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For all the praise for local news and the importance of preserving it, the dirty secret of newspapers today is that there is not so much local news coverage left to save. A 2018 Duke University study of 16,000 local media outlets (including broadcasters) in 100 communities estimated that only about 17% of articles were truly local (i.e., they had received place in or concerned the local municipality), and just over half were hard news. Another 2018 discovery from Pew found that only 16% of Americans often get their news from a newspaper, which further lowers the status of the press. Another indicator of the scarcity of local information: Last year, when Facebook researched local information to include in a new section called Today In, it found that one in three users lived in places where there was no had not enough local information published to maintain the section. New Jersey was the worst place to find local news on Facebook, with 58% of users unable to do so on any day of the past month, Recode reported. Maybe what the Pew respondents were really saying is you can’t miss what’s already gone.
Where has all the local news gone? A few decades ago, publishers raised so much revenue that they invented new sections, including local news, to spend the loot. Many metropolitan newspapers published weekly sections on computers and technology, weekly TV program guides, independent trading sections filled with page after page stock prices, Sunday magazines, book review sections and weekly tabloids. on suburban counties. The Washington Post once ran a weekly section called Sunday Source, designed to appeal to young readers, and column after column of police blotter in its District Weekly section. Newspapers were cash machines, even in regional markets like Buffalo, NY In her book Ghosting the News, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that her old newspaper, the Buffalo News, was once so rich that for many For many years, the News was sending a million dollars a week to its owner, Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway. But after the internet destroyed the advertising divide that had protected newspaper revenues for more than a century, editors and publishers reduced the old newspaper, including the locals, to a more basic package to reduce costs.
The decline in local news has been accompanied by the decline in newspaper audiences. In 1940, when the population was less than half that of today, the circulation of American newspapers was greater. Newspapers have lost audience not only because of the Internet, but also cable, television and radio, as well as non-news features found on smartphones. Advertising dollars that once helped support local news have fled to the web, where ads could be better paired with content, sometimes at a lower cost, to sell advertisers’ products. As Google economist Hal Varian said in 2013, pure news had very high social value for interested readers, but low commercial value due to the difficulty of serving relevant contextual ads.
There is evidence that high-quality, low-cost national news online from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC and other media has turned readers away who might otherwise participate in local news. Newspapers also appear to have gotten out of the reach of many readers, increasing the cost of subscriptions to cover declining advertising revenue. In 1980, for example, the Washington Post billed $ 92 per year for weekday and Sunday home delivery ($ 315 in today’s currency). Today the post office charges $ 1,160 per year for a lower quality product. The Post is not alone, of course. Iris Chyi of the University of Texas notes that many regional newspapers have passed the $ 1,000 per year mark for subscriptions. That’s a lot of money in most family budgets, more than the annual Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney +, and HBO Max subscriptions would all cost you together.
The great masses of readers and advertisers may look down on local news, but that doesn’t make its production a futile move. Dozens of local nonprofit news startups exist in places such as San Diego, Denver, Santa Cruz, Minneapolis, and Flint, and, with local public radio stations expanding their news footprint, these media make the Yeomans work. Axios has set up small local news operations in half a dozen cities and promises to expand to others, though one of its founders told The Wall Street Journal last year that its Localized newsletters would focus on business, technology and education, not politics. One of the best local news sites in the country is in Memphis, where the shrinking Commercial Appeal newsroom owned by Gannett inspired the founding of the Daily Memphian, a nonprofit news site focused on the local, in 2018. Bootstrap of $ 8.2 million in philanthropic venture capital donations, as some call it, the site now has a newsroom comparable in size to Commercial Appeals and nearly 14,000 subscribers paying an average of $ 9.25 per month. Its operators are convinced that the Daily Memphian can reach 25,000 paying subscribers to become sustainable in a few years. But for a metropolitan area of about 1.3 million inhabitants, 25,000 subscribers still represent a relatively thin demographic. As recently as 2000, the trade appeal moved 238,000 copies printed on Sundays and over 184,000 daily. Today, it has a circulation of around 52,000 copies on Sundays and 29,000 per day, which can be interpreted as repudiation of the newspaper by communities or their disinterest in local news or both.
Advocates of local news such as Steve Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, would like to see local news declared a public good, an essential service that no one can make money by providing and freeing governments for. fund with grants, refundable tax credits (similar to the federal campaign finance credit on your 1040), tax incentives, government advertising, and other interventions.
You should read Waldman’s pitch in the Washington Monthly, but even as we build such a grant and tax credit operation, can masses of readers be enticed to come? Do journalists design local news initiatives that satisfy them and their academic colleagues, but lack appeal to readers? As my friend Jason Pontin, former editor and publisher of Technology Review, noted last month, media types sentimentalize local news because it portrays local journalists as a heroic caste holding powerful officials and binding communities. together. But this fetishization of local news ignores the public’s reluctance to pay for the product. Local news is just not producing a product that people need.
Not all studies, monographs, and public policy arguments around the world are likely to appeal to readers. It is telling that two of the best and most successful newspapers in the Americas, the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos and the New York Times, have lost priority on local news in recent decades. Maybe they know something the local media don’t brag about. The groups most enthusiastic about saving and expanding local news are journalists, whose self-interest is evident; types of good government who relish the function of watchdogs of the press; tech giants like Google and Facebook, who have donated millions to local news to disarm critics who claim they’ve destroyed the press (they haven’t, but that’s another column); politicians like Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, who view news as infrastructure; and academics and foundations who say local coverage is an integral part of a functioning society.
The local news movement will not make much headway until its supporters realize that its main obstacle is on the demand side, not the supply side. It’s not that no one wants to read the local news; it’s just that there aren’t enough people to make it a viable business. Perhaps the glut of local news of yesteryear was the product of an economic crash, a moment that cannot be salvaged. But even if you were to fund local news with taxes and philanthropy, and distribute it to citizens through grants, you should still find a way to get people to read it. Until an editorial genius solves this conundrum, the quest for local news will remain a charitable niche project put forward by journalistic, academic and political elites.
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Nextdoor is not news, so don’t bother me with an email to [email protected] citing it. My email alerts would love to get a job spreading local news. My Twitter considers itself to be an international site. The only local copy that my RSS feed wants to read is Police Blotter.
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