff from before 1995 or so will make it online because it is largely in physical form. We have already lost most of the good stuff produced after it, despite the Internet Archive’s best efforts.
- jccalhoun 3y agoI've been doing some research on early 90s videogame industry and so much of the stuff on early websites is just gone because it was before archive.org started or it was things like proto-podcasts recorded to real audio that archive.org didn't capture. Interviews with creators of games and beta screenshots are just gone.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Guthur 3y agoI think that level of historically fidelity was a historical anomaly. We can see it through history where the narrative is mostly dominated by the great power of the time, yet I'm sure there was far greater diversity than what we can see. It biggest and loudest drowns or everyone else, and we are just returning to that status quo.
- StanislavPetrov 3y agoAs an aside, when I was in high school in the late 80s/early 90s, microfiche was heavily pushed by the school/teachers/librarians as the information medium of the future. There was a tremendous amount of information stored on microfiche, and it would be an absolute travesty if this was lost.
- blowski 3y agoPrinted has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc. The unknown is how much of that data will be accessible, say, 100 years from now.
- tgv 3y agoExcept there isn't much to begin with, and what's there is very selective, it isn't continuous, it is hidden in a gigantic pile of muck, and it isn't verified, nor written in an accessible way. Civil journalism doesn't exist at the correct scale and organization required, and never will. That was one of those ridiculous internet pipe dreams. National news is also diminishing. There's considerably less hard news, and more touchy-feely background stories.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWhat you're forgetting is the inventor of touchy-feely background stories was bullied in school and now loves cats.
- mschuster91 3y ago> Printed has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc. Unlike print media, internet sites are not required to submit their material to Library of Congress or similar government-run archives all over the world that have requirements on archival, durability and whatnot. Twitter used to have a firehose feed to LoC but IIRC it got discontinued years ago. And that doesn't even touch the question of integrity - it's hard enough to vet actual local news sources if they're authentic (there was a scandal some years ago about a lot of "content mills" from the Balkans), and outright impossible with local bloggers, Nextdoor or whatever.
- nologic01 3y agoTo get to they point of worrying about the historians of the future we need to first get to a future with historians. The demise of local news is symptomatic of a less diversified, a de-localized digital society that practically operates in a single unified space. Somehow we need to make sure there are healthy ecosystems of locally bound "screens" that capture the local affairs of people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yunohn 3y agoI would argue that the problem goes much deeper than for historians. By focusing on the most FUDed national/international news all day, people are collectively incensed all day long for no reason. Doesn’t matter that it won’t affect their daily lives, but they are forced to read it by having it shoved in their face…
- FredPret 3y agoThere's a magic red button with a cross at the top right or top left of every screen that can make the disappear into thin air. Nobody is forced to read anything.
- yunohn 3y agoThis post is about the disappearance of local news - if there isn’t any other news to read, you’re stuck with the FUD is my point.
- FredPret 3y agoThere’s a ever-increasing blizzard of information and content about every imaginable place and thing. You are never stuck with FUD. Maybe that content is on social media now, or wikipedia, or somewhere else, but there is more than ever out there. This is nothing but FUD about FUD.
- yunohn 3y agoAgain, the point of this post is that the blizzard is still primarily the same non-local news. Needles existing in a haystack doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss the problem with having an ever-increasing haystack.
- FredPret 3y agoI'm an investor. To make that work, I'm not a historian, but a current-ian. I avoid news like the plague - all narrative, all emotion, all written by English majors, not subject-matter experts. If a current-ian has to avoid the news, what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait? Future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news. They would be better served by databases that have lists of facts about current times in simple data formats. Stats, voting records, laws, commodity prices, demographics, weather data, boring (but low-key fascinating) things like that.
- jon-wood 3y agoHistorians need both those things. The hard facts on weather data, commodity prices, and voting records say exactly what was happening, but they can't tell a historian why it happened. The reasons behind voting records are inherently emotional, subjective, messy things which can't be boiled down to a series of hard facts. Those reasons are also the important bit of history, because they're what allow us to (hopefully, we're not doing a great job of it lately) avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did.
- carlosjobim 3y ago> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait? Expanding on that thought: What hope do we have of understanding history a hundred years or longer ago? Right now today, with a huge amount of true information available for anybody who takes time to look a little, almost everybody around us is 100% propagandized and will believe the opposite tomorrow of what they believed yesterday if the TV tells them to. Taking history as it is "taught" as any truth value is ridiculous, since we know that the rulers of each age have used history mostly as a tool for their own political goals. Even today, it is quite apparent that most historians go into the profession as political activists primarily and researchers secondarily, often having decided first what they want to "discover".
- FredPret 3y ago
- gtirloni 3y agoLocal news decline, where? Our local news agencies are pushing news every day, all the time. It's not the major news outlets' fault that local news can't be bothered to have decent websites/apps and actually maintain their archives.
- tamori 3y agoI don’t know where you live, but at least in the US, local news is almost extinct. I used to work for a chain of local newspapers - we had one or more reporters for each one, and we would go to every town and school board meeting and cover what was happening. That chain was bought up by a national, half the papers were shuttered outright, and the rest are run by one editor who doesn’t have time to do in depth coverage, and basically just parrots press releases. A few “local” replacements have cropped up that are little more than propaganda mills, without even an attempt at impartiality. The biggest issue is that local news used to be funded by classified ads, mostly. Since most of the functions served by classified ads migrated to the internet, no one has yet figured out an alternative funding model.
- gtirloni 3y agoI live in South America. My city has ~400k citizens and 4-6 local TV channels. The newspaper is pretty much dead and has gone down from 60 pages per day to maybe 5-10 pages (I don't know if they even print it anymore), true, but TV seems to be doing fine and embracing more social platforms. I think the main media outlet has at least 3-4 hours of local news mixed with content from their parent company (national). Their local website is garbage though so once a news ir aired, it's pretty much gone... which brings me back to my initial point, there are news but they are not properly managed/archived.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThere's no organization or library in your country preserving this stuff?
- 3y ago
- kodah 3y agoMeanwhile in Portland our local news is thriving via investigative journalism.
- PM_me_your_math 3y agoHere's the thing, local news produces cookie cutter stories and just swaps out the basic facts and injects a little of the mainstream narrative into everything. There really isn't any value in it, which is why they are dying in the first place.
- tivert 3y ago> Here's the thing, local news produces cookie cutter stories and just swaps out the basic facts and injects a little of the mainstream narrative into everything. There really isn't any value in it, which is why they are dying in the first place. Does your "local news" not cover your local area at all? I highly doubt that. If it does cover your local area at all, there is historical value to it. It doesn't matter if the stories are cookie cutter or not.