
Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions - watchdogtimer
https://pen.org/local-news/
======
Lendal
I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and
zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports,
entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that's it. In other
words, only the stuff that makes them money.

I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper,
and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much
for so little return on investment.

The week before an election there is no information at all on the people
running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that.

What's the word for government by random chance?

~~~
shantly
There's a _lot_ of local corruption. Before, keeping it hush-hush meant
capturing the local paper(s). Now? Increasingly you don't even need to do
that. As long as the state AG or whoever doesn't take an interest (and some of
them seem to intentionally avoid doing so) you're fine.

Talking counties, schools, and towns outside even mid-sized cities, here.

I am worried this, and other developments, will mean the gradual end of the US
as a relatively low-corruption state.

~~~
stakhanov
Can you think of any examples from the recent past of small local newspapers
doing investigative journalism of that kind? I certainly can't. Low
circulation means low advertising revenue, which means low budget for
journalism, which means low quality journalism. Any local newspapers that I
know of basically just print what comes out of the PR mill of local companies
and local government.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
In MA we have the Turtleboy blog which is basically the only way to get news
that doesn't bend over backwards to stay on the "correct" (where correct is
defined on Beacon Hill) side of issues involving government. He has a right
bias on certain social issues but it's easy enough to tune out and he does a
good job delineating facts and his opinions.

~~~
stakhanov
The question was about investigative journalism, which is the kind of
journalism where you actually expend resources to dig out facts that the
public needs to know and otherwise wouldn't know about. What you describe
sounds more like putting a "spin" on facts that are already in the media
that's off-the-map. In this context off-the-map may mean a genius operating at
a level far above us all. Or it may just mean crazy. The former is a
possibility, but the latter is always more likely. And those are a dime a
dozen, not a rare journalistic treasure.

~~~
dublinben
This outlet has broken stories about state police corruption that have later
been picked up by more mainstream publications. It is definitely an outlet
that occasionally 'digs out facts that the public needs to know' that are not
being otherwise revealed.

[https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso-
adm...](https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso-admitted-
drug-dealer-perjurer-and-tax-evader-friends-with-former-msp-colonel-marion-
mcgovern-dated-lt-colonel-prior-to-being-hired/)

[https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early-
agre...](https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early-agrees-to-
pay-5000-to-state-trooper-who-he-ordered-to-cover-up-junkie-slugpump-alli-
bibauds-felatio-offering-arrest-report/)

------
chrisco255
I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain
separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate
from the state.

Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to
have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.

The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for
WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local
papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I
think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue
problem.

I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's
world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open
content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech
industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's
time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the
platform.

Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem.
Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should
be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to
rebuild their industry.

~~~
dr_dshiv
I disagree. The church is not comparable to the media. We need innovative ways
to equitably pay for our economy of attention. Ideally a way that would create
a market incentive for producing local news that people read. I think the
revenue sharing tax on Google/Facebook is pretty fair and clear.

~~~
chrisco255
I disagree. North Korea has newspapers. North Korea has media. Are its
citizens well-informed? Of course not. The media is literally owned by the
government. And in that case, you get pure propaganda. The reason for
separation of church and state is that religion and politics are both powerful
forces that influence people. If one entity controls both, it inevitably
causes a loss of liberty. The press has the power to shape narratives and
influence massive amounts of people based on how they frame a story. That is
powerful, and it needs to be treated as a power that should remain separate
from the government. There should always be competing narratives in a free
country. Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity.

~~~
dr_dshiv
I totally agree! And I believe that markets can be created through
governmental platforms. Just as governments might have created cash (which
could have been private) and physical market places (which can also be
private), I believe the government can support a platform for a diverse market
of news media. Without a free market, monopolistic forces dominate. The market
for news is not so free, if the attention platforms are owned by private
individuals that don't share profits with the content driving their eyeballs.
We don't disagree. I just believe that government involvement and free markets
aren't opposites but mutual enablers.

------
mixmastamyk
I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on “murder of
the day” and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four.

We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are
relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.

~~~
RickJWagner
What's 'next door'?

~~~
ultrarunner
A place for Concerned Citizens to alert the neighborhood about petty HOA
violations and kids playing outdoors. Although I hear they're about to
introduce a feature in which the local police department will be able to
deliver their PR releases directly to your news feed. Also a good place to
report stray cats as lost pets.

It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will
have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a
month is probably not doing anyone any favors.

~~~
seminatl
The ability of local agencies to just post to your feed has been a feature of
Nextdoor for years. They can also close their posts to discussion, which is
pretty irritating.

~~~
ultrarunner
Looks like the feature was just rolled out. It was to reset my opt-out
settings for nextdoor emails so that I can now receive "Emergency Alerts" with
the first such instance being a road 45 minutes away being closed because it
rained.

It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next
Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is
this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e.
could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web
forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?

~~~
seminatl
Nextdoor is bad because your neighbors are bad people, and it only takes a few
to wreck it. Somewhere on your block lives a life-long racist, a chemtrail
crackpot, and an insufferable busybody. Normally these people hide but for
some reason they think Nextdoor is their safe space.

------
foob4r
I'll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid
tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like.

I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.

~~~
uncletaco
Honestly a lot of the work of local newspapers are picked up by our local
television stations.

Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in
our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police
and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local
station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called
their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who
was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so
he took off all his clothes and laid down.

I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news
station helped us get the news to them quicker.

The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news
has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level
officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.

~~~
lmkg
> The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes
> and laid down.

There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia
will take off their clothes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undressing)

~~~
uncletaco
Wow.

------
UglyToad
In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for
pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is
nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies.

While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.

I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1].

Relevant to the article:

"And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to
explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug
out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street
publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling.
They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three
times as much space as he or she was in 1985."

He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't
have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court
reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and
understanding of the justice system.

[0]: [https://www.flatearthnews.net/](https://www.flatearthnews.net/) [1]:
[https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-
earth...](https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/)

------
heavyset_go
I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has
a refreshing take on news that doesn't depend on fearmongering or thinly-
veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.

~~~
crtccnt
Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased
and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair,
I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be
an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the
start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying
member.

~~~
cobbzilla
McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business
Report were decent news programs, don’t remember a lot of bias, but I haven’t
watched in a long while though.

~~~
StuffedParrot
There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of
which stories to cover is inherently political. I don’t terribly mind PBS but
the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn’t even make sense
to me.

~~~
jasonjayr
Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the
content is even tempered and well reasoned.

If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find
content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion,
screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?

~~~
StuffedParrot
I would call PBS’s bias center to center-left, along with the nytimes,
huffpost, the guardian, most late night shows, and most slate writers. It
sounds like you are describing the wall street journal, bloomberg, the
economist, the washington post. It’s pretty difficult to go further right
without bumping into fox news, breitbart, the drudge report, the blaze, rush
limbaugh, etc.

For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones,
counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are
surely falling off the spectrum.

Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can’t help with specific
examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and
communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far
right wing shit (monarchism?, “racial realists”, “trumpists”).

~~~
boring_twenties
You must be reading a different Bloomberg than I am.

~~~
StuffedParrot
What kind of economic critique do you have about Bloomberg?

~~~
boring_twenties
I don't have any critique about Bloomberg, just your characterization of it as
right wing.

I can't remember ever seeing a "right-wing" viewpoint in Bloomberg's opinion
pages. As far as I can tell the only op-eds they publish are pro-gun control,
anti-income inequality or just generally anti-Trump.

------
Joakal
Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring
back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but are
increasingly getting less and less alternative sources and eventually none.
Some new age media possibilities I had been thinking of:

1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking
world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected
with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power. They will keep
the elected politicians in check and can do local journalism. Otherwise those
politicians who may get up to 50% of the vote, will stop working for those
potential voters by going back to their lives.

2) Citizen news. Government allows citizens to post anything on their personal
blogs/columns/newspapers. It has the side effect of being historical because,
the government will forever host it vs losing information when the
company/individual no longer hosts it for whatever reason. Registration is
simply getting username/password from local government with ID.

Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!

Both of the points require that the government recognise that some information
is better than nothing and an essential need if there is have democracy. To do
otherwise, is to let evil continue under the veil (Corruption, abuse, etc).
Those who would be against 'information needs to be free and widely
available', you guessed it, evil.

~~~
cartoonworld
>1) Double politicians (or leftover politicians). Most of English speaking
world has left over votes with no representative, have politicians elected
with leftover votes. These are paid positions with no power.

I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about
constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by
leftover votes?

~~~
Joakal
Essentially, second place in same constituencies.

The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place
candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.

~~~
cartoonworld
Ok thanks, I know that generally as Ranked Preference Voting and the more
specific proposal of IRV Instant Runoff Voting

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-
runoff_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting)

Do you have any more info about this type of voting? I would always be
interested in reading more analysis of this topic.

~~~
Joakal
There's no second place winner for IRV, FPTP, etc. That's where my proposal
comes in as a stop gap measure to cover lack of representation while
increasing journalism potential.

For better proportional representation, here's this topic:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation)

------
subpixel
Craigslist, who ate local newspapers’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose
founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds
in every Craigslist market.

A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local
and regional reporting.

------
_delirium
The end of the article mentions "newer, digitally focused outlets" as one
possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated
that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that's one of the possible futures
of local news.

Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed
here, although they vary in activity:
[https://inn.org/members/](https://inn.org/members/)

~~~
Mathnerd314
In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital
outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print
versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now?

It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's
the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of
CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.

------
davidw
This article is very relevant: [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-
when-local-news...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-
newspaper-close-city-bond-finances-suffer/561422/)

It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news
outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The
TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one,
get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the
segment.

------
walkingolof
Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for
allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on
all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It's beyond me why not
regulators have stepped in...

------
Merrill
Local news is more available now than previously.

There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news
websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local
politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to
publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee
minutes, etc.

More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a
subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that
primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of
little interest.

~~~
VLM
However, those new channels are not the incumbent, over employed, over
advertised, legacy organizations who feel they have a right to a perpetually
successful business model and that having a 90s era website in 2020 or saying
"learn to code" is some kind of hate crime. Just hand over your money forever
and they'll stop complaining.

------
kraig911
I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty
good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and
publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But
when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast
and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses.

Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that
stuff had to stop.

~~~
ShorsHammer
somewhat involved somehow with the newsmedia for a good portion of my life,
regional papers in my country are doing absolutely fine, metro paper are on
the verge of seppuku chaising eyeballs

------
dave_aiello
I could make the argument that this article makes it clear that Apple's move
in 2003 to set a price of $0.99 per track for recorded music was an act of
cultural salvation, [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-
the-...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-
Music-Store/).

~~~
Lapsa
Please do.

------
musicale
I guess I'm lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city
government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc..

Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local
businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.

------
Nasrudith
Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good
antidote to the awareness issues.

Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale
and there was a derth of information to process.

Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization
closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every
locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult.

Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.

------
t34543
Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They’re a
terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must
follow.

------
dang
We changed the URL from [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-
disappear-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/local-news-disappear-
pen-america.html), which points to this.

------
stakhanov
In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been
pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the
geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?

~~~
CharlesColeman
Because some news has limited geographical relevance. Are you going to
regularly read about things like city council meetings about a controversial
local development projects some small city in the NYT?

Hell no.

------
SllX
The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often
subsidized or paid for by people who are _paying_ to get a message in front of
you (advertisers).

All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is
accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites,
blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.

Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people _can_ adjust their
positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.

So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find
it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very
compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty
boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or
that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack,
or whatever.

~~~
abathur
This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value.

The market will only find a solution if it is _profitable_ to find one.

I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are
concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.

~~~
SllX
The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for
exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and
services.

The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There
actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be
competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find
replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty
damn creative.

~~~
abathur
This just begs the question.

People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the
reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree
that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.

~~~
SllX
Where exactly are you drawing the distinction between the social and market
value?

The local news is just another type of information, and if you don’t spend
your money on it, you’re at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the
people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning
themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people
most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost
because of how people weren’t spending their time and/or money, and due to the
nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very
vocal and visible manner.

~~~
abathur
Sorry for the slow response. Came down with a cold and haven't felt very
lucid.

I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value
created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of
producing + consuming it.

It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl-
clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or
whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the
consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production
side. For example:

The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't
_necessarily_ linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The
lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.

Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal
coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a
shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal
to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in
its place?

------
technobabble
I searched the thread and couldn’t find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I
thought it was good while it lasted.

What are the chances of reviving something like it?

------
acd
Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy
builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.

------
Yuval_Halevi
The whole news model is becoming strange. At the beginning journalism shifted
from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high
competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site
owners

------
scarejunba
Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your
time and money. It is no surprise you don't give them your time or your money.
They have problem and solution reversed.

------
IIAOPSW
"Lack of people buying newspapers bad" reports newspaper.

I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to
go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.

If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions
and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden
changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming
entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting
time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more
centralized.

