
Cost of government rises when local newspaper closes, study finds - santix
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jun/10/cost-of-government-rises-when-local-newspaper-closes-study-finds
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mirimir
OK, so they found that "the spread or yield of newly issued local municipal
bonds increased" after local papers closed. But from the title, I was
expecting some actual data on local government spending. But no, it's all
based on borrowing costs. The stuff about local papers having acted as
watchdog agents is just interpretation.

Here's the abstract of the study cited in the article:

> Local newspapers hold their governments accountable. We examine the effect
> of local newspaper closures on public finance for local governments.
> Following a newspaper closure, we find municipal borrowing costs increase by
> 5 to 11 basis points in the long run. Identification tests illustrate that
> these results are not being driven by deteriorating local economic
> conditions. The loss of monitoring that results from newspaper closures is
> associated with increased government inefficiencies, including higher
> likelihoods of costly advance refundings and negotiated issues, and higher
> government wages, employees, and tax revenues.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah. I'd take a _lot_ of convincing that they hadn't just failed to specify
adequate identification tests, since local newspaper closures and raised
municipal borrowing costs are both clearly and obviously linked to local
economic conditions, and the potential linkage between municipal bond rates
and local newspaper scrutiny far more questionable.

~~~
Eridrus
The article links to the paper, where this is the number one concern they
address. They seem to have a bunch of different ways of slicing the data to
prove their effect, e.g. pairing demographically similar districts, looking at
newspaper shutdowns likely induced by Craigslist, looking at number of
newspapers in a district, looking at distance of political center to economic
center. I don't know if this is a complete list of things that economists
would look at, so I don't know if they're cherry-picking good ways to slice
the data, but they have 47 pages of trying to convince you it's right if you
want to dig that deep :)

There could obviously be other explanations, e.g. markets thinking that less
information rich environments are just riskier because they won't know what's
going on, but they seem to have been fairly thorough in establishing the link
between newspapers closing and bond rates increasing.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, they do lots of checking. But still, I don't see anything clear beyond
the association of newspaper shutdowns and increasing bond rates. Nothing
about mechanism except speculative argument. This is very much like
epidemiology. And the literature is loaded with retrospective studies that
found correlations which turned out to reflect selection bias and/or
confounding. You really need prospective studies with carefully matched
controls.

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xellisx
I worked for a media company that had their hands in print, radio and TV. The
community based news papers had way higher profit margins than the large news
papers.

~~~
grandmczeb
Maybe I’m confused, but what’s the connection between the profit margin of
newspapers and the linked article?

~~~
TangoTrotFox
There's a phenomenal article that hits on this point: The Bad News About the
News [1] It's by Robert Kaiser, a 50 year veteran editor and reporter of the
Washington Post that decided to retire shortly following Bezos' purchase of
the company. I hate giving cliff notes of it since it's such a well written
piece that should really be consumed as a whole, so don't take this post as
cliff notes - but as some related asides.

One important point is that in the past the media had an effective monopoly on
information and that basically gave them a never ending faucet of money. The
internet has changed all of this. Newspapers, or the media in general today,
operate on thin to nonexistent margins. When times are good it's much easier
to focus on things like journalistic integrity and quality. In the golden era
of the media, monopolized as it was, could enjoy the luxury of having
relatively little concern about how their readers would, for instance, react
to their reporting. There was no need to pander to fashionable views or
condemn unfashionable views. They could write as they saw with their guiding
beacon being little more than the story itself.

There's a fine quote in the article from another individual, _" By undermining
the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public,
[the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an
effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that
an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its
institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger
that confronts us."_

Now the media is driven to compete against social media, and other media
outlets who have 0 concern for anything other than feeding their own buzz. And
social media, contrary to promises of uniting society and people, has instead
fragmented people into ever more radically divided groups. And this is now
reflected in the media as people have hovered to sources that primarily just
confirm their own biases and tell them what they want to hear.

One thing I will say as a counter to this all is that, peculiarly enough, even
establishments that are supposed to be above monetary concerns have gone
downhill. For instance the BBC was at one time the pinnacle of impartial
reporting, yet they now are falling into the same trappings of partisanship,
bias, and sensationalism that plagues the rest of the media in spite of the
fact that (to my knowledge) they have 0 financial mandates. As I check the
front page of that site this very moment (with a cleared cache) two of the top
5 displayed headlines are: "A world outraged over crispy chicken" and "How a
YouTube beef shook the vegan world.". ...

[1] -
[http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...](http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-
news.html)

~~~
isostatic
BBC has massive financial issues. In 2005 the license fee was £183.46 (in
today's money). It's now £147. That's a 20% cut in revenue in the last 13
years. In addition to that, funding for World Service and Monitoring has been
moved to the license fee too.

If you're accessing from abroad you're the product -- the website is selling
space to advertise to you.

This is the front page I see in the UK:
[https://i.imgur.com/EAADNgI.png](https://i.imgur.com/EAADNgI.png)

Top headline is Korea/US Then next is Migrants, G7, Grenfell, and a trooping
the colour change The the sidebar is Entertainment, Crime, Sport,
Entertainment, Entertainment, Crime, Technology

Internationally things like outbrain infect the BBC site, but we don't get
that in the UK where we pay for it

------
classicsnoot
I am ready to join any venture in creating local news. I am a capable writer
with above average capability and means for generating local content. I have
applied to every local paper in my area and have never once received a
call/email back. I won't stop trying, but if anyone here is attempting a
project even remotely pointed in the direction of local,online-or-paper news,
i'd appreciate your consideration. I'm happy to start at minimum wage. I just
want to write news in my spare time.

~~~
Eridrus
You will probably get further by writing a story and then sending that story
to local papers, rather than sending applications.

If you're more interested in distribution than payment, Google is trying to
build a tool for the general public to write news stories, get them published
and indexed and surfaced to people:
[https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share](https://posts.google.com/bulletin/share)

~~~
classicsnoot
Cool concept. If it comes to my city, i am totally doing it.

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verelo
Probably true, but just an opportunity for someone to produce something local
and not paper based. Most products are designed for mass markets, it'd be
great to see something work for a large group of smaller community in the way
newspapers did in the past. Also i wonder if this is in part due to the fact
that online news is more easily manipulated and therefore corruption is easier
to get away with.

~~~
graeme
The article specifically addressed your suggestion. It said people had been
suggesting that ever since community papers declined, but there's been no
replacement.

It's still good to look for a replacement, but I think you may be being a bit
blasé about it.

~~~
verelo
I never said it would be easy, and i certainly don’t have a solution. Having
worked very closely with old school media companies, being acquired by one,
and trying to contribute to the issues...yeah, maybe I’m just exhausted by the
problem, but i stand by staying it’s a big opportunity when someone finally
gets it right.

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sbhn
I kind of read the headline as, ‘pay the guardian a subscription fee or we’ll
aggravate, and amplify, stories that make society feel more scared and under
attack from forces that can only be resolved with less freedoms and more tax
payer spending’.

Perhaps the guardian should lobby to make non payment of ‘subscription’ a
criminal offence and benefit from the same protections over competition that
are awarded the bbc news.

~~~
n4r9
That makes no sense. The Guardian is not a local newspaper, it wouldn't
benefit from higher taxes, and you don't need a subscription to read the BBC
news.

~~~
sbhn
I try to put as much information into a small amount text so it’s quick for
you to read. I don’t need to write a 20 page essay to convince you. But I’ll
give you a few points. The guardian is just another lobby with its own hopes
and fears, but trying to convert all its readers to a subscription model, and
it will use any click bait title and print any fud it can to convince you of
the virtues of the subscription model. The bbc license fee, is illegal in
England not to pay. The terms and conditions on license fee renewal cover all
forms of media distribution and ways you might consume bbc content. And it’s
illegal to reprint those terms and conditions in any other media format
available so I can’t copy and paste it here for you. 50 percent of the
criminals that pass through a British councils court houses, are there for non
payment of bbc license fee. I get this info from my local paper public notices
section. The bbc license fee creates a unlevel playing field for all other
media organisations which who have media business models similar to the many
media types the bbc produces. Bbc gets its money for free, many people,
especially poor, receive criminal convictions for not paying it, it creates an
anti competitive environment for competing media organisations, it’s lawyers
are the best. At least local news outlets can print all the court cases it
wins, if it’s still legal to. I heard that recently many more criminal
convictions, let alone suspect investigations, are now subject to gag orders.
This is England

~~~
orcdork
Ok so...

There's no "BBC fee". Theres a TV Licence fee.

You don't need to pay it if you don't own a tv. Or you own a tv hooked up to a
playstation. There's also many other (legal) reasons to not pay for it.

There's no such thing as a "british council court house". There's magistrates
court, where non-payment of the license fee might end up at.

"50 percent of the criminals that pass through a British councils court
houses, are there for non payment of bbc license fee" is a ridiculous
statement. It's closer to 1 in 10, a fact you could have discovered by a
simple google search. You can find a related article here:
[https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-
one...](https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-
court-cases/)

A criminal conviction for non payment of the tv license fee will not show up
in most checks, and you don't have to disclose it.

Every single thing you typed above is either completely incorrect, or
specifically misleading.

~~~
sbhn
So 10 percent of criminal convictions are bbc license fee related, and many
don’t show up in searches or make it far enough to be statutorily documented.
I’m really sorry I wrote the British court house thing, you see, I don’t need
to speak the queens english, or write within the constraints of proper
journalist standards to convey an idea in a small text field on a public
forum. Unless of course the law has changed, and the system needs justify its
existence with more examples victimless petty crime. Did you understand my
concept of what the bbc license fee protects.

The naming of the license as ‘TV license’ is extremely, deliberately and
specifically misleading.

~~~
n4r9
You don't need to speak good English to convince people on this forum, but you
do need to be able to back up your ideas with evidence. I do have sympathy
with arguments against the BBC license fee and subscription models, but the
fact that you pull exaggerated figures from the top of your head to support
your arguments does very little for you.

~~~
sbhn
You just broke the law of my second disagreer. It’s ‘TV license’, not ‘BBC
license’, seems you're no better than me or perhaps been a little misinformed
by its naming, just like just about everybody, except those who read and
understood it’s terms and conditions.

I call the tv licence, the communications license, but in order to maintain a
little obfuscation if it’s real purpose to the general public, you could name
it the ‘BCC License’ - British Compulsory Communications License. Where You
would have no right to communicate unless you ticked the box, right before
payment, that shows you understood the t&cs.

~~~
n4r9
You can use almost all media and communications services _without_ paying the
license fee, including browsing the internet (even the BBC news website!),
watching catch-up TV (except BBC iPlayer) and using a TV to play computer
games, watch DVDs or listen to digital radio.

You _only_ need to pay the license fee if you watch live television or, more
recently, BBC iPlayer. I know this because I went for many years without
paying the fee, legally and guilt-free.

~~~
sbhn
I’m sorry but there is no get out clause in today’s modern society when it
comes to paying the tv license fee, unless your over 65 or registered
unemployed. The magistrate is going to need full access to your private
communications to find any evidence of you flouting the tv licensing laws so
they can decide if you are guilty or not. Sending someone around to your house
at night to look through your window and see what that strange flashing glow
is, is just too old fashioned.

~~~
n4r9
You can get out of paying the license fee by not watching live television or
BBC iPlayer. I know a lot of people that do this without any problems.

