
Local News Is Dying, Taking Small Town America With It - chmaynard
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-05/local-news-is-dying-and-it-s-taking-small-town-america-with-it
======
rurcliped
In my area, local journalism had a sharp decline as soon as the publisher
began requiring Facebook authentication for comments on the online stories.
Previously there had been at least a dozen comments on any major story and now
there are always zero. Apparently throwaway accounts can be most critical when
the audience is your closest neighbors, especially when a poster is associated
with a local business.

(Admittedly, there had been some abuse of the online comments and the
publisher did save money in the short term by dropping any moderator effort
from the payroll costs.)

~~~
gowanus
It's kind of unfortunate that there's no easy way to scope the internet down
to a smaller group of participants, for small time operations like local news
sites.

Local news doesn't want to include audience participation from as far away as
another time zone, or another state, but even then, geographic exclusions
aren't an entirely correct exclusion criteria, since former residents of a
local region may wish to participate from afar, because they still tune into
home town news, after moving to new territory.

Real world names freeze out lots of participation, because taking ownership of
an " _incorrect_ " (contentious) opinion can have permanent consequences to
one's reputation.

The real name and/or social credibility fix, is a blunt force trauma solution,
to keep out obnoxious people, and isolate discourse to limited subgroups. But
another problem is, even without being obnoxious, non-professional
participants frequently go off-topic and off-script.

Pseudonyms almost certainly require painstaking, labor intensive moderation,
and a skillful attention devoted to selectively ascribing relevance to
conversation.

Most local operations just want to know there's an audience with a pulse, but
providing that audience with a platform and a voice is another matter
entirely.

~~~
Eridrus
One option is to do what illicit sites have done forever: require an invite,
such that the bad deeds of the invitee reflect on the inviter. Doesn't require
real names on the site, but the inviter knows who they are inviting.

~~~
scarejunba
Lobste.rs, for instance

~~~
wincy
I want an invitation to lobste.rs now!

~~~
zie
message me your email addy.

------
combatentropy
> "we need more at the policy level,” said Napoli, who believes public funding
> could alleviate the local news crisis

Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government. Also,
artificially propping up old ways of doing business is a rickety foundation.
Newspapers as we know them occupy a narrow slice in world history. It's not
like we have always had newspapers from the beginning of time up until now.

Let's investigate natural ways to accomplish the same goal of newspapers, but
with our current technology. The internet has obliterated costs to publish.
Compare a building full of typesetters, Linotypes, and printing presses, to
WordPress and server rental. Now that doesn't address all of a newspaper's old
expenses. There is still the staff: reporters spending days and weeks
investigating a story, editors organizing and refining. But what does the
Press, invented from scratch with our current technology, look like? I think
you have to consider the different sections of an old newspaper one at a time:

1\. Product reviews. Seems that there is still plenty of that, between the
various specialized websites and bloggers and vloggers.

2\. Lifestyle. Again, we are drowning in such coverage, like on Youtube.

3\. Sports. I don't know, I don't keep up with sports. How is sports news
faring?

4\. Business news. Again I don't know and don't care. Someone else comment.

and finally, biggest of all:

5\. The main example and, to many, the raison d'etre for news: keeping
government and businesses honest, by sniffing out corruption.

Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider
speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak
himself.

~~~
lkrubner
Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in
the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to
watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it
is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved.

Nor is there any conflict of interest between receiving money from the
government and covering the government. If you believe the courts can be
independent then you can believe that newspapers can be set up as independent
entities. If you don’t believe that the courts can be independent then you are
essentially saying that you don’t believe in the existence of liberal regimes,
which takes us into a discussion regarding how much purity needs to be
achieved by an ideal before one is willing to recognize its existence — an
interesting topic but too broad to be discussed in comments on a website.

~~~
briandear
The government should not be funding media that reports on government. No
matter how independent the intent, there is an inherent conflict of interest.

I oppose using my tax dollars to fund reporting about my tax dollars. NPR, for
example would never report fairly on debates to eliminate subsidies for NPR.
Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests.
Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget
for the BBC? Never. To think otherwise is to live in a dream world.

~~~
lkrubner
We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a
hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."

It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential
services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing,
information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage
collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance,
and so much more -- all human activity.

Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by
decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best
by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we
speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized
decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the
private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other
forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have
yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that
this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form
which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer
programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms
of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve
all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results.
Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.

~~~
dantheman
Many would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the
government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good
argument for why that would be.

~~~
lkrubner
I read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don’t
have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at
some point and post them to my blog.

------
njharman
Supporting news with government money is horrible idea. Paying the fox to
guard your henhouse and all that.

Better move would be there force more government transparcy. So it doesn't
require reporters digging around to find truth. Record sessions post all
votes, actions, studies, proceeding etc. On line in easy to machine parse
format. There are plenty of people who would analyse and report on that data
for fun or out of sense of Civic duty. It happens now.

It's not perfect but a big step.

~~~
Kye
I like to think a fox who's smart enough to handle money is smart enough to
know an hour or two of pay could buy plenty of chicken without being hunted
down and turned into a scarf.

------
dwheeler
> “At the local level, news doesn’t stop when the news coverage goes away,”
> Lanane said. “Somebody has to do this work.”

And there's the problem: No, somebody does NOT have to do this work. It is
beneficial to society if someone does local journalism, agreed. But if there
is no viable economic model for it, then it will disappear. Perhaps the most
likely alternative right now, if there's going to be significant local new
coverage, is government-subsidized journalism, but that clearly will not be
doing any in-depth investigation of those in power in that government. And I
don't think that most governments are thinking about doing that anyway. I
think the most likely outcome is what is happening: local journalism will, for
the most part, completely disappear.

I also recommend Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" :
[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/) \- I think he clearly explains _why_ this is happening, not
because the newspapers didn't see it coming, but because the fundamental
economic forces have proven irresistible.

~~~
jrumbut
People can live in pretty awful situations, by that definition very few things
are necessary.

I disagree with the point made repeatedly in the comments here that government
funded media can't work. NPR, PBS, the BBC, and CBC all routinely perform
investigative reporting on the very governments that fund them. Additionally,
it would take a pretty wild set of circumstances for a federal government
official to squash reporting into a corrupt water board member in Utah. If
that happens, maybe that stone will go unturned, but if we do nothing nearly
every stone will go unturned.

I would love to live in a world where it was possible not to have the conflict
of interest that public funding creates, but it is abundantly clear that the
options before us right now are publicly funded local news and very much less
local news. I think public funding is the right answer.

Maybe we'll get lucky and a plucky Stanford dropout will figure out a way to
make local journalism profitable, but I'm not interested in waiting for that.

------
mudetroit
You are really dealing with a confluence of events that are affecting local
news outlets of all forms:

1\. Increased general interconnected nature of the world. People still care
about local events of course, but there is a much greater concern for the big
events of the whole world now. Your likelihood of being affected by the big
news in some far away place has increased greatly and at an accelerating pace
ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

2\. That interconnected nature has become exponentially greater as the
internet has rolled out. Before, your source to world events would still be
your local newspaper/radio/television but primarily driven through aggregators
(AP/UPI/major news TV/radio networks). Now people have the ability to get
directly to the original more local sources. The odd secondary effect of this
is that it has reduced the size of the local news sources in the first place.

3\. Increased partisanship hasn't helped. People are much more likely to
abandon a news source if they feel it is biased, true or not, ans they have
other options now.

All of these together mean that news of all varieties has been heavily
disrupted, but the long term replacement hasn't become readily apparent. I
can't think of a similar system of disruption in other industries.

~~~
criddell
Was there ever a self-sustaining model for local news? Weren't most local news
outlets mostly supported by their classified ads section?

~~~
_rpd
Yes, craigslist.org accidentally killed local news. Craig Newmark is aware of
this and is in engaged in philanthropic counter-efforts.

~~~
acct1771
How do you know/Where can I find more information about this?

------
wallflower
In case you've never encountered Clay Shirky's classic essay, "Newspapers and
Thinking the Unthinkable", it is a prescient look from 2009.

> It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry,
> because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty,
> complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has
> stopped being a problem...

> Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding
> the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of
> attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates
> benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of
> print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys
> to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that
> newspapers benefit society as a whole.

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/)

------
PakG1
Whenever I hear the latest issues with local news and various attempts to
solve it, I am reminded of Grisham's book _The Last Juror_. For whatever
reason, it dramatized the effect that local news can have on a small community
that made me really appreciate its potential as a nice public service, if for
nothing else than to keep the community talking about things together.

------
beeskneecaps
Nextdoor seems like the place where local papers can join up as news pages to
reboot their traffic.

------
jcims
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~~~
mrep
Nope, and I have ublock running. Do you have javascript disabled?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I run Firefox and NoScript and don't allow Javascript from Bloomberg. I've
never had a problem viewing their articles.

I'll guess it has more to do with the originating IP address (e.g. perhaps
lots of requests from a single IP behind a firewall) or maybe something to do
with cookies (I allow all but delete all at least once daily, so I never have
old cookies lingering around). I'm in the USA so geolocation might enter into
it as well.

------
snarfy
My wife is on nextdoor. I hear all the local news.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
That works OK for gossip. But how does it solve the problem of keeping
government honest? This was noted in the second paragraph of the article:

 _Without journalists digging through property records or attending city
council meetings, looking for official wrongdoing and revealing secret deals,
local politicians will operate unchecked—with predictable consequences._

------
drdeadringer
A few months ago Mercury News [I've heard AKA "The Murky News"] purged some
journalists, including the one that had the beat of my local city area of
Campbell; if Campbell was a rectangle, North and East and West are against San
Jose with South being against Los Gatos.

Now, at least it seams, the only coverage we get from Mercury News is the
police blotter. That's it. Nothing more. If I want anything about Campbell I
have to subscribe to Twitter, Campbell City specific website, Campbell City
specific events website, Campbell City specific paper local newspaper [I'm not
kidding], and I'll make an educated guess Facebook. I'd mention Reddit, but
that's on questionable life support because of one or two users based on
aforementioned sources sourced from myself included.

My point is... the point of the article, if at least the Hacker News title, is
correct. And I'm not even including stuff like "Patch" or "NextDoor" or other
hyper-local internet-based networks there are. Subscriptions mushroom like a
nuclear blast horror in the face of alternatives.

------
mjevans
I think I'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I live
there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but they're not
really self-sufficient; in reality they're all previously far flung places
that became tax-dodges for getting around being in the local major city.

I would actually welcome these outlying areas being merged in to the core city
and a policy of doing the transit transfer tracking at the ports/roadway edges
that connect out to other regions. That should also discourage founding new
small fiefdoms as tax-dodges.

I would also finally be able to vote on things in the big city that affect my
life, and maybe get those crazy anti-soda anti-cars/proper transit outside of
the big city politicians replaced with someone that's looking at the big
picture instead of a close-up.

~~~
dionidium
> _I think I 'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I
> live there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but
> they're not really self-sufficient_

This is a problem plaguing almost all comparative writing about cities and why
the OMB defines MSAs and CSAs for performing meaningful like-like comparisons.
(It's also for this reason that most ranked city lists are useless garbage
built on the false premise that political borders are a good way to delineate
towns for anything beyond politics.)

------
jrnichols
"You have 8 free articles remaining. Subscribe for unlimited access. " \-
Seeing this all over the web certainly doesn't help. Several of our local news
sites went the same route, which has no doubt cut into their page views.
People aren't interested in paying $5.99/week for news websites.

Another reality is that in a lot of areas... well, there's just not much to
report on to begin with. Slow news days are quite common. Our local news
station will actually call the fire and EMS stations and ask if anything is
going on. If there's nothing going on, you'll know because the Facebook feed
ends up reposting momsdaily or simplemost blog articles.

------
threatofrain
Local news died a long time ago, and in awful ways:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA).

------
jccalhoun
This is interesting but it seems like it is just a baseline. I didn't see how
the amount of local news now compares to the amount in the past?

------
brightball
IMO local radio has the most potential to augment local news services. It’s a
more natural fit.

------
aalleavitch
You should make the header start in helvetica and just imperceptibly slowly
have the letters animate to drift apart

------
isostatic
It's a symptom of the fact that people on the whole do not want to pay for
news.

It's a failure of capitalism that the positive externalities of local news are
not captured by the people who generate it (just like a failure of capitalism
that the negative externalities of so many things aren't borne by those that
generate it)

~~~
st26
Personally I feel like I would happily pay small amounts for news, but nobody
has figured out how to frictionlessly pay $0.00004 to read a news article I'm
interested in.

We're stuck right now with only two models, $15-30/mo subscriptions
subsidizing hordes of non-payers, or ads.

~~~
isostatic
Agate ([http://agate.one](http://agate.one)) seems a reasonable way, but
unless it builds a following I don't see it lasting.

------
bayesian_horse
Maybe small town America has to go?

Not saying it should. But it may be a valid question.

~~~
CompelTechnic
It has to stay. Farms, mines, and factories (usually in small towns, anyway)
aren't going to run themselves and cannot all be outsourced.

~~~
FussyZeus
These seem like problems that could be solved with applications of proper mass
transit.

~~~
AmVess
Your solution to small town newspapers dying off is to make people ride
hundreds of miles a day on buses?

~~~
ajmurmann
Where did he mention buses?

------
DanCarvajal
I think going non-profit is the best option for local news.

~~~
briandear
Most of them already are non-profit, involuntary as that may be.

~~~
ksdale
I'm assuming this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about what a
non profit setup would look like, it would basically be a subscription model,
which people have shown they don't really care to support, or businesses
"sponsoring" the newspaper by basically paying for ads that aren't a great
investment, which is also already happening. And none of it is enough to keep
these papers afloat.

