
When the Student Newspaper Is the Only Daily Paper in Town - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/us/news-desert-ann-arbor-michigan.html
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rmason
Sometimes you can have a daily newspaper and it isn't much help. The Lansing
State Journal costs me $60 a month and the stories of importance to me are
either days late or not there at all.

It was the local counter culture weekly, The City Pulse, that first broke the
story of Dr. Naser, the MSU sexual predator. The City Pulse was also the only
press that reported Sparrow Hospital had failed a federal inspection and was
in danger of losing their certification. Sparrow execs went out and
confiscated every paper they could find in a ten mile radius of the hospital
to prevent the story from spreading.

Personal note Ed Vielmetti quoted in the article is a friend who helped me
write the the open data legislation we're trying to pass here in Michigan.

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claudeganon
The Michigan Daily is more like an alt weekly than a traditional local
newspaper, it’s just that the traditional newspaper in Ann Arbor went under,
erasing a lot of this contrast.

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brohoolio
The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do
have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t
great, but we do have quality reporting. MLive has brought lots of awareness
around PFAs in the Ann Arbor water supply.

Here’s a twitter thread from Crains Detroit which talks about how the quality
of this article is kind of crappy.

[https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904...](https://twitter.com/chadlivengood/status/1185581429339643904?s=21)

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claudeganon
>The story isn’t completely accurate. While The Michigan Daily is great, we do
have excellent reporting in Ann Arbor by MLive. Some of the articles aren’t
great, but we do have quality reporting.

MLive is addressed in the article.

I lived in Ann Arbor when the old paper went under and after. MLive was and is
worse by a far margin. It’s always been of the same ilk as the low-quality,
corporate media consolidation going on across the country.

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Joakal
The lack of news are going to destroy democracy everywhere because voters 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.

Both of these 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.

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roenxi
We live in the best age that has ever existed for abundant news. Never before
have multiple perspectives of current issues been as freely available as they
are today.

Realistically the major impediment is the old news media. Although they have
done admirable work keeping everyone informed they are simply not as able to
provide the same quick response time, relevance and breadth of opinion as some
combination of twitter/specialist websites/the emerging podcast circuits.

Democracy will be fine. If anything, the media is an impediment to democracy
making it harder for polities to communicate directly. That was fine in the
past when there was no better option; but that has changed.

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Joakal
Not sure how to explain the lack of journalism being an issue but I would say
that there's abundant information, not news. It used to be that a person can
only get news from several sources, now with Internet, we find so much more
sources! The trouble is that sources are shrinking but we don't notice it due
to the abundant information or re-distributors of news. As in, global amount
of original sources are shrinking every year (aside from PRs).

So, while you're seeing more sources personally, it's actually getting harder
to get the fine details and local news all over world because information is
so cheap to distribute. My suggestions essentially offer a platform for
distribution and paid defacto journalists (politicians).

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roenxi
Maybe, but also consider that there were very few voices with a platform
speaking out. One possibility is that people were more confident of their
wrong opinions in the past and now it is obvious when people are fabricating.
I'd bet there were great journalists of the past who would simply look like
imaginative liars today because we can very easily fact check them. The world
is huge, complicated and scary. Any perception that there is a team of people
out there understanding it for us is a comforting illusion but ultimately not
much more than that.

30 years ago I would probably have struggled to compare media reporting of
what a politician said to what a transcript but today that is no trouble at
all. This newfound capability has trashed my trust in any political
journalist.

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mgoblu3
Wrote for the Daily in college from 2012-2016. Was a really cool experience,
and something that’s stuck with me a long time.

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irrational
Wait, there are still towns with daily papers? I live in a town with 100,000
people (if I include the immediately surrounding towns, there are over half a
million people within 5 miles of my house) and we haven't had a daily paper
in... I can't even remember how long.

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farrarstan
You live in a city homie

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chrisseaton
Some towns can get really large but never become cities for whatever reason.

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mkl
"over half a million people within 5 miles of my house" is more people and
more densely populated than many cities though, so it seems a little silly not
to call it one. There is only one city in my country with more people than
that, and it's not as dense.

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chrisseaton
In many countries 'city' is a formal thing, and not related to the number of
people living there. The smallest city in the UK has 1,797 people, and the
largest town has 466,266 people, for example.

