3 ms·
I'm a former news editor and worked at a metro daily newspaper in the mid to late '00s. Here's the thing: The local news spiral has been going on for decades.
by jawns 3y ago
I'm a former news editor and worked at a metro daily newspaper in the mid to late '00s.
Here's the thing: The local news spiral has been going on for decades. Business revenue drops, budgets are cut, leading to voluntary and involuntary attrition, leading to a decrease in both content and quality, leading to customer dissatisfaction and decreased subscriptions, leading to additional reductions in revenue, and the spiral continues.
Nevertheless, does quality local news matter? Objectively, yes. It's clear to me that as investigative/watchdog journalism has decreased due to budget constraints, we're seeing more people and companies in power get away with things with less scrutiny. We're seeing local communities who are less informed about issues that affect them, and that has political and social consequences.
Yet _quality_ local news has been harder to come by, not because there aren't fantastic, dedicated journalists out there, but because they're stretched so thin. And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views.
So I think we have two primary explanations for why people seem to devalue local news. One, quality has, indeed, gone downhill. But two, people's media literacy and consumption habits have gone downhill as well.
- coldpie 3y ago> And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views. Are you sure you have the causation in the right direction? It seems to me that the news sources have gotten less objective, thanks to takeovers by PE and wealthy individuals. I'm not interested in news sources with an explicit right-wing position, which is what the major papers in my area offer, so I don't subscribe to them.
- jawns 3y agoI think each feeds the other. You're right that news orgs that have fed readers' desire for bias-affirming content have done better than those that still aim, however imperfectly, to present the news objectively. But those news orgs wouldn't thrive if not for demand, and there is quite a lot of social science research out there showing that while most people _say_ they want unbiased news, their actual consumption habits indicate a preference for news that is in line with their existing ideological bents.
- coldpie 3y agoSure, I'm happy to accept "both are to blame." Your original comment placed all of the blame on readers, but I think it's important to recognize that newspapers are also to blame when they are selling a viewpoint that many readers don't want.