There are no places left for people to find out local news. Except on local TV news in between the happy talk, high school football games (in Texas anyway), and the weather report.
I get my local news on my city’s subreddit. It’s better than the paper or the tv news ever was. City Council members post there. Local activists post there. There are links to live feeds of events and real time discussions with opposing points of view.
Local TV news here is New York City news which isn’t local. There is a local cable news channel (News12) which does a decent job with big stories but will never go in depth like local newspapers.
I still get my local Montreal Gazette delivered 5 days a week (Tu-Sa) and the print Times delivered every day. Neither is up to what it once was, but they are the best I can do.
Somebody mentioned above declining businesses going out of the way to lose customers. Let me tell you about my experience with Scientific. I was a subscriber for over 50 years. Then there was a problem. Details not important. Called their help line. Guy with a strong Indian accent basically tells me to f**k off and I tell him I want to cancel my sub. Fine he says and I hang up. There were still issues left on the sub. They never came and no one ever tried to find out what happened or get me to resubscribe. Mark of a failing business.
I gave up on the local TV news a long, long time ago.
I remember when we moved after grad school across the country. The local news at the new spot wasn’t … news. It was all crime, fires, etc. Nothing about stuff that mattered to me. E.g., what the local government officials were up to. Things that actually affect me. A fire 20 miles away doesn’t matter to me.
Later, when I went back for a visit they started becoming that way. Including such nonsense as a reporter standing by the side of a highway to report on a bad wreck that happened there two days before. What? Why? Grrrr.
Local TV “News” is just absolute garbage.
Me, too. But that was a pretty rare event even then.
Certainly something of that magnitude is rare. But I’m talking about simple things like shoeleather-on-pavement research, checking sources, “inverted pyramid”-style composition, multiple editions daily, competent, experienced professionals in charge.
If you want a look at old time (though not all that old) day-to-day journalism, look up the TV series Lou Grant. When the series started, the paper didn’t even use computers. There’s an episode about the staff’s initial resistance when computers were brought in. [73 Emmy nominations, won 23]
I gave up on ALL TV news – local and national – 25 years ago. Never watch any of it. I get all my news from publications and from here. I do still subscribe (online) to my local newspaper, such as it is. Takes me about five minutes to go through it. But I do want to support them financially.
You’re right, of course, about the overall decline of newspapers and news. To use an example in a field I work in, “back in the day” there were about 1,200 reporters across Canada and the US who worked the “labour/labor beat.” Today, there might be a couple.
But it is also easy to give those earlier papers a gloss they don’t deserve, is all I’m cautioning. People like I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersh were necessary precisely because of the very real problems of the daily press.
Tom Paxton’s song “Daily News” from his 1964 album “Ramblin’ Boy” makes the point nicely https://youtu.be/802F7aZIWfk