
Better Local Journalism, by Local Reporters, Is the Goal of a New Database - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/business/media/shoeleather-local-reporting.html
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mncharity
> communities across the country have complained that journalists who come
> into their towns and cities too often produce shallow or misrepresentative
> reporting. <p> Local journalists who know their hometowns could report the
> same stories more accurately and with more depth, they say.

"[C]ommunities have complained that journalists [...] produce shallow or
misrepresentative reporting." That should sound familiar here. Communities
which include science, and tech, and aerospace, and medicine, and economics,
and military, and ... so many other communities.

Journalists embedded in those communities often get things right. Journalists
which aren't, often don't.

The current issue of CJR
[https://www.cjr.org/tag/fall-2018](https://www.cjr.org/tag/fall-2018) is
subtitled "The stories left untold in America's newsrooms". It's focused on
race, with some class and ethnicity, but one article describes the corps
remaining oblivious overseas, even in a country (Korea) that still has foreign
desks.

Even the best of mainstream journalism's coverage of science and engineering
feels like overseas coverage after foreign desks have closed. Missing sanity
check, ground truth, nuance, insight, the point, and the real story.

So if the [https://shoeleather.us/](https://shoeleather.us/) approach succeeds
in disrupting newsroom coverage of small geographic communities, the potential
impact seems much broader.

