I live in a fairly large Florida city. There is no investigative reporting and zero coverage of local politics anymore. The local news covers sports, entertainment, weather, syndicated national stories and that's it. In other words, only the stuff that makes them money.
I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment.
The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that.
What's the word for government by random chance?
corodra 1608 days ago [-]
Fellow Floridian, same here.
Thing is, I've been curious about this. You mentioned, "I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper". So, I know this is the sentiment most people have. But, isn't that the problem? BTW, I'm not picking on you, this is more about the generality of the situation.
A lot of people think local politics and other issues are worthless. But then are annoyed when they don't know anything about what's going on, why no one is "doing anything about it", "how did they get away with that" or just generally complain that their local whatever is a POS. For politics that is more likely to affect you faster than state, fed or international level, why do we think it's worthless? I'm not going to pretend like I'm magically different. Our mayor is about as important to me as a dog turd in my neighbor's backyard is to me. I've been wondering how I even came to the idea myself about a month ago when local politics does heavily affect me, whether I like it or not.
Makes me wonder about some demographics. Like, what is the percentage of people that do "care" and actively read about their local area? And by how much (1hr, 3hrs, 5hrs a week, etc)? Then, what's their city like? Do they have relatively less corruption than other cities? Are their schools better? Parks? Roads? Rec centers? Gov employee well being any better? Crime rates? How many people are needed to care about "local politics", on average, to make a city "good"? 10%? 20%? 50%?
Then, what has to happen to make enough people give a shit?
Questions beyond this post and HN... but yea... why the hell do we think local politics and news is worthless when it's the issues that will affect us more and faster than anything else?
shantly 1608 days ago [-]
There's a lot of local corruption. Before, keeping it hush-hush meant capturing the local paper(s). Now? Increasingly you don't even need to do that. As long as the state AG or whoever doesn't take an interest (and some of them seem to intentionally avoid doing so) you're fine.
Talking counties, schools, and towns outside even mid-sized cities, here.
I am worried this, and other developments, will mean the gradual end of the US as a relatively low-corruption state.
stakhanov 1608 days ago [-]
Can you think of any examples from the recent past of small local newspapers doing investigative journalism of that kind? I certainly can't. Low circulation means low advertising revenue, which means low budget for journalism, which means low quality journalism. Any local newspapers that I know of basically just print what comes out of the PR mill of local companies and local government.
In MA we have the Turtleboy blog which is basically the only way to get news that doesn't bend over backwards to stay on the "correct" (where correct is defined on Beacon Hill) side of issues involving government. He has a right bias on certain social issues but it's easy enough to tune out and he does a good job delineating facts and his opinions.
stakhanov 1608 days ago [-]
The question was about investigative journalism, which is the kind of journalism where you actually expend resources to dig out facts that the public needs to know and otherwise wouldn't know about. What you describe sounds more like putting a "spin" on facts that are already in the media that's off-the-map. In this context off-the-map may mean a genius operating at a level far above us all. Or it may just mean crazy. The former is a possibility, but the latter is always more likely. And those are a dime a dozen, not a rare journalistic treasure.
dublinben 1607 days ago [-]
This outlet has broken stories about state police corruption that have later been picked up by more mainstream publications. It is definitely an outlet that occasionally 'digs out facts that the public needs to know' that are not being otherwise revealed.
I worry that this is the sort of thing that has to get worse before it gets better. Only when the corruption is so bad, will an activist start a newspaper to report on local politics on their own funding. If the popular will against corruption is strong enough, they'll be able to get Patreon funding.
An example local sustainably-funded investigative journalism outfit: https://theferret.scot/
Unfortunately this relies on the "sweet spot" where the government is corrupt enough to be outrageous but not corrupt enough to shut down your paper and campaign by force.
(It also relies on accepting that if you want local political news coverage, it's not going to be flatly neutral, because neither the audience nor the writers want that. That's not the same as being factional; "local government should be good not bad" is a highly political position, but not necessarily a factional one unless a party has a policy that local government should be bad.)
Pigo 1608 days ago [-]
It never fails to amaze me how little people seem to care about local politics, the stuff that effects them the most day to day. Our local elections get an okay turn out, because we've done a good job of making people aware of how important it is. But I go to a city counsel meeting, and members seem mad that someone showed up and they have to go through the motions.
Most of them run unopposed, and I assume decide who gets what while they're at the bar or something. Their election campaign is usually a facebook page with cute kids smiling, and saying nothing at all. The city doesn't know what they're up to unless they ask for money. For a long time the federal level has been increasing in power, but maybe that's because no takes an active interest in city & state.
I've been considering running for a local seat just to be a monkey wrench.
True sortition -- a random selection, preferably from a prequalified candidate pool -- can actually be a fairly useful tool.
A vote-based system in the absence of an effective media to investigate and inform the electorate is not actually random, but is subject to sway and influence from any modestly motivated party, with no effective check from an at least putatively disinterested or nonbiased journalistic enterprise. You're not leaving selection up to chance, you're leaving it up the the most effective, least principled, least visible election manipulator.
Lendal 1607 days ago [-]
Sortition would actually be an improvement even if there was no manipulator. Right now local government seems to be a selection by most-recognizable-name. In Florida a Joe Smith will always get the nod over a Prayut Chan-o-cha if there's no local press covering the election or publishing any candidate bios.
there's also a question whether if this information was available, would it be read? i think there's an analogy to public education here: if it was driven purely by greed, it wouldn't happen. maybe there should be a government-sponsored investigative journalism, perhaps attached to the judiciary branch?
VLM 1608 days ago [-]
If everything is identity politics, would it have any impact?
If all that matters is race and gender, or whatever other "Divide and Conqueror" scheme we're undergoing at this time, you'll notice criminality didn't make the list of what matters, so ...
brandnewlow 1608 days ago [-]
They only published the investigations they did to win prestige and standing that would distract regulators from interfering with their monopolies over local advertising. Hardcore journalism has never been a moneymaker.
mrfusion 1608 days ago [-]
> What's the word for government by random chance?
Party line voting
knolax 1608 days ago [-]
stochastocracy?/s Sounds like the type of catchy buzzword to write a book around.
chrisco255 1608 days ago [-]
I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state.
Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.
The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem.
I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.
Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.
vegardx 1608 days ago [-]
News organizations struggle to survive even with government subsidies. Perhaps the problem isn't the business model, but the fact that there is no business. In an open and free country the government benefits from having a well informed population, just like it benefits from having a healthy population. Being well informed shouldn't be based on how willing you are to pay for it. At least not on a national and regional level.
It's not true that churches are able to function entirely on donations. They have all kinds of tax breaks and take government subsidies. And tipping? I bet anyone in the service industry in the US can tell you why that's a bad idea.
scribu 1607 days ago [-]
> In an open and free country the government benefits from having a well informed population
How exactly does the government benefit?
If by "well informed" you mean "the population knows the information the government wants it to know" then sure, I get that.
zkid18 1608 days ago [-]
Media is a low-margin business, that historically was always affiliated with government. I agree with you - it should be a government problem.
With various self-publishing media emerged recently it became easier to spread your unbiased opinions.
However, I don’t read American press, so not quite familiar with the state of media business in the country.
I subscribe to the economist and the ken (the great source covering VC news in SEA and India). I want to reward journalist for high-quality material. They don’t have a fremium reading and the subscription is quite high indeed.
As for Spotify-like business model, I bet Medium has something in their roadmap. Also, out of States there multiple interesting products that try to to pay-once-read-all business-model: Yandex Zen in Russia and SmartNews in Japan.
abathur 1608 days ago [-]
I am also not a fan of government-funded media.
But this sounds a lot like a rediscription of the dystopia we're already rushing towards.
The advertising model that floated newspaper journalism was circulation. Whether you read 1 story, 10 stories, or the whole paper. I don't think the genie can be put back, but online ads and going viral on the platforms are already both games measured in eyeball-seconds.
Rewriting society around eyeball-seconds is probably not a good idea.
dr_dshiv 1608 days ago [-]
I disagree. The church is not comparable to the media. We need innovative ways to equitably pay for our economy of attention. Ideally a way that would create a market incentive for producing local news that people read. I think the revenue sharing tax on Google/Facebook is pretty fair and clear.
chrisco255 1607 days ago [-]
I disagree. North Korea has newspapers. North Korea has media. Are its citizens well-informed? Of course not. The media is literally owned by the government. And in that case, you get pure propaganda. The reason for separation of church and state is that religion and politics are both powerful forces that influence people. If one entity controls both, it inevitably causes a loss of liberty. The press has the power to shape narratives and influence massive amounts of people based on how they frame a story. That is powerful, and it needs to be treated as a power that should remain separate from the government. There should always be competing narratives in a free country. Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity.
dr_dshiv 1607 days ago [-]
I totally agree! And I believe that markets can be created through governmental platforms. Just as governments might have created cash (which could have been private) and physical market places (which can also be private), I believe the government can support a platform for a diverse market of news media. Without a free market, monopolistic forces dominate. The market for news is not so free, if the attention platforms are owned by private individuals that don't share profits with the content driving their eyeballs. We don't disagree. I just believe that government involvement and free markets aren't opposites but mutual enablers.
Proven 1608 days ago [-]
“Equitably” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Equitably means no one gets gov funding - no one is favored just like in the case of organized religion.
> Ideally a way that would create a market incentive for producing local news that people read.
Government doesn’t create market incentives, it destroys and distorts them.
dr_dshiv 1607 days ago [-]
You have an interesting perspective. But governments can create, or shall I say foster, market incentives -- and not just by getting out of the way. A cap and trade program illustrates that, as does mandatory product labeling. Markets and governments have more akin to flowers and gardens than to oil and water. They need each other to function.
Or do you have another truth to share?
threatofrain 1608 days ago [-]
Should local journalism also receive special tax benefits like the church? Otherwise in the discussion of viable business models that seems to be an omission.
belorn 1608 days ago [-]
> I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state.
Complete separation of state and church is pretty rare. They often gain some form of tax benefit. Their buildings often holds central position in towns and if there property tax then they are exempted. If there are government initiatives for children, for arts, or other social benefits then the church is often a common actor in the end. Very few religious organizations that I know depend exclusively on members fees, and I live in Sweden where church being separated from the state is a common perception by those who live here.
If we apply this to local media then a government supported model would not inherently be controlled by the government. You could have government information awareness initiatives with criteria for the actor to have independent journalism. The local news agency would then bid for the job.
jeegsy 1607 days ago [-]
The idea of the separation of Church and State is a long standing and well-established tradition. We dont expect much interference in this case. Not so for if a similar thing is applied to local press vis a vis the govt. Interference is virtually guaranteed given the nature of politics. In any case, tax breaks for local media would be insufficient to solve their revenue problems.
teddyh 1608 days ago [-]
As long as there is something which can unambiguously be referred to as “the church”, the state will favor it. It’s not necessarily a question of insufficient separation, it’s more of a de-facto-monopoly situation.
choward 1608 days ago [-]
> I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world.
That's an interesting idea. I love getting paywalled by some web site because I clicked a headline, especially when it's some a local news site or some other site I'll probably never visit again. I'm not signing up to read one article that I might not even like.
I thought pay per article might be a good idea, but that would just encourage click bait. And if the article is terrible, I still have to pay.
However, with a subscription to all of the news none of this would be an issue as long as it was reasonably priced.
rapnie 1608 days ago [-]
Blendle works like this, aggregates news sites, offers subscription (10 euro/month) and deals out micropayments under the hood (moved away from pay-per-article). They operate in US, Netherlands, Germany.
> I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world.
Do Brave Attention Tokens fit this model?
mtberatwork 1608 days ago [-]
Does your average artist even generate enough revenue to support themselves off of Spotify payouts? Unless you have some high level of popularity, I'd imagine most artists pull in less than minimum wage from Spotify. I can't imagine funding the entire staff of a newsroom with this kind of model is even remotely viable, let alone at the local level.
base698 1608 days ago [-]
The average in almost any domain doesn't earn enough. Pareto is a real thing and creative output doesn't scale linearly. Some people are Linus and most are not.
True especially in the arts where the median can't get a job writing SQL queries for a Telecom.
chrisco255 1608 days ago [-]
Yes, if they can hit critical mass. I'm rooting for them.
Dirlewanger 1607 days ago [-]
Not only is a church's model incomparable to a newspaper's, they also have the very nice benefit of not being taxed...
lordgrenville 1608 days ago [-]
Blendle (https://blendle.com/getpremium) does this. I signed up a few years ago but don't use it much. With paywalls getting stricter (eg NYT, New Yorker) maybe its time has come.
mixmastamyk 1608 days ago [-]
I gave up local TV news years ago when I realized it was focused on “murder of the day” and other FUD. We even called one Channel Fear instead of Four.
We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.
cobbzilla 1608 days ago [-]
Agreed, local TV news has been heavy on fear with a sprinkling of cutesy feelgood for decades. It deserves to die.
I do find it mildly ironic that TFA is also fear-based. Will they never learn?
CallMeMarc 1608 days ago [-]
That's funny because "fear" sounds like the German word "vier" which stands for four and would make it sound like Channel Four again.
RickJWagner 1608 days ago [-]
What's 'next door'?
ultrarunner 1608 days ago [-]
A place for Concerned Citizens to alert the neighborhood about petty HOA violations and kids playing outdoors. Although I hear they're about to introduce a feature in which the local police department will be able to deliver their PR releases directly to your news feed. Also a good place to report stray cats as lost pets.
It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.
seminatl 1608 days ago [-]
The ability of local agencies to just post to your feed has been a feature of Nextdoor for years. They can also close their posts to discussion, which is pretty irritating.
ultrarunner 1607 days ago [-]
Looks like the feature was just rolled out. It was to reset my opt-out settings for nextdoor emails so that I can now receive "Emergency Alerts" with the first such instance being a road 45 minutes away being closed because it rained.
It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?
seminatl 1606 days ago [-]
Nextdoor is bad because your neighbors are bad people, and it only takes a few to wreck it. Somewhere on your block lives a life-long racist, a chemtrail crackpot, and an insufferable busybody. Normally these people hide but for some reason they think Nextdoor is their safe space.
paulie_a 1608 days ago [-]
My county has an independent Facebook page called nosy neighbor. They alert ask questions and can be asked wtf us going on. They also give news rundowns responsibly. It actually is a pretty ideal setup. No sensation but gets the word out and asks and filters info properly
parrellel 1608 days ago [-]
Locality based mailing list / social network critter.
foob4r 1608 days ago [-]
I'll probably get down voted into Oblivion, but the least we, the well paid tech workers, could do is pay some of that to support journalism we like.
I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.
uncletaco 1607 days ago [-]
Honestly a lot of the work of local newspapers are picked up by our local television stations.
Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down.
I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker.
The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.
lmkg 1607 days ago [-]
> The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down.
There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes.
I don't think you'll get downvoted for such an innocuous statement. I'd pick different sources but I agree with the sentiment.
CharlesColeman 1607 days ago [-]
Ditto. I have an NYT and WSJ online subscription, and I made a donation to a free weekly that covers hyperlocal news for my area.
I understand paywalls are annoying. But if anyone wants to do anything, they need to figure out how to get micropayments to work or build a non-techgiant service [1] that can let you collectively subscribe to most of the news organizations at once for a reasonable fee. I understand those are both hard problems.
[1] Can't be a techgiant because they've caused enough damage already, and giving them control of the subscription fees could be the coup de grâce. Honestly, the website should be a media-owned co-op or something.
UglyToad 1608 days ago [-]
In my opinion the best book on this topic which should be required reading for pretty much everyone is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0]. The book is nowhere near as sensationalist as the title implies.
While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.
I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1].
Relevant to the article:
"And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985."
He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system.
I find my local PBS member station to not only be of high quality, it also has a refreshing take on news that doesn't depend on fearmongering or thinly-veiled advertisements being floated as human interest pieces.
crtccnt 1608 days ago [-]
Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair, I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying member.
cobbzilla 1608 days ago [-]
McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business Report were decent news programs, don’t remember a lot of bias, but I haven’t watched in a long while though.
StuffedParrot 1608 days ago [-]
There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of which stories to cover is inherently political. I don’t terribly mind PBS but the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn’t even make sense to me.
jasonjayr 1608 days ago [-]
Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned.
If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
StuffedParrot 1608 days ago [-]
I would call PBS’s bias center to center-left, along with the nytimes, huffpost, the guardian, most late night shows, and most slate writers. It sounds like you are describing the wall street journal, bloomberg, the economist, the washington post. It’s pretty difficult to go further right without bumping into fox news, breitbart, the drudge report, the blaze, rush limbaugh, etc.
For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones, counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are surely falling off the spectrum.
Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can’t help with specific examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far right wing shit (monarchism?, “racial realists”, “trumpists”).
boring_twenties 1607 days ago [-]
You must be reading a different Bloomberg than I am.
StuffedParrot 1607 days ago [-]
What kind of economic critique do you have about Bloomberg?
boring_twenties 1603 days ago [-]
I don't have any critique about Bloomberg, just your characterization of it as right wing.
I can't remember ever seeing a "right-wing" viewpoint in Bloomberg's opinion pages. As far as I can tell the only op-eds they publish are pro-gun control, anti-income inequality or just generally anti-Trump.
thanatropism 1608 days ago [-]
> monarchists, racial realists, trumpists
One of those things is not like the others.
StuffedParrot 1608 days ago [-]
I honestly have no clue what you’re talking about.
_delirium 1608 days ago [-]
Depends a bit on what you mean by right-wing. The Economist is a fairly level-headed representative of center-right free-market economics, but they aren't cultural conservatives and quite secular. That makes their political positioning in the US a bit ambiguous, though they're more solidly right-of-center in the UK context where they originate. (For example: the only Labour candidate they've endorsed in 50 years is Tony Blair, and even that came with a caveat that they were endorsing him because they preferred "the ambiguous right-winger rather than the feeble one".)
On the U.S. side, intellectually oriented conservative media has really had trouble with the Trump era. The more highbrow outlets were never on board with Trump, but maintaining an anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical line on the U.S. right basically dooms you to irrelevance in the current climate, since only a smallish band of "never-Trumper" conservatives are still tuning in to that political position. There are a few of those, like The American Interest, which keep going on a small circulation.
mixmastamyk 1608 days ago [-]
Bill buckley and National review carried the flag for the intelligent right for years. Not sure how they are doing in the T era.
raxxorrax 1608 days ago [-]
There is. You can try to give a neutral perspective. It won't be perfect, but you can read a staunch difference between those who try and those who do not. And the information gain is vastly better if you read the former. It isn't even comparable, it is a whole other league. I cannot comment on PBS here.
Sure, the topics picked can very well be political, although that has degraded somewhat to topics that generate clicks. But that is nevertheless a huge problem and I believe correlated to the low trust in media overall.
Or look at elections. A press staunchly favoring a candidate wouldn't be able to hold that candidate accountable. That is another huge problem, because that is their primary raison d'être.
Some even go that far that a worse candidate is preferable in that situation if it means the press as representatives of the public reports critically. Could explain some things.
StuffedParrot 1608 days ago [-]
Neutral... between what? The financing and your reporters? That is the neutrality I am aware of.
raxxorrax 1607 days ago [-]
We could discuss what it means to give a neutral perspective, but I don't think that would get us anywhere to be honest.
The last discussion about that has been with fundamentalists that had a similar critique about neutrality.
We could also talk about how feasible it is to achieve neutrality. But that wouldn't be the point in most cases.
In secular education for example neutrality has a specific meaning. That pupils are to be empowered to make choices and that views are not imposed on them. End of story.
It isn't that hard to transfer these principles to journalism. Does journalism try to inform as best as possible so people can make better decisions? Or should they be nudged towards certain perspectives.
The former variant would be the neutral approach. Pretty simple if you think about it.
StuffedParrot 1607 days ago [-]
If PBS were trying to empower voters, they could easily report different news. You need to actually analyze their coverage to make any assertion about to what extent they empower their viewers with their news coverage. If I were to suggest stories, I would inevitably be labeled and discarded for the exact same reasons PBS refuses to cover the stories.
And btw, I agree with your definition of neutrality. I just don’t think PBS markedly improves in this respect (empowering viewers) from any other cable news station, they simply have less obnoxious production value and are therefore a more palatable, or at best equally palatable, version of the other center to center left publications I listed.
roenxi 1608 days ago [-]
There are a bunch of biases that are pretty safe to call good. For example, bias against intellectually dishonest ideas (best of social sciences). Or a bias towards peace and prosperity (pick your favourite, lots of people biased in this direction), or a bias towards mathematical correctness (eg, fivethirtyeight.com). Or a very clear mandate and a bias to fulfilling it honestly (eg, a homelessness focused charity that is relentlessly evidence driven).
There is a big gap between those sort of biases and Not-Trump-At-Any-Cost or Must-Sell-Public-Assets. Some biases are productive and have motivations which can be honestly articulated and are broadly reasonable.
StuffedParrot 1608 days ago [-]
Why is a center bias inherently better? You call it “pretty safe to call good”. That’s actually excellent framing: PBS (I should clarify, I refer specifically to the news hour) plays it safe and doesn’t report anything not on other comparable stations or news outlets, but they do it with an enormous amount of decorum.
That said, frontline occasionally covers things the news hour won’t and can be a serious investigative journalism outlet.
roenxi 1607 days ago [-]
If you read closely you'll observe that I'm not talking about the 'centre' (whatever that means, the word doesn't label a fixed set of things). I'm talking primarily about evidence based biases and secondarily biases towards being flexible and moderate.
It may be as many as 80% of the population would support evidence-based biases, in theory. There are still problems but it is a big step up from inflexible partisanship.
StuffedParrot 1607 days ago [-]
I believe I replied to the wrong comment; I agree with your assessment about biases. I meant it as a neutral term, I would ideally like the biases to align with my own.
Joakal 1608 days ago [-]
Losing the news is a threat to democracy or great news if you want to bring back rule by the minority. Why? Voters need to be well informed but 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.
Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!
Both of the points 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.
cartoonworld 1607 days ago [-]
>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.
I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?
Joakal 1607 days ago [-]
Essentially, second place in same constituencies.
The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.
cartoonworld 1606 days ago [-]
Ok thanks, I know that generally as Ranked Preference Voting and the more specific proposal of IRV Instant Runoff Voting
Do you have any more info about this type of voting? I would always be interested in reading more analysis of this topic.
Joakal 1604 days ago [-]
There's no second place winner for IRV, FPTP, etc. That's where my proposal comes in as a stop gap measure to cover lack of representation while increasing journalism potential.
Craigslist, who ate local newspapers’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and whose founder purports to care about journalism, can set up regional reporting funds in every Craigslist market.
A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.
_delirium 1608 days ago [-]
The end of the article mentions "newer, digitally focused outlets" as one possible solution, and lists three of them. They could have further elaborated that all three examples are nonprofits. Imo that's one of the possible futures of local news.
Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: https://inn.org/members/
Mathnerd314 1608 days ago [-]
In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now?
It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.
It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.
walkingolof 1608 days ago [-]
Google and Facebook have had serious implications on democracy, not only for allowing direct lies to spread like wildfire, but they also pulled the rug on all local news by outcompeting them on ad sales. It's beyond me why not regulators have stepped in...
Merrill 1608 days ago [-]
Local news is more available now than previously.
There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc.
More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.
VLM 1608 days ago [-]
However, those new channels are not the incumbent, over employed, over advertised, legacy organizations who feel they have a right to a perpetually successful business model and that having a 90s era website in 2020 or saying "learn to code" is some kind of hate crime. Just hand over your money forever and they'll stop complaining.
jeegsy 1607 days ago [-]
Thats an interesting take. It never even occurred to me. You are right, if you really want to know about the local stuff, you can. You might have to work a little bit more but most of the info is out there already.
kraig911 1608 days ago [-]
I used to work in media in the early 2000s. Some newspapers still do pretty good journalism. TV stations though are all but gutted. General managers and publishers used to be able to stay afloat purely on national advertising. But when cable tv targeted insertion and then internet that money dried up fast and local media companies then had to turn to local businesses.
Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.
ShorsHammer 1608 days ago [-]
somewhat involved somehow with the newsmedia for a good portion of my life, regional papers in my country are doing absolutely fine, metro paper are on the verge of seppuku chaising eyeballs
I guess I'm lucky enough to have multiple local newspapers that cover city government, local businesses, local events, local schools, local issues, etc..
Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.
Nasrudith 1608 days ago [-]
Personally I suspect that counterintuitively more centralization may be a good antidote to the awareness issues.
Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process.
Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult.
Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.
t34543 1607 days ago [-]
Sinclair group owns and controls the majority of local news markets. They’re a terrible org and have mandatory editorial guidelines their stations must follow.
In other areas, such as search engines, the rise of the filter bubble has been pointed out as a force of evil. Why should we lament the downfall of the geographical filter bubble in print media (and their modern online offshoots)?
CharlesColeman 1607 days ago [-]
Because some news has limited geographical relevance. Are you going to regularly read about things like city council meetings about a controversial local development projects some small city in the NYT?
Hell no.
SllX 1608 days ago [-]
The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers).
All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.
Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.
So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.
marmadukester39 1608 days ago [-]
This discounts the critical role of local news in informing citizens about the performance of and candidates for local government, as well as the investigative role. If the above is all we have in most municipalities, America will likely become a high corruption country.
SllX 1607 days ago [-]
This discounts the possibility that at lower levels of government, America might already be a high corruption country.
Let’s break this down:
1. The performance of the local government. You can already see this when you talk with your neighbors or walk or drive around the streets. Are the potholes in your area getting filled? Are the police doing a decent job? Are houses burning down left and right? Are your kids coming home from school and not getting progressively more literate and numerate? To the extent that there is room in the market for even more coverage of the local government, it really depends on how big the local bureaucracy is.
2. Candidates in local elections. Did you know it was the job of candidates running for office to get themselves and their message in front of as many people in their constituency as they can? They have a message to sell, and if they are at all effective, they’ll sell it as widely as possible. If the local papers and broadcasters aren’t doing the job, they’ll find other ways to get their message out or else just lose the election. Anybody with any interest against this candidate will also be selling messages to get in front of you, in whatever channels you’re paying attention. I don’t think we’re any less informed about our politicians than we ever were, it’s simply a matter of how interested we are in what they do for us. For example, I care very much who is repping me on the Board of Supervisors, but without children of my own, I struggle to stay interested in school board elections, and I find it questionable that we are electing any judges at all.
3. Investigative journalism. This is a separate kind of informational product, and there is a generally competitive market here, but the trick is to see each story as a separate product. Organizations which attempt to specialize in this product tend to not bring in much revenue, but the investigative arm of an organization can bring prestige to the whole organization by putting out investigative products. In any case, investigative journalism does not stand on its own without a supporting organization, and brings in more revenue if you get a book deal.
I don’t think all we have is all that I outlined above. I think the market supports reporting and editorializing just fine, but for the local variants, there just isn’t a lot of demand for the same kind of reporting, maybe because the stakes are lower, maybe because people are just less interested in the community they live in, or maybe there’s less government, less stuff, to keep tabs on.
Tempest1981 1608 days ago [-]
Isn't that like saying that exercise has no intrinsic value?
It's good for us, but no obvious short-term benefits. How can we make such things more compelling?
SllX 1607 days ago [-]
Not a great comparison. Of course exercise has intrinsic value! It’s just the grueling hard work that used to be life isn’t such grueling hard work anymore, and we haven’t yet adapted to that. It’s too easy to not work hard and make a good living, and a symptom of that is obesity. There’s still vocations out there that are hard, but most jobs don’t require you to lift more than 50 pounds and only infrequently at that.
Exercise as a hobby has no intrinsic value though. You either do it for whatever reasons that you find compelling, or you don’t.
Getting back to the local news, I guess the way for it to be more compelling is for your local market to be more interesting, or for the people in that market to be more interested in their neighbors. I am struggling to find a niche in there that can’t be filled in other ways by a hundred other means. I think the case for local news these days is only when a market is so big that keeping tabs on the goings on of the city’s bureaucracy is a full time job, and even then, only to the extent that the bureaucracy has an effect on people’s daily lives. I think the market has already mostly optimized for this. You’re not going to make the product as it existed in the 20th Century any more compelling than it is now, unless conditions in the market change to allow for this. I think we’re going to have to collectively let go of our romantic notions of the local paper from times past.
abathur 1608 days ago [-]
This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value.
The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one.
I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
SllX 1607 days ago [-]
The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and services.
The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
abathur 1607 days ago [-]
This just begs the question.
People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.
SllX 1607 days ago [-]
Where exactly are you drawing the distinction between the social and market value?
The local news is just another type of information, and if you don’t spend your money on it, you’re at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost because of how people weren’t spending their time and/or money, and due to the nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very vocal and visible manner.
abathur 1604 days ago [-]
Sorry for the slow response. Came down with a cold and haven't felt very lucid.
I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of producing + consuming it.
It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl-clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production side. For example:
The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't necessarily linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.
Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in its place?
1608 days ago [-]
CharlesColeman 1607 days ago [-]
> The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers).
This is a myopic take that ignores externalities. Local news has significant positive externalities: better informed citizens (important for a democracy), anti-corruption effects, etc.
SllX 1607 days ago [-]
Are people less informed about their communities today than they were 50 years ago? Or 30 years ago? Or 10 years ago?
technobabble 1607 days ago [-]
I searched the thread and couldn’t find DNAinfo. Did anybody else use it? I thought it was good while it lasted.
What are the chances of reviving something like it?
acd 1607 days ago [-]
Please subscribe and pay for news both local and national. Our democracy builds on journalists reporting and screening those elected into power.
Yuval_Halevi 1608 days ago [-]
The whole news model is becoming strange.
At the beginning journalism shifted from offline to online, and then because lack of solid business model and high competition, they began with paywalls which hurt the UX and also the site owners
scarejunba 1608 days ago [-]
Local news was always low quality. Now you have options for how to spend your time and money. It is no surprise you don't give them your time or your money. They have problem and solution reversed.
IIAOPSW 1608 days ago [-]
"Lack of people buying newspapers bad" reports newspaper.
I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.
If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.
Rendered at 03:13:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I don't blame them. I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper, and they can't afford to do investigative reporting because it costs too much for so little return on investment.
The week before an election there is no information at all on the people running for local office, school board, judges or boring stuff like that.
What's the word for government by random chance?
Thing is, I've been curious about this. You mentioned, "I won't pay for a subscription to a worthless newspaper". So, I know this is the sentiment most people have. But, isn't that the problem? BTW, I'm not picking on you, this is more about the generality of the situation.
A lot of people think local politics and other issues are worthless. But then are annoyed when they don't know anything about what's going on, why no one is "doing anything about it", "how did they get away with that" or just generally complain that their local whatever is a POS. For politics that is more likely to affect you faster than state, fed or international level, why do we think it's worthless? I'm not going to pretend like I'm magically different. Our mayor is about as important to me as a dog turd in my neighbor's backyard is to me. I've been wondering how I even came to the idea myself about a month ago when local politics does heavily affect me, whether I like it or not.
Makes me wonder about some demographics. Like, what is the percentage of people that do "care" and actively read about their local area? And by how much (1hr, 3hrs, 5hrs a week, etc)? Then, what's their city like? Do they have relatively less corruption than other cities? Are their schools better? Parks? Roads? Rec centers? Gov employee well being any better? Crime rates? How many people are needed to care about "local politics", on average, to make a city "good"? 10%? 20%? 50%?
Then, what has to happen to make enough people give a shit?
Questions beyond this post and HN... but yea... why the hell do we think local politics and news is worthless when it's the issues that will affect us more and faster than anything else?
Talking counties, schools, and towns outside even mid-sized cities, here.
I am worried this, and other developments, will mean the gradual end of the US as a relatively low-corruption state.
https://turtleboysports.com/state-trooper-leigha-genduso-adm...
https://turtleboysports.com/corrupt-douchebag-joe-early-agre...
An example local sustainably-funded investigative journalism outfit: https://theferret.scot/
Unfortunately this relies on the "sweet spot" where the government is corrupt enough to be outrageous but not corrupt enough to shut down your paper and campaign by force.
(It also relies on accepting that if you want local political news coverage, it's not going to be flatly neutral, because neither the audience nor the writers want that. That's not the same as being factional; "local government should be good not bad" is a highly political position, but not necessarily a factional one unless a party has a policy that local government should be bad.)
Most of them run unopposed, and I assume decide who gets what while they're at the bar or something. Their election campaign is usually a facebook page with cute kids smiling, and saying nothing at all. The city doesn't know what they're up to unless they ask for money. For a long time the federal level has been increasing in power, but maybe that's because no takes an active interest in city & state.
I've been considering running for a local seat just to be a monkey wrench.
A vote-based system in the absence of an effective media to investigate and inform the electorate is not actually random, but is subject to sway and influence from any modestly motivated party, with no effective check from an at least putatively disinterested or nonbiased journalistic enterprise. You're not leaving selection up to chance, you're leaving it up the the most effective, least principled, least visible election manipulator.
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-may-17-la-me-chine...
If all that matters is race and gender, or whatever other "Divide and Conqueror" scheme we're undergoing at this time, you'll notice criminality didn't make the list of what matters, so ...
Party line voting
Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.
The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem.
I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.
Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.
It's not true that churches are able to function entirely on donations. They have all kinds of tax breaks and take government subsidies. And tipping? I bet anyone in the service industry in the US can tell you why that's a bad idea.
How exactly does the government benefit?
If by "well informed" you mean "the population knows the information the government wants it to know" then sure, I get that.
However, I don’t read American press, so not quite familiar with the state of media business in the country. I subscribe to the economist and the ken (the great source covering VC news in SEA and India). I want to reward journalist for high-quality material. They don’t have a fremium reading and the subscription is quite high indeed.
As for Spotify-like business model, I bet Medium has something in their roadmap. Also, out of States there multiple interesting products that try to to pay-once-read-all business-model: Yandex Zen in Russia and SmartNews in Japan.
But this sounds a lot like a rediscription of the dystopia we're already rushing towards.
The advertising model that floated newspaper journalism was circulation. Whether you read 1 story, 10 stories, or the whole paper. I don't think the genie can be put back, but online ads and going viral on the platforms are already both games measured in eyeball-seconds.
Rewriting society around eyeball-seconds is probably not a good idea.
Equitably means no one gets gov funding - no one is favored just like in the case of organized religion.
> Ideally a way that would create a market incentive for producing local news that people read.
Government doesn’t create market incentives, it destroys and distorts them.
Or do you have another truth to share?
Complete separation of state and church is pretty rare. They often gain some form of tax benefit. Their buildings often holds central position in towns and if there property tax then they are exempted. If there are government initiatives for children, for arts, or other social benefits then the church is often a common actor in the end. Very few religious organizations that I know depend exclusively on members fees, and I live in Sweden where church being separated from the state is a common perception by those who live here.
If we apply this to local media then a government supported model would not inherently be controlled by the government. You could have government information awareness initiatives with criteria for the actor to have independent journalism. The local news agency would then bid for the job.
That's an interesting idea. I love getting paywalled by some web site because I clicked a headline, especially when it's some a local news site or some other site I'll probably never visit again. I'm not signing up to read one article that I might not even like.
I thought pay per article might be a good idea, but that would just encourage click bait. And if the article is terrible, I still have to pay.
However, with a subscription to all of the news none of this would be an issue as long as it was reasonably priced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
Do Brave Attention Tokens fit this model?
True especially in the arts where the median can't get a job writing SQL queries for a Telecom.
We’re lucky to still have few large and small newspapers in the area that are relatively decent. Facebook groups and next door fill in the rest.
I do find it mildly ironic that TFA is also fear-based. Will they never learn?
It's local, it's unfiltered, but… I wonder about the long term effect it will have on my estimation of my neighbors. Checking any more than once or twice a month is probably not doing anyone any favors.
It might go without saying that I'm slightly even less impressed with Next Door than when I wrote the original comment, but it does make me think: is this product bad because of the people it attracts? Is that its fault, i.e. could it be targeted better or formatted better (think Stack Overflow vs web forums)? How could the problem be solved in a less obnoxious way?
I'm sub'd to nyt, 3 local paper/publications, wired, natgeo, motherjones.
Last week my partner and I found a dead man wearing nothing but his undies in our parking lot. He froze to death the night before. So we called the police and got him picked up and later that night saw a news story on a local station's website saying that man's family was looking for him. We called their police department and the next day he was confirmed to be their dad who was suffering from dementia. The poor guy probably thought he was at home so he took off all his clothes and laid down.
I'm sure his family would have found out eventually but that local news station helped us get the news to them quicker.
The only thing that bothers me at the moment is how little power local news has to really investigate corruption or wrongdoing by local and state level officials. Like that Roy Moore scandal.
There's actually this weird phenomenon where people suffering from hypothermia will take off their clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia#Paradoxical_undres...
I understand paywalls are annoying. But if anyone wants to do anything, they need to figure out how to get micropayments to work or build a non-techgiant service [1] that can let you collectively subscribe to most of the news organizations at once for a reasonable fee. I understand those are both hard problems.
[1] Can't be a techgiant because they've caused enough damage already, and giving them control of the subscription fees could be the coup de grâce. Honestly, the website should be a media-owned co-op or something.
While focused on the UK I think the content is broadly applicable.
I'm sure the full text is available online but there's an excerpt here [1].
Relevant to the article:
"And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985."
He also talks in depth about the loss of local news. Unfortunately I don't have my copy to hand; but he makes a compelling case about the loss of court reporters and corresponding decline of democratic accountability and understanding of the justice system.
[0]: https://www.flatearthnews.net/ [1]: https://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth...
If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones, counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are surely falling off the spectrum.
Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can’t help with specific examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far right wing shit (monarchism?, “racial realists”, “trumpists”).
I can't remember ever seeing a "right-wing" viewpoint in Bloomberg's opinion pages. As far as I can tell the only op-eds they publish are pro-gun control, anti-income inequality or just generally anti-Trump.
One of those things is not like the others.
On the U.S. side, intellectually oriented conservative media has really had trouble with the Trump era. The more highbrow outlets were never on board with Trump, but maintaining an anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical line on the U.S. right basically dooms you to irrelevance in the current climate, since only a smallish band of "never-Trumper" conservatives are still tuning in to that political position. There are a few of those, like The American Interest, which keep going on a small circulation.
Sure, the topics picked can very well be political, although that has degraded somewhat to topics that generate clicks. But that is nevertheless a huge problem and I believe correlated to the low trust in media overall.
Or look at elections. A press staunchly favoring a candidate wouldn't be able to hold that candidate accountable. That is another huge problem, because that is their primary raison d'être.
Some even go that far that a worse candidate is preferable in that situation if it means the press as representatives of the public reports critically. Could explain some things.
The last discussion about that has been with fundamentalists that had a similar critique about neutrality.
We could also talk about how feasible it is to achieve neutrality. But that wouldn't be the point in most cases.
In secular education for example neutrality has a specific meaning. That pupils are to be empowered to make choices and that views are not imposed on them. End of story.
It isn't that hard to transfer these principles to journalism. Does journalism try to inform as best as possible so people can make better decisions? Or should they be nudged towards certain perspectives.
The former variant would be the neutral approach. Pretty simple if you think about it.
And btw, I agree with your definition of neutrality. I just don’t think PBS markedly improves in this respect (empowering viewers) from any other cable news station, they simply have less obnoxious production value and are therefore a more palatable, or at best equally palatable, version of the other center to center left publications I listed.
There is a big gap between those sort of biases and Not-Trump-At-Any-Cost or Must-Sell-Public-Assets. Some biases are productive and have motivations which can be honestly articulated and are broadly reasonable.
That said, frontline occasionally covers things the news hour won’t and can be a serious investigative journalism outlet.
It may be as many as 80% of the population would support evidence-based biases, in theory. There are still problems but it is a big step up from inflexible partisanship.
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.
Or UBI. Journalists gotta eat!
Both of the points 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.
I don't understand what you are proposing here. I think there is a point about constituencies, but I do not parse your logic. What do you refer to by leftover votes?
The rationale is that people voted to be represented. When the 1st place candidate wins, they have no more incentive to represent the 'losers'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Do you have any more info about this type of voting? I would always be interested in reading more analysis of this topic.
For better proportional representation, here's this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
A drop in the bucket of Craigslist’s revenues could work miracles for local and regional reporting.
Besides the three mentioned by this article, there are ~200 others listed here, although they vary in activity: https://inn.org/members/
It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.
It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.
There are mostly-free websites run by former print organizations, news websites started as digital-only by journalists, blog sites by local politically-involved commentators, and sites run by local government to publish council minutes, draft resolutions, meeting agendas, committee minutes, etc.
More detail and more points of view are available than one got from a subscription to a local print newspaper. As for local television, that primarily dealt with happenings in the core of the metro area, which are of little interest.
Most local businesses don't like exposes on them and their friends so that stuff had to stop.
Google, Facebook and Craigslist aren't that great for advertising local businesses or events. A local weekend/dining guide is much better than Yelp.
Historically there was too much lag for centralization past a certain scale and there was a derth of information to process.
Since that is no longer the case it is easier to watch one organization closely than distributed one. Even if they had comprehensive coverage of every locality the parsing and understanding of it would be more difficult.
Of course getting said reorganization would be politically very difficult.
Hell no.
All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.
Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.
So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.
Let’s break this down: 1. The performance of the local government. You can already see this when you talk with your neighbors or walk or drive around the streets. Are the potholes in your area getting filled? Are the police doing a decent job? Are houses burning down left and right? Are your kids coming home from school and not getting progressively more literate and numerate? To the extent that there is room in the market for even more coverage of the local government, it really depends on how big the local bureaucracy is.
2. Candidates in local elections. Did you know it was the job of candidates running for office to get themselves and their message in front of as many people in their constituency as they can? They have a message to sell, and if they are at all effective, they’ll sell it as widely as possible. If the local papers and broadcasters aren’t doing the job, they’ll find other ways to get their message out or else just lose the election. Anybody with any interest against this candidate will also be selling messages to get in front of you, in whatever channels you’re paying attention. I don’t think we’re any less informed about our politicians than we ever were, it’s simply a matter of how interested we are in what they do for us. For example, I care very much who is repping me on the Board of Supervisors, but without children of my own, I struggle to stay interested in school board elections, and I find it questionable that we are electing any judges at all.
3. Investigative journalism. This is a separate kind of informational product, and there is a generally competitive market here, but the trick is to see each story as a separate product. Organizations which attempt to specialize in this product tend to not bring in much revenue, but the investigative arm of an organization can bring prestige to the whole organization by putting out investigative products. In any case, investigative journalism does not stand on its own without a supporting organization, and brings in more revenue if you get a book deal.
I don’t think all we have is all that I outlined above. I think the market supports reporting and editorializing just fine, but for the local variants, there just isn’t a lot of demand for the same kind of reporting, maybe because the stakes are lower, maybe because people are just less interested in the community they live in, or maybe there’s less government, less stuff, to keep tabs on.
It's good for us, but no obvious short-term benefits. How can we make such things more compelling?
Exercise as a hobby has no intrinsic value though. You either do it for whatever reasons that you find compelling, or you don’t.
Getting back to the local news, I guess the way for it to be more compelling is for your local market to be more interesting, or for the people in that market to be more interested in their neighbors. I am struggling to find a niche in there that can’t be filled in other ways by a hundred other means. I think the case for local news these days is only when a market is so big that keeping tabs on the goings on of the city’s bureaucracy is a full time job, and even then, only to the extent that the bureaucracy has an effect on people’s daily lives. I think the market has already mostly optimized for this. You’re not going to make the product as it existed in the 20th Century any more compelling than it is now, unless conditions in the market change to allow for this. I think we’re going to have to collectively let go of our romantic notions of the local paper from times past.
The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one.
I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.
The local news is just another type of information, and if you don’t spend your money on it, you’re at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost because of how people weren’t spending their time and/or money, and due to the nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very vocal and visible manner.
I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of producing + consuming it.
It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl-clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production side. For example:
The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't necessarily linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.
Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in its place?
This is a myopic take that ignores externalities. Local news has significant positive externalities: better informed citizens (important for a democracy), anti-corruption effects, etc.
What are the chances of reviving something like it?
I'm pay-walled out and probably shouldn't waste the time anyway. All I have to go on is the premise in the headline, which I find dubious.
If you're not actively using breaking news to adjust your investment positions and you're not a political staffer who's job requires reaction to sudden changes on the ground, then what you're actually doing is consuming entertainment while tricking yourself into thinking you are not merely wasting time. Local news is no better than busybodies on nextdoor, merely more centralized.