It's time to take the decline of local news more seriously
More subsidies, yes, but also some changes to institutions
We should take steps to subsidize local news as a public good. But we should also consider realigning elements of our political system to address the reality of a de-localized media environment.
Most of the trajectory of American political reform over the past 250 years has been based on the idea that smaller political institutions are “closer to the people” and thus in some sense they possessed more democratic legitimacy.
That may have been approximately true at some point in time, but simply does not reflect how contemporary society functions. You have a much better-informed opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden than you do about your state senator. Far from being “distant,” significant national figures are virtually present in our lives on a nonstop basis and they are aggressively covered by a large pack of thriving media institutions.
State and local coverage has suffered. But even in their diminished state, local news organizations can still offer robust coverage of a governor — and national news organizations can also dip down into gubernatorial politics.
But with fewer resources going to state/local journalism and less audience attention available for the coverage that does exist, down-ballot statewide officeholders, school board members, state legislatures, etc. are tending to slip into obscurity. Under the circumstances, centralization actually promotes democracy and accountability by giving reporters and readers writers alike a tractable quantity of things to pay attention to.
I don’t have a single sweeping reform, but in general, tend to favor:
Replacing elected school boards with systems of direct control by mayors or county officials.
Consolidating city and county levels of government where practical.
Having strong mayors or county executives rather than diffuse legislature-focused systems.
Unicameral state legislatures (hello Nebraska!) and paring back the number of separately elected statewide executive officers.
Tilting the balance of power between governors and state legislatures in favor of the governor.
Establishing clear lines of control over public sector entities (transit agencies etc.) rather than having diffuse multi-jurisdictional governance structures.
A big part of this vision is recognizing that shifts in the media landscape are only partially remediable by policy changes.
I am really interested in mass transit and housing issues, and thanks to my high level of interest plus the magic of digital technology, I am now much better informed about transit and housing policy issues in Greater Boston than I was 20 years ago when I actually lived in Greater Boston. Today, transit enthusiasts nationwide can read in great detail about the Green Line Extension project or the North-South Rail Link. But the time we spend paying attention to things we are interested in happening in cities we don’t live in necessarily tends to crowd out paying attention to important things in our community that don’t happen to interest us.
A world of more robust local coverage will be a better world, but it will still have those attention-economy issues. And we need to adjust to a world where information dissemination is not limited by truck routes (this is a good thing!) and we are consequently better informed about bigger units rather than “closer” ones.
This is an excerpt from a longer article titled What To Do To Save Local News that’s available exclusively to Slow Boring subscribers. If you’re interested, I hope you’ll consider buying a subscription. There are discounts available to students & educators as well as for group purchasers. If not, you might enjoy my most recent free articles, The Real Economic Challenge in 2021 and 17 Theses on Pete Buttigieg and the Department of Transportation.