Comment by SoftTalker
2 days ago
Disagree. Where I live there is a local news website that is mostly one guy, who attends city and county meetings, summarizes issues discussed and decisions made, analyzes the data that local government provides under various "transparency" initiatives---all stuff that our local newspaper no longer covers. I pay a monthly subscription (which isn't even required to read) because I believe that local news is the most important news. Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint, and it's easy to stay informed on those events through a variety of sources. But there's very little coverage of the stuff that does affect me: decisions of local government, boards and commissions, stuff that directly affects the taxes I pay and the community I live in.
You may be right that not enough people want to pay the bill, but I do and so far it seems to be working.
I stopped subscribing to our local traditional newspaper because it's nothing but lightweight feature stories, local sports, and reprints of news from USA Today.
I think what you have there is cool, but I question if it would be sustainable.
In a market where "mostly one guy" can cover the beat that might work for awhile, with all the caveats that come from depending on an individual, versus an organization, to do a job.
In a larger market, where multiple people would be needed to cover the workload, I'm not so sure the funding model would work. I can imagine the subscription fees not keeping up with the step function of adding people to the organization. (You need that 3rd reporter to drive subscription revenue by expanding coverage, but current subscription revenue doesn't support it, so you can't add them.)
I think this is great, and I'm glad to hear that there are people out there doing this kind of work.
The main thing you need to watch out for in this kind of situation is corruption of the news filtering process on the local level. It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom. Editors are helpful for vetting sources, providing guidance on how to follow up on leads, etc.
>It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom.
Except the problem in the US now is that newspapers are owned by corporations that own a bunch of newspapers, or very rich individuals/families - and a single individual can dictate what an entire newsroom says.
I don't see much of a difference when it comes to corruptibility.
parent poster is saying a healthy newsroom is much better than one guy. You're disagreeing by saying one guy is not better than an unhealthy newsroom.
1 reply →
I think that's great!
Maybe that's the answer, hope your town gets one or two good journalists who can live off the pool of people who do care. Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, etc.
I do wish there was a more systematic market for it though, it's crazy how much value a few reporters can provide just by providing the check on power of asking basic questions to those in power.
>Then you just hope that they don't get hit by a bus, sell out without you knowing, piss off the wrong person, etc.
Reporting does have some dangers.
The problem with "one guy" is the potentially high standard deviation. The one guy can potentially be a careerist good old boy club protecting special interest facilitating jerk in the same way that any of the dozens of the barely accountable bureaucrats in your town can be.
I'd still prefer that "one guy" if the alternative is nothing. My Ontario town has a similar character. Lord knows he has his biases, but frequently the alternative to a loud curmudgeon is just no accountability at all.
Accountability to whom and on what axis? My city's apparent "we're poor AF and can't in good conscience say yes to any boondoggle expenditure or no to anyone who wants to invest anything" soft policy is a Karen's nightmare.
1 reply →
If one guy can make it, then another guy could probably too. That's how cities used to have sometimes 3 or 4 competing papers.
My town as two newspapers and two TV new stations. They employ more than a dozen journalists, including an old friend of mine.
If you want any actual important news, you go to Facebook and make sure that you’re following the right people and you’re in the right groups, because that’s where the news about local governance and politics actually comes out. The papers and TV stations almost always run bland human interest stories, business propaganda, press release reprints, a huge selection of national and sports news, etc. a few years ago, both papers announced they wouldn’t report most local crimes anymore unless they were particularly notorious.
After a few months or sometimes years if a local story has become big enough, they’ll deign to cover it, usually without crediting the people who actually broke the story to everyone paying attention.
When local professional journalism is this bad, it’s nobody’s fault but them whe nobody wants to pay for it.
> Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint, and it's easy to stay informed on those events through a variety of sources.
This is something that - for whatever reason - takes a surprising amount of time for ppl to understand.
Where I live we have like 6 people doing that, and they all post summaries on Facebook for free.
That sounds neat, but I wonder how they pay their bills.
I guess it depends on the depth of analysis and quantity of reporting. It's one thing to write a summary of the school board or town council meeting. That probably isn't a full time job. If there's more detailed reporting, fact checking, etc, involved I begin to worry about the implicit bias that creeps in when only certain people can afford to do it.
They have day jobs or are retired. We have a local newspaper, which we performatively fundraise for (it's doing fine), and it staffs full-time reporters; the people doing it for free out of interest, on Facebook, crush them newspaper.
I do agree that local policies are important, but I'm wary of "Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint."
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
If something happens in the US or the middle east I'll find out about it - because so many other people need to know the same it isn't hard to find enough people to pay for it.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.
My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board primaries. This experience has given me insight you would never get on national news but lots of people blindly argue about: voter ID requirements, how provisional ballots work, why higher-population counties take longer to report results on election night, what election night "calls" actually mean, entirely mundane failure modes that can slow down the line, etc.
You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.
Basically everything the feds do winds up getting implemented state or locally in a backhanded national drinking age sort of way.
When you get into the minutia of policy changes and "yeah we'll just enforce what the feds say and let the official rules be wrong until someone sues" type behavior that comes about as a result it'll have you shopping for bulldozers on FBMP.
The roots of the current situation in US politics, arose from concerted actions taken at local levels.
We have this also. https://coppellchronicle.substack.com/
Article about it: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/this-local-newsletter-cove...
40%+ conversion rate on substack.
How is that disagreement with what they are saying?
I disagree that there is not enough value in local journalism that people are willing to pay for it. I used to pay for my local paper, I stopped when they stopped doing local reporting. Now I pay another guy who is doing that.
There may be a question as to whether enough people will do this to be sustainable, but so far it's working at least in this case.
I believe it's important for you to show up at the meetings too, not outsource political action like you do sewing of your clothes.
Consistent displays of comity would go a long way to kowtowing the politisphere.
> Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint
The federal government decides the limits within which your local government must operate. A good chunk of your taxes go to wars in the middle east, and a good deal of the politicians in that federal government self-professedly care more about a middle-eastern country than the one they were elected to represent [1].
To rephrase a saying - you may not care about federal politics, but federal politics cares about you.
[1] "if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel." - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I