6 ms·

> The bill is intended to shore up California’s struggling media outlets, including ethnic media and media serving so-called “news deserts.” I think that this

• throwaway2203 3y ago
  Not sure I agree. Local journalism is a social good. How else will you find out what your city council is up to? It's not like that's reported on CNN or Fox. And if there are no journalists asking questions, how will you know they've been selling permits to their cousin developer for cents on the dollar while jacking up your taxes?
  • pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Go to the meetings or talk to people in town or follow your neighbors who care on Twitter/Facebook? If you really care what happens at your city council, and you live in a city of less than 1 million people, you can generally meet all of them and know what's happening. Cities greater than 1 million often support a regional-level paper which also covers city news.
    • NeuNeurosis 3y ago
      So everyone in the city of less than a 1 million should go? What about the meag cities? How are people supposed to have time, energy or resources to achieve that? The news has always been about democratizing information that impacts civic life, hence why a "free press" was written in the constitution. Its a civic service that needs supported and the current model of incentives no longer supports adequately. There are no easy answers to address the dying of newspapers but saying that people should just go to the meetings is not an answer.
      • pclmulqdq 3y ago
        Presumably if more than the 30 people who show up care about the city council, then there will be someone who reports about it and writes something up, maybe like a substack, about it. Maybe they will call it something pretentious like "The $city Times" or "The $city Chronicle" and combine that newsletter with other topics of local interest. Maybe they will innovate a physical delivery format, too, that delivers the news on paper. Then they can really charge people for it. This is literally all just a question of supply and demand. The only people who care show up, and the rest wouldn't even spend $2 on a local newspaper. Also, you don't have to go to the meeting to know what happened there: all of these councils and committees produce minutes that are accessible from your city's website. I bet out of that city of 1 million, only 2x as many people read the minutes of the city council (which are almost always public) as go to the meeting. The production of those minutes is a public service.
        • text0404 3y ago
          this is just local journalism, except from some random blogger and not trained journalists.
          • pclmulqdq 3y ago
            Journalists didn't have a college training program until about 50 years ago. This used to just be "journalism."
      • throwaway2203 3y ago
        Yeah I used to ardently read the newspaper for the local suburb I was living in a few years ago and felt super connected and informed about issues (which meant I was less confused about all the names on the ballot come election time). Then I moved to a suburb which didn't have that newspaper and now I have no idea about anything nor are there any avenues for me to learn. And I have kids, so no, I'm not going to all those meetings.
  • s1artibartfast 3y ago
    It is a social good that nobody cares enough about to pay for it themselves.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Yes, that's how it usually goes with social goods. That's why many of them are government functions rather than a private businesses. I'm not sure that local news is something I want as a government function, though...
      • s1artibartfast 3y ago
        Exactly. And we rarely use regulation to force unwilling parties to produce or pay for them. This is like making a regulation saying that public parks are good, so restaurants have to build parks.
        • text0404 3y ago
          you don't need a metaphor here. the world's largest communications platform is using content generated by journalism organizations to make money, and those orgs are now asking for a piece of it. it's that simple.
          • s1artibartfast 3y ago
            Yes, and it is in no way the responsibility of the communication platforms to ensure journalist are profitable. Furthermore, those communications platforms should be able to say "No" if journalists demand payment for incoming traffic to their articles.
            • text0404 3y ago
              > Yes, and it is in no way the responsibility of the communication platforms to ensure journalist are profitable. they aren't. this is akin to licensing content.
  • jart 3y ago
    Journalists can't report on what local city governments are actually up to, because if they did, they'd be sued into oblivion.
• asoneth 3y ago
  > Because of their mediocrity, media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well. The problem with this mindset is that there is a negative correlation between investigative journalism and corruption. (e.g. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/25/when-the-local-newspaper-leaves-town-the-effects-of-local-newspaper-closures-on-corporate-misconduct/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/25/when-the-local-ne... and https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72689 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72689) When local newspapers close (or stop doing real investigative journalism) political and corporate corruption increases which causes a financial drag on the region. Given that we tend to bail out failing cities with state funds and failing states with federal funds the rest of us have a vested interest in ensuring that the other regions we're bound to maintain basic levels of functional governance. Setting aside the specifics of the strange law in the article, I would not be opposed in principle to spending $X a year propping up journalism to avoid spending $100X a year propping up corrupt cities and states.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    really eye-opening to see this downvoted here.. this is a fundamental principle of a functioning society, post-Enlightenment in the West
  • greatgib 3y ago
    I don't think that it is true that the newspaper that are dying are the one that are doing the useful investigation s. Quite the opposite: the trend is to make easy money by cutting staff and just printing AP or Reuters click baity news. They are complaining that people just take the titles and don't pay for articles, but articles are empty block of rephrasing the content they got from AP. I think the trend is even having IA and co generating these contents, like for sport newspapers. And if you notice, also a big quantity of major newspaper ( like tv channels) are bought by moguls or the richest businessmen of most countries and then they clearly avoid doing dangerous investigation about the government and powerful persons because it is bad for business. But if you look carefully, the media that are still doing real investigative journalism and the one that are fighting corruption are not the one that are trying to racket Facebook. At the opposite most of them are independent, and they are proud to be funded by readers. And it works. People pay when they see that they get quality work. For example, in France, the is an online newspaper (Mediapart) that exposed most of the recent corruption cases and still they give the option for subscribers to share the articles that they want with friends for free. It works and I think that a lot of people like me are very happy to continue funding this media with our subscriptions.
• f33d5173 3y ago
  Media is dying because of lack of funding. Mediocrity comes after the money dries up and they can't afford to pay writers and editors anymore. This in turn drives readers away, causing a spiral. But the initial effect is due to lack of funding It is not normal in a free market for an entire industry to die. In a free market, if one competitor starts flailing, the other competitors should pick up their slack. If every player in the market is suffering the same disease, that is indicative of a deeper problem that could plausibly be solved via regulation.
  • artificialLimbs 3y ago
    Exactly. I'm going down town today to buy a brand new, reasonably priced, safe and effective horse drawn buggy.
  • MrPatan 3y ago
    Why would an industry dying be a problem? Why would you "regulate" to keep it alive? (which means keep it alive with our money) Who decides which industry should be kept alive and which should die? Let me guess, you do.
    • tivert 3y ago
      > Who decides which industry should be kept alive and which should die? Let me guess, you do. Sometimes that's better than letting "the market" decide. IMHO, it's a mistake to think of the market as some kind of best-decision making machine that should be left to run unattended. It's a effective, but buggy program with a lot of WONTFIX bugs that need to be mitigated through other means.
    • f33d5173 3y ago
      > Let me guess, you do. Close. It's decided democratically, via elections of representatives who in turn vote on such issues. This system has it own problems, of course.
      • MrPatan 3y ago
        Aren't those same people now voting directly, with their wallets, to let an industry die? Why do you want to add a middleman politician to the process? Do people not know what's good for them? Why would they then know what's good for them when voting for those politicians?
• MrPatan 3y ago
  "News deserts" is too close to "Just desserts". Maybe they need an ubi for marketers and lobbyists as well.
• comte7092 3y ago
  Libertarian Utopianism strikes again. I’d buy your argument if these media outlets were being replaced by higher quality journalism, but instead is low quality, low effort, click bait/attention seeking headlines with no substance. (I don’t really think California is going down the right path either, but the “free market” is objectively producing garbage)
  • hellojesus 3y ago
    But that's what's selling. If high quantity sold, the market would shift to produce it. As it stands, people are happy with consuming only the headline of an article and moving on. There are still many high quality outlets; most have just changed to discussion based formats. Take Joe Rogan for example. He talks to a variety of people, sometimes about current events, sometimes not. Similarly, Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Stephen Crowder, The Daily Wire, Ethan Klein's show, etc. all are daily news shows that produce content in the format people want. The market shifted. Those working for dying industries can reallocate themselves. That's how the market keeps capital allocation efficient.
    • comte7092 3y ago
      “What the market produces is good because it is what the market produces” At the end of the day the position of free market fundamentalists always comes down to a tautology.
      • hellojesus 3y ago
        Free markets don't allocate capital in the best way measured by societal goodness. They allocate capital in the most efficient way relative to the demands of other participants. This means that goods/services are regularly not produced because it is unprofitable. If for some reason local news is profitable, then anyone that wants to consume it could easily step in to produce it. Efficiency doesn't necessarily mean good. But it does prevent or at least minimize wasteful economic activity. Anything outside that realm is a good candidate for a hobby.
• briffle 3y ago
  Media is dying because of consolidation. My local town newspaper used to employ 400-600 people, and have a big building downtown. Since we are a capital city, it had great coverage of government, politics, etc. It got bought by USA Today, and now my newspaper has 15 or so employees, all printing is done at their other local newspaper they bought and gutted 60 miles south, and our newspaper consits of 3-4 articles a day of actual, local content, and then a bunch of AP and USA today syndicated stories. They also raised the prices for the papers, and wonder why people are stopping their subscriptions.
  • ericd 3y ago
    That’s all because the economic model has almost completely collapsed. Classifieds used to be a huge source of revenue, Craigslist gutted that for them. And to news sites, they lost most of the market power they had in terms of reaching news readers.
    • wusher 3y ago
      The impact of Craiglist on the local news media is grossly overlooked.
• breakingrules 3y ago
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• amalcon 3y ago
  The problem is that "news" is a space where the free market doesn't really accomplish what the theory suggests it should. Consumers don't have a good way to judge the quality of a newspaper, so they end up competing solely on price. Competing solely on price means publishing what's most efficient to produce, Niche things are generally inefficient to produce, so niche reporting goes away. Goodbye local and special interest news. Regurgitated press releases and coverage of the latest Twitter drama are highly efficient to produce, so you get more of those things. Unfortunately for California, this measure isn't very likely to help the situation. It doesn't actually address any of the incentives that are killing local and special interest reporting. Even if the law sticks, these outlets are likely to just die anyway unless something else is done.