A quote from the NYT opinion pages:
Most of what I want to ask is encapsulated in this quote. Obviously, these local races, especially the House and Senate, really impact national politics, not to mention the huge obvious effect it has on local races. Whaddya all think?
(Complete aside: Gail Collins later mentions Doom apparently as a contemporary video game reference. I laughed.)
It concerns me, too. It’s already hard to get good coverage of local issues, and I live in a major metropolitan area.
If there is a market for local news, someone will provide local news for a fee.
Newspapers aren’t whaling, they’re milk men. The product is not obsolete, merely the delivery system. People still buy milk, but they get it at the store which is much more convenient and cost-effective.
I’m sure milk men really thought the world was going to end. “You’ll miss us; you’ll be sorry.” Twas ever thus with the B ark.
My concern is twofold:
[ul]
[li]The “professionalism” of the reporter.[/li][li]Their ability to actually get investigate, write the story, and get it out to readers.[/li][/ul]
It’s all about ratings and money these days.
Any thoughts on when that might start happening? Newspapers have been struggling for more than a decade and AOL’s SEO-oriented Patch thing isn’t exactly filling the gap - not that Patch is doing very well financially either.
It has never stopped happening, but if you’re only looking for your news online, you won’t see as much of it. In my area, beside still having a fairly okay regional daily, every town has its own local weekly. Most of them also have websites or are available as .pdf files. Mostly, though, you have to go to the newsstand or the local coffee shop and actually pick up an ink-on-paper copy. It’ll cost you somewhere between free to about a buck a copy.
They cover everything from local zoning board hearings to the high school football scores to local political campaigns to the ham and bean supper at the Congregational Church. A lot of cities and towns are streaming their public government meetings online, either live or on demand. . .
If you are really interested in local news, you can get it. But since most of it is NOT controlled by large “media groups” it’s not necessarily the first thing that pops up on your home page every morning.
There’s never been a market for local news. Most outlets rely on giving away their product for free or near free, and make money by selling advertising. With ad money drying up, local reporting has as well.
I suspect local news going forward will be done by hobbyists (our town paper is basically done by volunteers), non-profits (NPR does most of the state level reporting here) and “single issue” bloggers who are interested in one particular aspect of local politics that generates a lot of interest.
If so, how do you think that’ll affect life in communities? Will local governments be able to get away with more shenanigans short of outright murder because no one will know about them?
I could also ask whether it’ll make it easier for crazy people to keep on getting reelected for state government (but they already do, and have done so for years) and whether it’ll make it easier for states to get away with stuff that has national impact, like the effort to tie electoral votes to gerrymandered districts (although when it DOES have that kind of national impact, that alone bumps it up to national news).
Yes, I’m well aware. The problem is that fewer and fewer people get their news this way, and local papers are having the same problems with ad revenue that larger papers are having.
We already have a lack of local “public squares” - and thus a vacuum in civic discourse - unless you are on the far left or far right (and in a lot of places there ain’t no far left left). I’m afraid the trend is toward articulate public opinion becoming a rarefied metropolitan taste, like jazz or fine deli meats.
In reality, fewer and fewer care, I think.
The ones who do actually go out and vote in local elections DO get their news that way. But that’s always been a dismally low number. Around here sometimes we’re getting 15% to 20% voter turnout for local elections.
From what I understand, the smallest most locally targeted newspapers are holding their own pretty well. They survived magazines. The survived huge metropolitan/regional dailies. They survived radio. They survived television. They’ll survive internet. Because they continue to cover “hyperlocal” news and events that the larger media have always ignored.
Things like aol’s Patch haven’t caught on because too many people are STILL getting their local news from small print sources available at the corner store. Small local advertisers–the handyman, the corner garage, the breakfast/lunch place, the hairdresser–are still buying ads in the little free weeklies.
And from local government, comes regional and state government and upward.
Local politicians are NOT getting away with crap because there are still local reporters sitting in meeting rooms in town halls taking notes and publishing what goes on. Or better yet, people can WATCH the local meeting on their laptops and not even have the potential editorial filter of a reporter in between.
Local voters and people are involved in what goes on in their communities will always be able to have access to local news.
But again, I repeat, they have to seek it out.
The local weekly does cover all that you’ve said. What it doesn’t do, however, is any investigative reporting. Or any reporting that reflects negatively on the community at all, actually.
You obviously don’t live in my town. . .
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been an excellent source of local news. They’ve done some damn good reporting.
I’ve worked at both weeklies and small dailies and there seems to be a wide range of reporting styles in both types. The small (20,000 circulation) daily where I worked was hyper aggressive, to the point of having nearly all the officials in the good ol’ boy county mad at us for turning over their rocks. The weekly where I started my career also had an ambitious reporter who made sure local readers knew what the town council was up to. But some neighboring publications were far more content to get along with the local powers and report on the Elks Club elections.
There is definitely a niche for good local reporting and I don’t know how it will be filled in the future. It’s hard to make money at it in today’s economic climate.
I was told, by someone who’d know, that the print edition makes a profit, but the owner of the Cleveland Plain Dealer are considering dropping it down to 3 days a week!
Daggnabbit.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for just over twenty years. In that time, our flagship daily, the Chronicle, has gone from being a mostly-okay paper to a tawdry website I can scarcely bear to visit. For content, it’s mostly become an aggregator of AP news feeds. Many of the links on its home page are actually blogs of staff columnists. Meanwhile, if I visit the home page, I get lots of spinning links (look at me, look at me), one of which invariably features a soft porn picture of some babe in a bikini. Open an article and odds are good I’ll get an audio commercial that won’t shut up unless I close the page. To be fair, there’s some local reporting, which is one reason I followed the paper until recently, but the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish news from blogs undercut this to a large degree. And, well, there’s all that other noise.
Is it my fault I no longer look at the Chronicle? I think not.
From my experience, local news was always puff pieces and filler. “Cops Always Wear Seatbelts” and “Local Fire Department Hosts Community Soup Kitchen” were all that was reported locally. If you screwed with the powers that be: 1) Nobody read it anyways, and 2) You pissed off someone important so that on the rare day there was a story, nobody would talk to you.
Yeah, ever since that bastard Hearst started publishing it’s all been downhill. Yellow journalism will be the death-knell of the Republic, mark my words!
It’s definitely possible to do “hard” journalism at the local level, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy, partly for the reasons you mention and partly because of the decreasing editorial resources available to many (most? nearly all?) local media.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind a lot of people like reading inoffensive stories about dogs saving Christmas, children from the nearby primary school donating their pocket money to Somali famine victims and how the local cricket team did in the one-day test match against Waikikamukau on the weekend.