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-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.
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
This. I read it somewhere a while ago that prior to information revolution of late 90s onwards news travelled very slowly. Which meant people consumed more news of happenings around 50KM-100KM radius of their living place. And this reduced exponentially with increased radius. I could totally related to this as when I was in school (late 80s, early 90s) I read physical news paper that carried mostly my district and state news. Once a week I would be exposed to national news and maybe once a month to international news.
But now it's exactly reverse. I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war which is half way across the world but have no clue about local politics. The net result being I get more enraged/impacted about happenings on which I have close to zero control but totally oblivious to things that I have control over such as reasons why there are so many broken roads in my vicinity.
>>I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war
Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings <<insert current event of interest>> often filled with less and less facts and more sensationalism chasing maximum number of clicks, follows, thumb ups, likes, etc.
This is true if it is random person, small organization, a non-profit, or a "trusted source" main stream media outlet
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you think it has nothing to do with the community being 80% Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy.”
Georgia elected Marjorie Greene Taylor and Raphael Warnock. States aren't red or blue; it is a divisive over simplification. To paraphrase that parent comment, What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in much of the rest of California.
There wasn’t much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to have some convenient video to work with and used the opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a hero. It’s a testament to the power of media and gullible minds in great numbers.
Did a quick search through the article, can't find a mention of any attempt to cover up the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, can you elaborate? Is there an ongoing investigation into this and is there some way we can help? It is insane that in 2022 the authorities in America are still complicit in lynchings and that nobody does anything, it disgusts me. How long will this indiscriminate murder of BIPOC continue, why can't America do better? What is it about Americans that drive them to murder BIPOC?
Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
Fucking true. People think hicks are unique to the South and are oblivious to the hordes of hicks living in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and northern California. In fact, they're even more extremist over in the west because they don't feel like they're represented at all.
Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about the city burning.
Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red. Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was in 2018.
Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are reasonable, IMHO.
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.
>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.>>
This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true - I think it's manufactured (I assume due to all mass communication being a large ad server that requires a quick and easy way to stimulate engagement - but that could be wrong too, I don't know). I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values. Where we're apart is a) facts, and b) the tactical approach to getting our society as a whole to express those values (eg. trusting that if left alone the society will be "good" vs. trusting that codifying the "good" in law will genuinely reach the same end).
>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.
> This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true
My personal experience is of a diverse USA. In the late 90s I toured
the states, a gig in a different city each night then back to the tour
bus and off to the next one by daybreak. Okay, not a great sampling of
ordinary life because on the road you mostly meet audiences, people in
bars, diner waitresses etc. But while I recall how the USA looks
superficially similar (giant cars on giant roads and the same brand
logos in every city) it's not. I saw quite a range of poverty and
wealth, segregation and integration, friendliness and aloofness, dense
cities and wide open country. Much like travelling around Europe.
> I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values.
I don’t think that’s true any more. Major schisms have been opening up over the past couple of decades. For example, a significant portion of the elite is now opposed to color blindness. That’s a fundamental thing to disagree about in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. The same people also oppose the “melting pot” ideal of American immigration. The Democratic Party’s “safe, legal, and rare” has turned , in NYC at least, into “abortion until the moment of birth,” at least in NYC. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/05/23/....
When my family came to this country in 1989, Carter Democrats and Reagan Republicans didn’t disagree on the fundamental notions of a good life. You got educated, got married, had 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, etc. They both venerated the founders and the history of America, and agreed on what qualities of that historical America led to the prosperity that Americans enjoy today. They disagreed on the role of government in achieving that ideal, on economics, on a few social issues at the edges.
It's not only the media but also the political campaign industry. Some inner city council person somewhere says they hate Jewish people and suddenly their opponent for city council has nationwide fundraising support. Same for some small town mayor saying they don't want "those people" in his town. Now there's money flooding in nationwide for his opponent in the election. In a country of 330 million, there's always a politician somewhere saying something reprehensible. Political parties and their fundraising wings love finding these incidents and then making money off of them.
330M is large, but not so large that national news stops making sense. Japan is roughly comparable - it has 126M people, and it was composed of competing (and sometimes warring) feudal lords until the Meiji Restoration (1868), a few years after the US civil war.
Yet go to Japan and suggest that it's toxic for people in Tokyo to care about what's happening in Fukuoka, and people will look at you as if you've grown another head.
I mean, what is a nation if not a group of people subscribing to the same central authority and sharing a rough idea of a society? On the face of it, saying that "nationalization of news and politics in a country is toxic" is so absurd that I'd like to see an argument for supporting that, instead of using it as a starting point of an argument.
If people in SF stop caring about what's happening in Atlanta (and vice versa), it won't bring peace. It will merely accelerate the disintegration of the USA as a single country.
I would argue that USA has already disintegrated as a single country with respect to its foundation, which is the society itself - basically, there's no single "American society" anymore. The only thing that still keeps the country together is the formalities of governance, and even that will only last for as long as people are willing to tolerate them (which is less and less with every passing year).
It might be possible to reboot it in more or less the same format as the original was way back when (i.e. by moving most political questions out of the federal level). But there needs to be some motivation to try to keep things together at least on some level. For the original colonies, it was clear that they would simply not survive on their own. But for many states today, they have numerous independent countries of similar size (in terms of territory, people, economy etc - you name it) as a showcase that it is possible.
yeah but the population density of japan is 10x that of america, and the distance between atlanta and los angeles is well over 3x that of tokyo to fukuoka.
I doubt GP was intending to speak strictly about population count itself.
idk, but in japan i get the sense that there is alot less money in politics and media, whereas in the us money == politics, so you get full-tilt media insanity which push people further and further apart
i really think the us needs serious campaign and media reform; there is just too much money sloshing around from all these donors and its creating all kinds of havoc
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
The "nightly news" used to be a much more common experience that people shared:
"Twenty-seven million to 29 million viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair."
Today the most popular news channel is Republican propaganda. I don't use that term to be dramatic. I do not think there is a more accurate description.
It seems doubtful people are leaving California due to jobs, taxes, and public universities, but I would certainly believe it was due to cost of living. CA is the world's 5th largest economy, the universities are world-class, and most people are unwilling to give up their family, friends and life to establish something new simply to save a few percent on taxes.
But “most people” aren’t leaving California, you need to look at the margin. A marginal mover might very well be swayed by high taxes to a significant degree. For example, when I was moving to the States, one major factor for choice of Washington over California was exactly state taxes. I also have friends who are planning their move out of California to Texas, and for them taxes also play a significant role in their choice. It’s not only taxes that made them decide to move, but it’s rarely only a single factor that makes people move.
One thing that makes this worse is the collapse of local information economies. Papers can no longer make money by acting as pay-to-post message boards for the communities they serve. Instead, the best way to make money is to convince people from outside your region to use your organization for their news needs. So now every paper writes news for a national audience and what determines the financial health of the paper is how effectively it can attract readers that aren't from its area.
> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater
They wouldn't be wrong. For example in April 2021 a black woman from Md was drummed out of a wealthy town in GA for the crime of being black and an educator[0]. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in the south and west.
I've spent a ton of time in SF and Baltimore, wondering what specifically you had in mind? I think it's less socially acceptable to be right leaning in SF? Sure you would be looked at weird if you used a koozie or wore croakies in SF, or if you went up to people at a coffee shop to ask them to pitch their startup in Baltimore, but the differences feel cultural not political.
> Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention.
Because local elections have national consequences.
Then in 2020, GA's special elections determined control of the US Senate, and therefore the fate of the Biden Admin.
Shouldn't the nation pay attention to GA? At least as much as say Iowa and New Hampshire?
> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
Nonwhite voters are systematically disenfranchised in GA. Enough so that in a straight up fight, Stacey Abrams would be governor.
Those "misrepresentations" of GA are packed with history. Slavery, Confederacy, Jim Crow, Southern Strategy, etc. Centuries of denying nonwhites their right to vote. Sure, white people feel resentful about being constantly reminded. For everyone else, it's present reality, not history.
If you're curious, I recommend the books These Truths, 1619 Project, and The Sum of Us.
> ...a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents...
That's the plan. Immigration back inland, to flip those reds states blue.
Were their any progressive do-gooder billionaires, they'd be paying people to move inland. To start farms, businesses, families.
Why don’t you tell this to the several UGA math profs who quit recently (including an acquaintance of mine from high school) or the GA Tech faculty unhappy with state COVID policies
Your analysis somewhat conspicuously omits the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted. Is it reasonable to expect local news and politics to be insulated from such dramatic national shifts?
I've lived in Atlanta for over two decades. What's happened in Atlanta politics tracks with what's happened nationwide. It is not strictly a function of media or a random, spontaneous racialization.
Nor do I know anyone who feels we've been characterized as an "unreformed Confederate backwater". The idea that we've been so maligned is itself a media narrative. In fact, I live in an area that is staunchly conservative, majority white, and upper-middle class. The people I speak with abhor Trump and the style of politics he represents (which have been noted as favorable to your "unreformed Confederates"). This was visible in their repudiation of him in 2020, even while they voted GOP down balllot. It was visible again in the recent primary wherein the candidates Trump endorsed were largely shellacked.
So, it's somehat ironic that you're bemoaning the media's role in mischaracterizing Georgia politics, when you seem to be a victim of the same, and repeating certain narratives.
Likewise with your comment that black people are leaving blue states in droves to come to Atlanta, as if this is some recent phenomenon. That is simply a new right-wing media narrative that seeks to malign blue states and peel off support. But, black people have long sought Atlanta as a mecca, which has featured black political power for decades now and was even labeled an ascendant "Chocolate City" in a Parliament song of 1975.
Perhaps there was some national media painting of Georgia. After all, narratives do sell. But your analysis here is somewhat superficial and features its own skewed media-driven narratives.
> the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted.
This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right in order to scare their constituents into voting, and Republicans stopped resisting Trump, who they were only against because he was an outsider to their patronage networks. The far-right haven't risen, the Democrats just spend all their time doing PR for them and trying to associate them with Trump to attract centrist Republican voters.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
>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.
They're not. I worked in a local news station's news room (and grew up working in them alongside my dad). I would pull stories off an Associated Press feed [1], copy the scripts verbatim, and throw them into the rundown. It's one gigantic feed trough. People deny it because they want to feel like they're in control, but they're not. They're cattle.
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!
>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.
Attempted entry at 3am, grand theft auto, homeless camps, and coyotes? These are your examples of NextDoor toxicity?
These are downright useful things to know. I’ve seen comical behavior on NextDoor. If it was just people warming me about coyotes I’d still have the app installed.
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.
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.
I agree those examples are bad. I usually see something like "weird car I don't recognize is in the neighborhood!!!!", And ofc the explanation cant be something simple, like visiting friends or family, someone checking out homes for sale, someone got a new car, etc. It's obviously a cunning criminal staking out the place in broad daylight.
I can't imagine having the level of paranoia as Nextdoor posters, that shit would break me.
On the other hand ,I find myself not doing certain things I'd like to do, like evening walks around the neighborhood because some shut in might call the cops on me.
Nextdoor posts about crime almost always contain a reaction that normalizes it in one horrific way or another. Like if people complain about their car being broken into, someone always says that they should just leave their doors unlocked.
If someone complains about their political signs being stolen it results in someone condemning the content of their stolen sign or complaints like, "yeah but signs on (opposite side of issue) get stolen all the time and you don't see us complaining about it!" So even on the local level it turns into neighbor versus neighbor easily despite careful moderation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Of much greater importance--why would media from NYC become absolutely obsessed with a trivial event in, say, Ferguson, Missouri? Why not concern themselves with the incredible violence of places like...NYC? Why not look deep into the actual statistics around violence, rather than amplifying particular incidents from irrelevant places? Bad faith question, of course. They do it because they have to travel far and wide to find things that match the narrative. Outside their window, in the streets which their own politicians control, the narrative is a little different.
To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.
You’re asking the same question, but in a leading way. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to imply here.
>To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.
NYC is the financial capital of the US so of course important news out of NYC may be important elsewhere. However, a random act of subway violence is not important national news. Given the volume of subway riders I would argue that it is not even important local news.
Ferguson was publicized heavily because of massive demonstrations because police everywhere should know that their brother in blue makes their jobs more dangerous. Police killings undermine trust in police which is crucial for their safety.
John Oliver did a good "writeup" about Ferguson and why it mattered back in 2014. You should watch it, and see if you think it wasn't notable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdHIatS36A
> 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.
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.
I believe local news tends to be a more 'news' and a bit less 'narrative'.
I also believe that the more local the news is, the more relatable.
From Canada, I can get PBS/NPR Vermont, and the sheer quaintness of the local issues from Burlington Vt. I mean it feels like going back in time but in a good way. 'The New Playhouse' opened up, the 'Fireworks Display Will Be Here' etc. - it's the complete opposite of Cable news and Twitter, which is incendiary and ideological.
National narrative news satisfied an ostensible intellectual aspect of our orientation, but I'm not sure it's useful in the magnitude we consume it.
There are so many mundane things that happen in local communities that I'm not sure you need research to show how invaluable it is to local readers. Yet, is noise to everyone else.
I could think of a few, new businesses opening up, or worse, shutting down, or changes to government policies that affect residents. Maybe you're in a farming community and there's a big corporate buyout that's going to make your life more difficult, or something to celebrate. What about new parks opening up, or changes to traffic flow, or even, a new stop light being added at a dangerous intersection.
These are all things people locally care about, and true, they probably wouldn't actively seek them out, but having it on the front page of their news source would definitely be interesting enough to read.
There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:
- "Academic studies suggest that a lack of local media coverage is associated with less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians." [0]
- "We examine how local newspaper closures affect public finance outcomes for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points, costing the municipality an additional $650 thousand per issue." [1]
Without local news people don't vote as much, are less informed about the issues, and politicians have less oversight. Local news fills a very important role in society.
> There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:
keyword here is "associated".
Does lack of local media coverage cause "less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians", or is it the reverse? It certainly seems plausible. If you don't care about politics at all, you're probably happy sitting at home watching daytime national TV rather than reading the local paper.
The same applies to newspaper closures being associated with higher borrowing costs. Towns that are on a downward spiral would cause higher borrowing costs (who wants to borrow to a town with a dwindling tax base?) as well as causing local media establishments to shut down.
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.
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.
This has been tried a lot with very little to show for it.
The problem is running a real newsroom that actually has the capabilities to do serious coverage is shockingly expensive.
So you need a revenue model. Being local, it can't pursue scale like WaPo or Dotdash-Meredith, so programmatic isn't going to work for you with. National advertisers want more scale and more specific demographics than you're able to offer, and besides, why should they deal with you when they can target the same people on Facebook?
So you're left with a few local advertisers, who may be willing to spend some money, but the metro papers have tried that for the last decade and it's not enough.
Which leaves subscriptions.
And here's the question: Newspapers were never actually in the political coverage business, they're in the Information Business, and local politics and news are loss-leaders inside that. In the old days, their offering included sports, real estate, classifieds, jobs, shopping, movie times and various other near monopolies that are now scattered to the winds of the internet.
So that leaves two questions:
1. What is a local information product that's good enough for a sizeable percentage of the community to pay for?
2. At what price point?
3. How big does that community need to be in order to make it work?
Can this be done? Actually, I think there's a shot if the right person tried it in the right place. I have some ideas, but odds are long, and I don't think anyone without a deep grasp of both the local community they plan to serve and the business they're going into has a chance.
It's expensive and risky. Telling truth to power invites power to fight back, and power has the means to fight.
A major unrecognised role of publishers is in providing legal shield to authors and reporters. Though some publishers are ducking out on that responsibility, see Cory Doctorow's take, "Reasonable Agreement":
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.
One answer to that is to go to a weekly format. I think the economics work out a lot better than for a daily.
Around Tompkins County we still have the Ithaca Journal but each edition seems a little thinner than the one before.
There is a civic-minded weekly, Tompkins Weekly which is mostly newspaper-length stories and makes it to public meetings, and also the weekly Ithaca Times which covers serious issues, often with stories a bit longer than newspaper stories. There are also some publications focused on arts and entertainment.
I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.
The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs. Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news to all parts of the country.
The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local, irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't something.
Patch [1] seems to be exactly what you’re describing — “local news in a box”:
> What is Patch?
>
> Patch is an innovative way to find out about, and participate in, what's going on near you.
My Connecticut hometown had a Patch site. As other commenters have pointed out, apps don’t address a dearth of local journalists (Patch appears to encourage community participation, which sounds good, but is not journalism), funding for local news (though I would expect it to reduce operating costs), etc.
If you mean startup as in VC backed super growth oriented companies. Then this set of incentives is exactly what got us here. I don't see anyway local news framework make big money without devolving to the attention grabbing mindless beasts we have now.
But newspapers have always been in the business of grabbing attention. Tim Wu has written about this extensively.[1] The issue for me is that in the past, this generated a lot of positive by-products (i.e. local news reporting on corrupt politicians resulting in them being kicked out of office; local news reporting on polluted water supply resulting in it being cleaned, etc.). With Google/Facebook news, and a focus on national stories, you loose this side benefit.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
The problem is, many of our generation can't afford to pay for local news that we barely have the time and the mental energy to consume after working 10 or more hours and then commuting. No, cutting our Netflix and switching it to some local paper won't work either, because we don't need to engage our brains with some random Netflix stuff.
In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote - as evidenced by just about every voter turnout statistic.
Want to fix politics? Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.
> In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote
Not with that attitude. I'm reading a newspaper since I was 14. If they don't make time to read a newspaper, they're just not interested. Don't try to sugarcoat it with some pointless victimization.
>Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.
Is this really that much more difficult now than in the past? I would think it'd be easier now given that information is easier to obtain and workers rights are at an all time high
"Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it isn't already. That's the answer to the local news problem. If you want to know how to become a successful influencer just ask the popular kids at a school. Yes quality of content matters, but there's a mystical charisma component at the center of it.
Once local influencers have been established in an area then quality can gradually take on more of a role. Those who provide sensationalistic news will get their crowd, but some (hopefully those with citations, less sensationalism, and less bias) will eventually gain the status of "trustworthy". And over time some will gain enough popularity to start looking more like a normal business again, with local sponsorships and the whole thing.
This may seem a bit depressing at first but it's completely normal. As publication relies less and less on expensive machinery and elaborate organizations it will naturally gravitate toward individuals. Conglomerates like Sinclair only exist to pick on the carcasses of dead mediums.
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.
Sometimes I walk by the TV while my mother is watching the local news. It seems to always just be reporting about thefts/gunshots downtown, then some new product available, followed by 15 minutes of weather and sports. I don't find much value in any of that information.
Not local really but I bit the bullet on NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg
I miiight do LA Times (doubt)
Paywall circumvention doesnt work well/at all on mobile
I agree that ad bombing eyeball news is very low quality in comparison to subscription news. Its a night and day difference. Its distressing that nobody else I know can really see or access these articles, being pulled by every clickbait version of an event
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.
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.
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.
In my city, the local chamber of commerce put together a plan for a nonprofit local news website, something that is truly needed for the reasons cited in TFA. However, while the virtual masthead proclaims "Independent. Accurate. Unbiased." the board of directors is made up mostly of wealthy property developers and people connected with the local real estate industry. There's no way they won't put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to vetting the chief editor, providing coverage of community meetings around development, and endorsing candidates for mayor and city council.
You have the same problem with commercial newspapers, though. The L.A. Times is nothing more than a 100-year-long real estate pump and dump. Almost every newspaper in America relies on car dealer ads, and will therefore never say anything even slightly negative about cars. Cars and real estate have had their thumbs and the rest of their hand on the scale for a long time.
I work in non-profit media and it's really tough. Getting funds from membership is an uphill battle. Executive comp is much lower than private media, but at the same time it's relentlessly criticized for being too high because the numbers are disclosed. The Baltimore Banner exists based on the personal largesse of one person who tried and failed to buy the Baltimore Sun so it's going to have a hard time maintaining impartiality or surviving in a competitive market.
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.
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.
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.
Non-profits are funded by people (possibly lots of people with a little money, but far more usually a couple of people with a lot of money) who have interests, or by foundations that are funded directly and completely by government. They are not news-as-public-good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because:
>- 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
clickbait might not be a thing, but attention grabbing headlines to get you to read/buy the paper is still a thing. Besides, most (all?) major news publications have an online presence, and they're they're probably sharing stories/headlines between the print/online formats so I doubt there would be any difference in quality.
>There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork.
Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce? It seems like many of the things that the internet provides have been so integral to your life that you've forgotten about them.
>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.
1. Google flights provides legroom in addition to prices. you're free to compare on price and comfort here.
2. I'm not sure how the alternative (not having comparison shopping) is any better. Are you just hoping that the benevolent airlines would always put customer comfort above profits?
>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.
Disagree. Now I can buy ETFs with management fees in the single basis points (eg. 0.03% for VTI) with zero trading fees. In the past I'd either have to contend with mutual funds with exorbitant management fees (1-2%), or pay $50-$100 per trade.
Google maps yes. You got me on that. Wikipedia, well, sort of, yes... it had a good beginning but is losing trustworthiness as it's being exploited more and more, it's surely a good source of info, still. e-commerce - i bought stuff online maybe 3-4x in my life (rare items that are never stocked in shops). Food delivery apps are a particularly notorious kind of evil, killing good businesses first.
Flights - it's not just the legroom. Because people started picking on the price, airlines had to get rid of business class or make it very flexible in size (meaning - use crappy "transformer" seats that can switch back to economy when needed). Or just simply leave middle seat empty and call it business. When price wasn't the only variable people chose tickets by, airlines could be a lot more comfortable with their costs and tried to sell premium product first - which is natural for every other normal business, premium product by definition brings higher margins. It's not just what i choose, it's what other people choose. Here in EU, we simply don't have any decent business class anywhere anymore.
Stocks - ETFs were a thing before internet and they don't require it. Vanguard exists since 1975 and it's fee structure didn't change since.
> I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford.
Huh? Pick a decent airline, and long haul international business class is pretty comfortable. First, I hear, is even better. Expensive, but a heckuva lot less so than a private jet.
For really long distance flights, yes things are OK, but i'm flying over 5 hours maybe a couple times per year and never did since covid. But on "short" haul (intra EU) flights, and these are typically 3-4 hours from where i live, there is now either no premium service at all or "euro business", which is economy with middle seat blocked, best case with a transformer seat that slightly increase seat width by moving inner armrests inwards, but even that is a rarity. Some backwards, poor countries where digitalisation lags behind others, like Romania and Bulgaria, kept it for a lot longer, in fact Bulgaria Air still has proper business class on a few planes, but every "modern" country (France, Germany, Italy etc) destroyed their premium "short" haul service a long time ago.
Belarus hanged in for a lot longer than others, too, and i think for same reason. Russia still does - Aeroflot has proper 3-class service on most flights and at least normal 2-class even on short haul.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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-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.
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
This. I read it somewhere a while ago that prior to information revolution of late 90s onwards news travelled very slowly. Which meant people consumed more news of happenings around 50KM-100KM radius of their living place. And this reduced exponentially with increased radius. I could totally related to this as when I was in school (late 80s, early 90s) I read physical news paper that carried mostly my district and state news. Once a week I would be exposed to national news and maybe once a month to international news.
But now it's exactly reverse. I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war which is half way across the world but have no clue about local politics. The net result being I get more enraged/impacted about happenings on which I have close to zero control but totally oblivious to things that I have control over such as reasons why there are so many broken roads in my vicinity.
>>I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war
Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings <<insert current event of interest>> often filled with less and less facts and more sensationalism chasing maximum number of clicks, follows, thumb ups, likes, etc.
This is true if it is random person, small organization, a non-profit, or a "trusted source" main stream media outlet
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I wonder if the fact that the local population has a murkier view of local events also has its beneficiaries.
I remember stories about local corrupt politicians trying to silence local outlets of uncomfortable news. Now they likely don't even have to.
Agree. With 330 million people I'm pretty sure you can find at least a few bad ones every. single. day.
I'm glad we give them air time.
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> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater:
Electing Marjorie Greene Taylor and the coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you think it has nothing to do with the community being 80% Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy.”
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Georgia elected Marjorie Greene Taylor and Raphael Warnock. States aren't red or blue; it is a divisive over simplification. To paraphrase that parent comment, What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in much of the rest of California.
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There wasn’t much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to have some convenient video to work with and used the opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a hero. It’s a testament to the power of media and gullible minds in great numbers.
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> coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
Did a quick search through the article, can't find a mention of any attempt to cover up the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, can you elaborate? Is there an ongoing investigation into this and is there some way we can help? It is insane that in 2022 the authorities in America are still complicit in lynchings and that nobody does anything, it disgusts me. How long will this indiscriminate murder of BIPOC continue, why can't America do better? What is it about Americans that drive them to murder BIPOC?
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Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
Fucking true. People think hicks are unique to the South and are oblivious to the hordes of hicks living in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and northern California. In fact, they're even more extremist over in the west because they don't feel like they're represented at all.
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.
Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about the city burning.
Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red. Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was in 2018.
Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are reasonable, IMHO.
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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.
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>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.>>
This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true - I think it's manufactured (I assume due to all mass communication being a large ad server that requires a quick and easy way to stimulate engagement - but that could be wrong too, I don't know). I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values. Where we're apart is a) facts, and b) the tactical approach to getting our society as a whole to express those values (eg. trusting that if left alone the society will be "good" vs. trusting that codifying the "good" in law will genuinely reach the same end).
>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.
> This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true
My personal experience is of a diverse USA. In the late 90s I toured the states, a gig in a different city each night then back to the tour bus and off to the next one by daybreak. Okay, not a great sampling of ordinary life because on the road you mostly meet audiences, people in bars, diner waitresses etc. But while I recall how the USA looks superficially similar (giant cars on giant roads and the same brand logos in every city) it's not. I saw quite a range of poverty and wealth, segregation and integration, friendliness and aloofness, dense cities and wide open country. Much like travelling around Europe.
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> I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values.
I don’t think that’s true any more. Major schisms have been opening up over the past couple of decades. For example, a significant portion of the elite is now opposed to color blindness. That’s a fundamental thing to disagree about in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. The same people also oppose the “melting pot” ideal of American immigration. The Democratic Party’s “safe, legal, and rare” has turned , in NYC at least, into “abortion until the moment of birth,” at least in NYC. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/05/23/....
When my family came to this country in 1989, Carter Democrats and Reagan Republicans didn’t disagree on the fundamental notions of a good life. You got educated, got married, had 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, etc. They both venerated the founders and the history of America, and agreed on what qualities of that historical America led to the prosperity that Americans enjoy today. They disagreed on the role of government in achieving that ideal, on economics, on a few social issues at the edges.
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It's not only the media but also the political campaign industry. Some inner city council person somewhere says they hate Jewish people and suddenly their opponent for city council has nationwide fundraising support. Same for some small town mayor saying they don't want "those people" in his town. Now there's money flooding in nationwide for his opponent in the election. In a country of 330 million, there's always a politician somewhere saying something reprehensible. Political parties and their fundraising wings love finding these incidents and then making money off of them.
330M is large, but not so large that national news stops making sense. Japan is roughly comparable - it has 126M people, and it was composed of competing (and sometimes warring) feudal lords until the Meiji Restoration (1868), a few years after the US civil war.
Yet go to Japan and suggest that it's toxic for people in Tokyo to care about what's happening in Fukuoka, and people will look at you as if you've grown another head.
I mean, what is a nation if not a group of people subscribing to the same central authority and sharing a rough idea of a society? On the face of it, saying that "nationalization of news and politics in a country is toxic" is so absurd that I'd like to see an argument for supporting that, instead of using it as a starting point of an argument.
If people in SF stop caring about what's happening in Atlanta (and vice versa), it won't bring peace. It will merely accelerate the disintegration of the USA as a single country.
I would argue that USA has already disintegrated as a single country with respect to its foundation, which is the society itself - basically, there's no single "American society" anymore. The only thing that still keeps the country together is the formalities of governance, and even that will only last for as long as people are willing to tolerate them (which is less and less with every passing year).
It might be possible to reboot it in more or less the same format as the original was way back when (i.e. by moving most political questions out of the federal level). But there needs to be some motivation to try to keep things together at least on some level. For the original colonies, it was clear that they would simply not survive on their own. But for many states today, they have numerous independent countries of similar size (in terms of territory, people, economy etc - you name it) as a showcase that it is possible.
yeah but the population density of japan is 10x that of america, and the distance between atlanta and los angeles is well over 3x that of tokyo to fukuoka.
I doubt GP was intending to speak strictly about population count itself.
idk, but in japan i get the sense that there is alot less money in politics and media, whereas in the us money == politics, so you get full-tilt media insanity which push people further and further apart
i really think the us needs serious campaign and media reform; there is just too much money sloshing around from all these donors and its creating all kinds of havoc
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
The "nightly news" used to be a much more common experience that people shared: "Twenty-seven million to 29 million viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair."
Today the most popular news channel is Republican propaganda. I don't use that term to be dramatic. I do not think there is a more accurate description.
The top cable news channels are propaganda for the two major political parties.
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It seems doubtful people are leaving California due to jobs, taxes, and public universities, but I would certainly believe it was due to cost of living. CA is the world's 5th largest economy, the universities are world-class, and most people are unwilling to give up their family, friends and life to establish something new simply to save a few percent on taxes.
But “most people” aren’t leaving California, you need to look at the margin. A marginal mover might very well be swayed by high taxes to a significant degree. For example, when I was moving to the States, one major factor for choice of Washington over California was exactly state taxes. I also have friends who are planning their move out of California to Texas, and for them taxes also play a significant role in their choice. It’s not only taxes that made them decide to move, but it’s rarely only a single factor that makes people move.
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The university system may still be world-class, but the public schools are definitely not. CA isn’t a great place to live, if you are blue collar.
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I actually have a coworker moving to California for their university system. Like taking his sophomore daughter and 4th grader and moving there.
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I would put taxes in the cost of living column.
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One thing that makes this worse is the collapse of local information economies. Papers can no longer make money by acting as pay-to-post message boards for the communities they serve. Instead, the best way to make money is to convince people from outside your region to use your organization for their news needs. So now every paper writes news for a national audience and what determines the financial health of the paper is how effectively it can attract readers that aren't from its area.
Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.
And that’s why the founders set up the electoral college. We are a federal republic of states.
The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.
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This sounds like a great recipe for disintegration, Yugoslavia- or at best Spanish American empire - style.
If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
It is a small wonder that the US had, so far, only one secession and civil war crisis, and a testament to your resilient constitutional order.
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Yeah because then the entire country will only have to care about what NY thinks
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A few years ago my friends started call NYT "Pravda", saying that it's turned into the mouthpiece of the "party line".
Grudgingly, I had eventually to agree.
> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater
They wouldn't be wrong. For example in April 2021 a black woman from Md was drummed out of a wealthy town in GA for the crime of being black and an educator[0]. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in the south and west.
0. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-p...
>Cecelia Lewis was asked to apply for a Georgia school district’s first-ever administrator job devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion.
They disagreed with her politics.
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She was drummed out of town because she was supporting DEI and CRT, not because she was black.
Did you read the article?
"This is not about the color of her skin. It’s what she’s going to bring into our district and what she’s going to teach our children"
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I agree with your remarks. Adding one aspect for thought:
> We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.
Problem is: from the perspective of massification efforts, we're all equal.
The same principles that make Facebook addictive to a person in San Francisco also govern the psychology and neuro-chemistry of a kid in Miami.
That holds not just to US citizens. Anywhere in the world it's like that.
Thank you for an excellent example of a national narrative that does not match the true local flavor.
I've spent a ton of time in SF and Baltimore, wondering what specifically you had in mind? I think it's less socially acceptable to be right leaning in SF? Sure you would be looked at weird if you used a koozie or wore croakies in SF, or if you went up to people at a coffee shop to ask them to pitch their startup in Baltimore, but the differences feel cultural not political.
> Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention.
Because local elections have national consequences.
Then in 2020, GA's special elections determined control of the US Senate, and therefore the fate of the Biden Admin.
Shouldn't the nation pay attention to GA? At least as much as say Iowa and New Hampshire?
> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
Nonwhite voters are systematically disenfranchised in GA. Enough so that in a straight up fight, Stacey Abrams would be governor.
Those "misrepresentations" of GA are packed with history. Slavery, Confederacy, Jim Crow, Southern Strategy, etc. Centuries of denying nonwhites their right to vote. Sure, white people feel resentful about being constantly reminded. For everyone else, it's present reality, not history.
If you're curious, I recommend the books These Truths, 1619 Project, and The Sum of Us.
> ...a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents...
That's the plan. Immigration back inland, to flip those reds states blue.
Were their any progressive do-gooder billionaires, they'd be paying people to move inland. To start farms, businesses, families.
> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
The national media everywhere is full of shit. That's the norm. It's the norm, because it works.
> an excellent public university system
Why don’t you tell this to the several UGA math profs who quit recently (including an acquaintance of mine from high school) or the GA Tech faculty unhappy with state COVID policies
You sound like somebody who hasn't waited in line for many hours because you live in a Black neighborhood in Georgia.
You are all one people!
No!
That’s right—you are all either on Team Blue or Team Red!
Yes!
Amazing how widespread such dichotomies are.
Your analysis somewhat conspicuously omits the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted. Is it reasonable to expect local news and politics to be insulated from such dramatic national shifts?
I've lived in Atlanta for over two decades. What's happened in Atlanta politics tracks with what's happened nationwide. It is not strictly a function of media or a random, spontaneous racialization.
Nor do I know anyone who feels we've been characterized as an "unreformed Confederate backwater". The idea that we've been so maligned is itself a media narrative. In fact, I live in an area that is staunchly conservative, majority white, and upper-middle class. The people I speak with abhor Trump and the style of politics he represents (which have been noted as favorable to your "unreformed Confederates"). This was visible in their repudiation of him in 2020, even while they voted GOP down balllot. It was visible again in the recent primary wherein the candidates Trump endorsed were largely shellacked.
So, it's somehat ironic that you're bemoaning the media's role in mischaracterizing Georgia politics, when you seem to be a victim of the same, and repeating certain narratives.
Likewise with your comment that black people are leaving blue states in droves to come to Atlanta, as if this is some recent phenomenon. That is simply a new right-wing media narrative that seeks to malign blue states and peel off support. But, black people have long sought Atlanta as a mecca, which has featured black political power for decades now and was even labeled an ascendant "Chocolate City" in a Parliament song of 1975.
Perhaps there was some national media painting of Georgia. After all, narratives do sell. But your analysis here is somewhat superficial and features its own skewed media-driven narratives.
> the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted.
This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right in order to scare their constituents into voting, and Republicans stopped resisting Trump, who they were only against because he was an outsider to their patronage networks. The far-right haven't risen, the Democrats just spend all their time doing PR for them and trying to associate them with Trump to attract centrist Republican voters.
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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-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-...
If, like me, you read "Axios" as that js library, and PR as Pull Request, you too, my friend, need to take a break.
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/
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.
Investigative, independent, long form, good journalism still exists, you have to pay for it though and it isn’t as popular as mainstream.
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.
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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.
>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.
My local news site has byline titles including 'Multimedia Reporter' and 'SEO Journalist'.
Is it even "local news" when it's owned by some corporation like Sinclair?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations
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?
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So replace Sinclair with Gannett, Same problem
Pretty sure "local news-ness" and ownership are separate qualities.
Are they though? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/sinclair-n...
Pretty sure they're not.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo
They're not. I worked in a local news station's news room (and grew up working in them alongside my dad). I would pull stories off an Associated Press feed [1], copy the scripts verbatim, and throw them into the rundown. It's one gigantic feed trough. People deny it because they want to feel like they're in control, but they're not. They're cattle.
[1] https://www.ap.org/media-solutions/enps/
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!
>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.
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.
Attempted entry at 3am, grand theft auto, homeless camps, and coyotes? These are your examples of NextDoor toxicity?
These are downright useful things to know. I’ve seen comical behavior on NextDoor. If it was just people warming me about coyotes I’d still have the app installed.
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.
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.
I agree those examples are bad. I usually see something like "weird car I don't recognize is in the neighborhood!!!!", And ofc the explanation cant be something simple, like visiting friends or family, someone checking out homes for sale, someone got a new car, etc. It's obviously a cunning criminal staking out the place in broad daylight.
I can't imagine having the level of paranoia as Nextdoor posters, that shit would break me.
On the other hand ,I find myself not doing certain things I'd like to do, like evening walks around the neighborhood because some shut in might call the cops on me.
Nextdoor posts about crime almost always contain a reaction that normalizes it in one horrific way or another. Like if people complain about their car being broken into, someone always says that they should just leave their doors unlocked.
If someone complains about their political signs being stolen it results in someone condemning the content of their stolen sign or complaints like, "yeah but signs on (opposite side of issue) get stolen all the time and you don't see us complaining about it!" So even on the local level it turns into neighbor versus neighbor easily despite careful moderation.
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-...
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.
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.
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?
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
The top ones are often propaganda outlets who feed them the lies.
Exactly, what divide are we talking about? Divide me (please!) from para-military loons.
Of much greater importance--why would media from NYC become absolutely obsessed with a trivial event in, say, Ferguson, Missouri? Why not concern themselves with the incredible violence of places like...NYC? Why not look deep into the actual statistics around violence, rather than amplifying particular incidents from irrelevant places? Bad faith question, of course. They do it because they have to travel far and wide to find things that match the narrative. Outside their window, in the streets which their own politicians control, the narrative is a little different.
To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.
You’re asking the same question, but in a leading way. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to imply here.
>To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.
NYC is the financial capital of the US so of course important news out of NYC may be important elsewhere. However, a random act of subway violence is not important national news. Given the volume of subway riders I would argue that it is not even important local news.
Ferguson was publicized heavily because of massive demonstrations because police everywhere should know that their brother in blue makes their jobs more dangerous. Police killings undermine trust in police which is crucial for their safety.
John Oliver did a good "writeup" about Ferguson and why it mattered back in 2014. You should watch it, and see if you think it wasn't notable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdHIatS36A
> 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.
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.
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.
I believe local news tends to be a more 'news' and a bit less 'narrative'.
I also believe that the more local the news is, the more relatable.
From Canada, I can get PBS/NPR Vermont, and the sheer quaintness of the local issues from Burlington Vt. I mean it feels like going back in time but in a good way. 'The New Playhouse' opened up, the 'Fireworks Display Will Be Here' etc. - it's the complete opposite of Cable news and Twitter, which is incendiary and ideological.
National narrative news satisfied an ostensible intellectual aspect of our orientation, but I'm not sure it's useful in the magnitude we consume it.
There are so many mundane things that happen in local communities that I'm not sure you need research to show how invaluable it is to local readers. Yet, is noise to everyone else.
I could think of a few, new businesses opening up, or worse, shutting down, or changes to government policies that affect residents. Maybe you're in a farming community and there's a big corporate buyout that's going to make your life more difficult, or something to celebrate. What about new parks opening up, or changes to traffic flow, or even, a new stop light being added at a dangerous intersection.
These are all things people locally care about, and true, they probably wouldn't actively seek them out, but having it on the front page of their news source would definitely be interesting enough to read.
There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:
- "Academic studies suggest that a lack of local media coverage is associated with less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians." [0]
- "We examine how local newspaper closures affect public finance outcomes for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points, costing the municipality an additional $650 thousand per issue." [1]
Without local news people don't vote as much, are less informed about the issues, and politicians have less oversight. Local news fills a very important role in society.
[0] https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-loc... [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555
> There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:
keyword here is "associated".
Does lack of local media coverage cause "less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians", or is it the reverse? It certainly seems plausible. If you don't care about politics at all, you're probably happy sitting at home watching daytime national TV rather than reading the local paper.
The same applies to newspaper closures being associated with higher borrowing costs. Towns that are on a downward spiral would cause higher borrowing costs (who wants to borrow to a town with a dwindling tax base?) as well as causing local media establishments to shut down.
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.
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.
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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=20...
[1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/
This has been tried a lot with very little to show for it.
The problem is running a real newsroom that actually has the capabilities to do serious coverage is shockingly expensive.
So you need a revenue model. Being local, it can't pursue scale like WaPo or Dotdash-Meredith, so programmatic isn't going to work for you with. National advertisers want more scale and more specific demographics than you're able to offer, and besides, why should they deal with you when they can target the same people on Facebook?
So you're left with a few local advertisers, who may be willing to spend some money, but the metro papers have tried that for the last decade and it's not enough.
Which leaves subscriptions.
And here's the question: Newspapers were never actually in the political coverage business, they're in the Information Business, and local politics and news are loss-leaders inside that. In the old days, their offering included sports, real estate, classifieds, jobs, shopping, movie times and various other near monopolies that are now scattered to the winds of the internet.
So that leaves two questions:
1. What is a local information product that's good enough for a sizeable percentage of the community to pay for?
2. At what price point?
3. How big does that community need to be in order to make it work?
Can this be done? Actually, I think there's a shot if the right person tried it in the right place. I have some ideas, but odds are long, and I don't think anyone without a deep grasp of both the local community they plan to serve and the business they're going into has a chance.
It's expensive and risky. Telling truth to power invites power to fight back, and power has the means to fight.
A major unrecognised role of publishers is in providing legal shield to authors and reporters. Though some publishers are ducking out on that responsibility, see Cory Doctorow's take, "Reasonable Agreement":
https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed...
Alt (paywall / regwall / JS): https://scribe.rip/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7
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.
One answer to that is to go to a weekly format. I think the economics work out a lot better than for a daily.
Around Tompkins County we still have the Ithaca Journal but each edition seems a little thinner than the one before.
There is a civic-minded weekly, Tompkins Weekly which is mostly newspaper-length stories and makes it to public meetings, and also the weekly Ithaca Times which covers serious issues, often with stories a bit longer than newspaper stories. There are also some publications focused on arts and entertainment.
I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.
The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs. Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news to all parts of the country.
The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local, irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't something.
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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.
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Patch [1] seems to be exactly what you’re describing — “local news in a box”:
> What is Patch? > > Patch is an innovative way to find out about, and participate in, what's going on near you.
My Connecticut hometown had a Patch site. As other commenters have pointed out, apps don’t address a dearth of local journalists (Patch appears to encourage community participation, which sounds good, but is not journalism), funding for local news (though I would expect it to reduce operating costs), etc.
[1] https://patch.com/about
Oh, neat! Thanks for sharing this.
If you mean startup as in VC backed super growth oriented companies. Then this set of incentives is exactly what got us here. I don't see anyway local news framework make big money without devolving to the attention grabbing mindless beasts we have now.
But newspapers have always been in the business of grabbing attention. Tim Wu has written about this extensively.[1] The issue for me is that in the past, this generated a lot of positive by-products (i.e. local news reporting on corrupt politicians resulting in them being kicked out of office; local news reporting on polluted water supply resulting in it being cleaned, etc.). With Google/Facebook news, and a focus on national stories, you loose this side benefit.
[1] https://bookshop.org/books/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-...
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.
>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.
Still need journalists though, even for digital.
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
I assume they do that because local news isn't profitable and is always on the risk of failing?
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).
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.
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?
Here is the full report from the original source, along with the methodology used.
https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...
https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...
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.
>Younger generations need to pay for news.
Add it to the list of things that younger generations are somehow required to purchase.
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-killing-list...
The problem is, many of our generation can't afford to pay for local news that we barely have the time and the mental energy to consume after working 10 or more hours and then commuting. No, cutting our Netflix and switching it to some local paper won't work either, because we don't need to engage our brains with some random Netflix stuff.
In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote - as evidenced by just about every voter turnout statistic.
Want to fix politics? Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.
> In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote
Not with that attitude. I'm reading a newspaper since I was 14. If they don't make time to read a newspaper, they're just not interested. Don't try to sugarcoat it with some pointless victimization.
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>Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.
Is this really that much more difficult now than in the past? I would think it'd be easier now given that information is easier to obtain and workers rights are at an all time high
We already have enough youthful political activists that are 100% disconnected from the real world.
Why would we want the youngest, least experienced, most ideological, and frequently petulant to elect leaders?
More youth voters won't fix a thing. It will, in fact, make things a lot worse.
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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.
> How does one incentivize this?
"Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it isn't already. That's the answer to the local news problem. If you want to know how to become a successful influencer just ask the popular kids at a school. Yes quality of content matters, but there's a mystical charisma component at the center of it.
Once local influencers have been established in an area then quality can gradually take on more of a role. Those who provide sensationalistic news will get their crowd, but some (hopefully those with citations, less sensationalism, and less bias) will eventually gain the status of "trustworthy". And over time some will gain enough popularity to start looking more like a normal business again, with local sponsorships and the whole thing.
This may seem a bit depressing at first but it's completely normal. As publication relies less and less on expensive machinery and elaborate organizations it will naturally gravitate toward individuals. Conglomerates like Sinclair only exist to pick on the carcasses of dead mediums.
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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.
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Paying for twitter screenshots?
Sometimes I walk by the TV while my mother is watching the local news. It seems to always just be reporting about thefts/gunshots downtown, then some new product available, followed by 15 minutes of weather and sports. I don't find much value in any of that information.
Not local really but I bit the bullet on NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg
I miiight do LA Times (doubt)
Paywall circumvention doesnt work well/at all on mobile
I agree that ad bombing eyeball news is very low quality in comparison to subscription news. Its a night and day difference. Its distressing that nobody else I know can really see or access these articles, being pulled by every clickbait version of an event
Do you live in NY or DC? Otherwise this is pretty much the opposite of supporting local news.
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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-...
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-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.
In my city, the local chamber of commerce put together a plan for a nonprofit local news website, something that is truly needed for the reasons cited in TFA. However, while the virtual masthead proclaims "Independent. Accurate. Unbiased." the board of directors is made up mostly of wealthy property developers and people connected with the local real estate industry. There's no way they won't put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to vetting the chief editor, providing coverage of community meetings around development, and endorsing candidates for mayor and city council.
You have the same problem with commercial newspapers, though. The L.A. Times is nothing more than a 100-year-long real estate pump and dump. Almost every newspaper in America relies on car dealer ads, and will therefore never say anything even slightly negative about cars. Cars and real estate have had their thumbs and the rest of their hand on the scale for a long time.
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I work in non-profit media and it's really tough. Getting funds from membership is an uphill battle. Executive comp is much lower than private media, but at the same time it's relentlessly criticized for being too high because the numbers are disclosed. The Baltimore Banner exists based on the personal largesse of one person who tried and failed to buy the Baltimore Sun so it's going to have a hard time maintaining impartiality or surviving in a competitive market.
Largely agreed, known, and understood. See also my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981720
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.
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
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_Repor...
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Non-profits are funded by people (possibly lots of people with a little money, but far more usually a couple of people with a lot of money) who have interests, or by foundations that are funded directly and completely by government. They are not news-as-public-good.
Non-profit doesn't mean "benevolent charity."
This is true, though the point is more that news organisation don't seem to be possible to run as for-profit entities in the long run.
I'm well aware of issues with not-for-profit / NGO organisation and charity:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802315
The Baltimore Banner's first few stories have been absolutely amazing.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
Yet no mention of Operation Mockingbird!
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
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.
The what?
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/
How did this whole article manage to avoid mentioning that Axios itself has local news?
I was wondering this same thing! And honestly, I've found Axios's approach to be kind of inspirational.
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.
How do you figure out what’s going on around you then? Word of mouth (online or otherwise)?
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.
I use local newspaper articles online and Reddit, but I mostly don't figure out what's going on around me. :D
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."
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Is there a point where Americans will give up on the Union or will it take a Yugoslavia war?
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.
My bet is that this education ratio issue has existed since the dawn of time.
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.
>I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because:
>- 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
clickbait might not be a thing, but attention grabbing headlines to get you to read/buy the paper is still a thing. Besides, most (all?) major news publications have an online presence, and they're they're probably sharing stories/headlines between the print/online formats so I doubt there would be any difference in quality.
>There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork.
Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce? It seems like many of the things that the internet provides have been so integral to your life that you've forgotten about them.
>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.
1. Google flights provides legroom in addition to prices. you're free to compare on price and comfort here.
2. I'm not sure how the alternative (not having comparison shopping) is any better. Are you just hoping that the benevolent airlines would always put customer comfort above profits?
>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.
Disagree. Now I can buy ETFs with management fees in the single basis points (eg. 0.03% for VTI) with zero trading fees. In the past I'd either have to contend with mutual funds with exorbitant management fees (1-2%), or pay $50-$100 per trade.
>Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce?
Google maps yes. You got me on that. Wikipedia, well, sort of, yes... it had a good beginning but is losing trustworthiness as it's being exploited more and more, it's surely a good source of info, still. e-commerce - i bought stuff online maybe 3-4x in my life (rare items that are never stocked in shops). Food delivery apps are a particularly notorious kind of evil, killing good businesses first.
Flights - it's not just the legroom. Because people started picking on the price, airlines had to get rid of business class or make it very flexible in size (meaning - use crappy "transformer" seats that can switch back to economy when needed). Or just simply leave middle seat empty and call it business. When price wasn't the only variable people chose tickets by, airlines could be a lot more comfortable with their costs and tried to sell premium product first - which is natural for every other normal business, premium product by definition brings higher margins. It's not just what i choose, it's what other people choose. Here in EU, we simply don't have any decent business class anywhere anymore.
Stocks - ETFs were a thing before internet and they don't require it. Vanguard exists since 1975 and it's fee structure didn't change since.
> I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford.
Huh? Pick a decent airline, and long haul international business class is pretty comfortable. First, I hear, is even better. Expensive, but a heckuva lot less so than a private jet.
For really long distance flights, yes things are OK, but i'm flying over 5 hours maybe a couple times per year and never did since covid. But on "short" haul (intra EU) flights, and these are typically 3-4 hours from where i live, there is now either no premium service at all or "euro business", which is economy with middle seat blocked, best case with a transformer seat that slightly increase seat width by moving inner armrests inwards, but even that is a rarity. Some backwards, poor countries where digitalisation lags behind others, like Romania and Bulgaria, kept it for a lot longer, in fact Bulgaria Air still has proper business class on a few planes, but every "modern" country (France, Germany, Italy etc) destroyed their premium "short" haul service a long time ago.
Belarus hanged in for a lot longer than others, too, and i think for same reason. Russia still does - Aeroflot has proper 3-class service on most flights and at least normal 2-class even on short haul.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
Social media, maybe. Social (and other) ad-driven media? Certainly not.