Comment by uniqueuid
4 years ago
In research on effects of local news, there is one really tricky part.
We don't yet know what precisely the "local" benefit is. Many of the relevant studies investigate the effects of local newspapers closing (or opening, rarely). But they imply that there is something special about local reporting that can't be supplied by national news.
The best answer comes from a ~10 year old study [1] that suggests there is a mutual reinforcing effect of local news, community embedding (i.e. social capital) and social engagement (i.e. volunteering etc.)
I wish there was a better model of (1) what it is in particular in local news that is beneficial and (2) how it affects people (positively and negatively).
[1] Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Friedland, L. A. (2011). A communicative approach to social capital. Journal of Communication, 61(4), 689–712.
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.
>your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share
Local papers are usually both barely profitable and locally funded. Local businesses, similarly, are usually scraping by. A local paper that alienates a significant fraction of the community doesn't usually survive. Local reporting is usually straightforward and factual, therefore.
That's the other reason local reporting is important, because it can't afford biases. It's where journalists learn to be impartial.
Said another way, it seems clear that conflict between people has been becoming more extreme as a consequence of news shifting to a belief based system due to the lower probability that any news source heard is something that can be directly experienced.
> your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization
It cannot possibly be worse than localized social media like Nextdoor.