Local news is good for us, we’re told daily, most recently this week in a FiveThirtyEight piece and seconded by the Reliable Sources newsletter. Local news makes representative government more accountable, scholars claim. Books and monographs extolling the virtues of local reporting on everything from public health to economic vitality abound. When local reporting goes south, researchers tell us, political polarization, civic corruption, lower voter turnout, reduced civic engagement and even authoritarianism follow. Even I have gone on the record for local news!
So, why is local news collapsing, a trend spotted over the past two years by everybody from the New York Times to the Brookings Institution to the Harvard Business Review? The blame is often placed on rapacious publishers like Alden Global Capital or online advertising giants like Facebook and Google. Yes, […]
The Progressive Populist is my favorite.
I think part of the problem for local papers is cost. They’ve lost advertising, especially Want Ads that used to be a big income for papers. Everybody does these things on line. The cost of subscriptions, to get the paper delivered to the home is also out-of-sight. When I lived in Tucson AZ, the price of the Arizona Daily Star went up each year. I was paying $800-900 a year for a subscription! How many hard-working folks have that kind of cash? I also think Social Media and the internet play a major part in this disappearance. Wherever I go people are GLUED to their phone. There are many cartoons on this topic. The causes are multiple and tragic.