Do we care if Alden Capital walks off with the tax credit for hiring another reporter at the Chicago Tribune? Does the act have a cap on the number of such staff credits awarded to a single paper, or even to a single ownership entity?
I get most of my national news from PBS News Hour. For national news it is excellent. Fair and balanced. It is probably the thing doing the best job of keeping me from writing off the Republicans altogether because they consistently interview the sane one and remind me they exist even if I disagree with them on almost everything. They also good in depth coverage of issues that is helpful for informing my thoughts on what our local policy should be.
I don't have a subscription to the Seattle Times but I do follow KUOW, our local public radio station and Crosscut, the local news website for our local PBS station and they are also excellent.
So I probably have a better view of publicly funded, independent news operations and I would love to see some of the PBS dollars from the Feds be dedicated specifically to local news. I am less nostalgic about actual newspapers than I am local news and I am happy to get it blog style vs a printed paper.
We used to have a neighborhood blog that was produced by a real journalist. She actually won a national prize for her coverage of a serial arsonist in our neighborhood and the response and investigation. She was able to fund herself through ad revenue including local ads. But she eventually lost money as more people started getting their local "news" through facebook groups and next door and so she didn't have the readership to support her ad revenue. It is a shame because the "news" in those other sources is mostly gossip and speculation and frankly pretty toxic. It seems that a lot of other neighborhood blogs from that same period have died too. We just got a new one run by our neighborhood association but it is run by an employee who only gets to dedicate a few hours a month to it and it mostly just shares events and local business openings etc and isn't really news either.
I am sad that we have less local news coverage in part because it seems so much more actionable and useful. I don't feel like I have much power at all at a national level but I do at a local level and so knowing what is happening there seems much more democratically empowering.
As someone who worked in Kansas, California, New York and Indiana at relatively small papers that emphasized local news for more than three decades, these ideas seem unworkable and, well, dumb.
As an editor in rural Kansas, I should ignore national farm policy stories to boost my "local" news percentage? Lots and lots of federal and state news directly impacts local readers and the issues get no coverage in virtually any other media. Further, as community newspaper staffing basically disappears, you want them to have to audit and record on a daily basis what is local news? Who is going to do that? And as we already have seen at too many newspapers, editors and content generators (they really aren't reporters) are all too happy to load up on restaurant and retail news and other empty-calorie content to chase online traffic. Does it count as local news if you are choosing to cover restaurant openings instead of the local school board?
Would you mind writing a bit about what you think the solution is, assuming you even agree it's a problem? I think your perspective would be really interesting!
The key issue is on the revenue side. Unless local media can fix that, they are just dying to a different tune. Newspapers made extraordinarily high profit margins for a long time. Not just the big papers, but the small ones. Especially the small ones. Some chains, such as Gannett, invested some of those profits to help make the transition to digital, with sites that were leading in their sectors (Remember Careerbuilder.com?)
But when times started getting tough, they sold off the most successful digital ventures, stopped investing in the future and started chopping. And they continue to chop staff and services - while raising prices - to try to eke out profits.
I think there is no one solution. Collaboration (using trade groups, state press associations, tech-media partnership) is vital. I still believe there is a way to make a micro-payment system work if enough media would sign on and if they make it easy for readers to sign up and use. I think the nonprofit model of digital news sites holds promise. I believe that entrepreneurs who care at all about their community can find new ways (and keep using old ways) to provide solid journalism and help local business grow with services and advertising. I believe tech giants should be paying journalists for using their work.
Newspapers aren't the money machines they used to be. The impetus for innovation won't be tax breaks for companies focused on this quarter's earnings. I remain hopeful that resourceful and creative people will find local journalism models that work - not as high-profit investments, but as sustainable nonprofits or small businesses. And if they work in tandem with national or regional consortiums that optimize revenue on the business side, we'll have a model that can be used to reinvent the sector.
What we need is local news. What we don't need are local newspapers. Propping up a legacy of the past makes no sense. Private companies have PR departments that generate press releases. It's in their interest to make sure the public knows what they are up to. It should be the same for public institutions, but they have always gotten by without it because they could depend on the Daily Ledger or whatever to cover all the student council meetings and high school basketball games for them. The Daily Ledger didn't mind because they could sell classified ads to pay the salaries of the reporters and editors. Municipalities, school districts, police departments, transportation departments, etc., should generate content that could be on their websites and/or distributed via Facebook or other social media. Just like everything else. It's 2024, not 1924. Every local newspaper reader I know also is active on Facebook. Seems like a match made in heaven.
My local government does a great job pushing out information about what they are up to but that doesn't seem to take the place of people fact checking if they are lying about what they are up to.
IMO, semi-automated AI tools could help with the local news supply problem. Well made tools could create nearly press ready local news articles from mundane public meetings and police logs.
Just like with software engineers, AI tools should increase the productivity of each local reporter and that could reverse the local news quality doom loop. Using automated tools to efficiently cover the mundane stenography would leave more time for reporters to focus on higher value actual reporting.
I get a physical copy of my local news publication home delivered. They throw in decent national and international coverage too. They won two Pulitzers last year and were finalists in four other categories.
> the law should mandate that 80% of their news is original to the paper.
That seems excessive to me. My local paper (the Seattle Times) has a lot of original local content, but it also publishes a lot of articles from national papers and wire services and so on, and I don't see why that should bother me. And if the tax credit is only for hiring journalists, then anyway it would promote more original content rather than republished stuff.
I'm a news junkie and mourn the shrinkage of my local paper (still exists, still covers local news, just less of it).
But my 3 children (and their spouses) don't read newspapers or watch tv news. They seem to get their info from social media. They were born in the 1970's and I think they are set in their ways.
So I like the idea of financial assistance for local journalism -- but I wonder who's going to read it?
I'd argue that this can't be fixed as long as we still have such an oversupply of newspapers purporting to do national coverage. We still have many big cities with their own newspaper claiming to do national coverage and doing just enough local coverage (and providing it online -- often for free) to make it really uneconomical to do the local coverage. I fear that right now any subsidy would go to these papers.
I still believe that, long term, a model where a handful of major national papers let you subscribe to their 'local coverage' (and, critically thereby gain access to it in every locality they hire a local affiliate) will be profitable. At least for me, and I expect many people, getting access to local news everywhere (so I can see what's going on where I went to school, back where I grew up etc etc) offers much more value than just a single local newspaper (especially if I can access it in the same app as my main news). That kind of bundling requires a national distributor but so far no one has taken up that role.
Congressional and state legislators subsidized local newspapers for decades (even centuries) with legal notice requirements. Subsidies of local news sources would be nothing new (and very political).
"Congressional and state legislators subsidized local newspapers for decades (even centuries) with legal notice requirements."
They still do to a certain extent -- last year I was required to put notices in two newspapers "of general circulation" for a particular legal proceeding, one in Denver and the other in a specific county where a property was located. The problem is that other than in major metro areas, there probably isn't nearly enough activity to generate a sufficient volume of legal notices to support a newspaper that does original reporting, which is what I understand to be the goal here.
Idea (this may be good, or not, it may be feasible, or not): What about approaching it from the opposite end? Instead of subsidizing local news to hire people, subsidize people to produce local news. The tax credit goes to the journalist who chooses to cover the Board of Zoning Appeals instead of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Back in the oven with this idea! It’s not even half-baked:
“…the local or state government shouldn’t be the ones making the funding decisions”
The notion that the federal government is any better than state or local governments when it comes to respecting the privileges and immunities of citizens is hopelessly naive.
Once again the American solution to any problem is [drum roll] more tax credits!
I don't say this to make fun of Ben, these are reasonable ideas, it's just notable how much of spending money on any issue is done with the bass ackward way of subsides for the middle class via the tax code instead of like, just spending the money. Hillary's child care plan was a great example of this, or see Matt's post from back in the day about how we should just give new mothers breast pumps if that's what we want to do instead of really complex systems: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/24/8277827/7-things-becoming-a-parent-taught-me-i-was-right-about-all-along (see also his description of why American health care is so bad, summs it up pretty well in just a few graphs.)
If I had a nickel for every time Ben Krauss mentioned eating at a South East Asian restaurant in a Slow Boring article, I'd have three nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.
I suspect that's in part because Denver has had a large Vietnamese community since the late '70s/early '80s and we have a lot of Vietnamese or "stealth Vietnamese" Asian fusion restaurants.
Overall, though, great piece and great ideas! Just, as Ben rightly notes, we'd have to make sure government support doesn't cause local papers to collapse into "This Is Why Denver's Housing Situation Is Cisheteronormative And White Supremacist" type stories.
Do we care if Alden Capital walks off with the tax credit for hiring another reporter at the Chicago Tribune? Does the act have a cap on the number of such staff credits awarded to a single paper, or even to a single ownership entity?
I get most of my national news from PBS News Hour. For national news it is excellent. Fair and balanced. It is probably the thing doing the best job of keeping me from writing off the Republicans altogether because they consistently interview the sane one and remind me they exist even if I disagree with them on almost everything. They also good in depth coverage of issues that is helpful for informing my thoughts on what our local policy should be.
I don't have a subscription to the Seattle Times but I do follow KUOW, our local public radio station and Crosscut, the local news website for our local PBS station and they are also excellent.
So I probably have a better view of publicly funded, independent news operations and I would love to see some of the PBS dollars from the Feds be dedicated specifically to local news. I am less nostalgic about actual newspapers than I am local news and I am happy to get it blog style vs a printed paper.
We used to have a neighborhood blog that was produced by a real journalist. She actually won a national prize for her coverage of a serial arsonist in our neighborhood and the response and investigation. She was able to fund herself through ad revenue including local ads. But she eventually lost money as more people started getting their local "news" through facebook groups and next door and so she didn't have the readership to support her ad revenue. It is a shame because the "news" in those other sources is mostly gossip and speculation and frankly pretty toxic. It seems that a lot of other neighborhood blogs from that same period have died too. We just got a new one run by our neighborhood association but it is run by an employee who only gets to dedicate a few hours a month to it and it mostly just shares events and local business openings etc and isn't really news either.
I am sad that we have less local news coverage in part because it seems so much more actionable and useful. I don't feel like I have much power at all at a national level but I do at a local level and so knowing what is happening there seems much more democratically empowering.
As someone who worked in Kansas, California, New York and Indiana at relatively small papers that emphasized local news for more than three decades, these ideas seem unworkable and, well, dumb.
As an editor in rural Kansas, I should ignore national farm policy stories to boost my "local" news percentage? Lots and lots of federal and state news directly impacts local readers and the issues get no coverage in virtually any other media. Further, as community newspaper staffing basically disappears, you want them to have to audit and record on a daily basis what is local news? Who is going to do that? And as we already have seen at too many newspapers, editors and content generators (they really aren't reporters) are all too happy to load up on restaurant and retail news and other empty-calorie content to chase online traffic. Does it count as local news if you are choosing to cover restaurant openings instead of the local school board?
Would you mind writing a bit about what you think the solution is, assuming you even agree it's a problem? I think your perspective would be really interesting!
The key issue is on the revenue side. Unless local media can fix that, they are just dying to a different tune. Newspapers made extraordinarily high profit margins for a long time. Not just the big papers, but the small ones. Especially the small ones. Some chains, such as Gannett, invested some of those profits to help make the transition to digital, with sites that were leading in their sectors (Remember Careerbuilder.com?)
But when times started getting tough, they sold off the most successful digital ventures, stopped investing in the future and started chopping. And they continue to chop staff and services - while raising prices - to try to eke out profits.
I think there is no one solution. Collaboration (using trade groups, state press associations, tech-media partnership) is vital. I still believe there is a way to make a micro-payment system work if enough media would sign on and if they make it easy for readers to sign up and use. I think the nonprofit model of digital news sites holds promise. I believe that entrepreneurs who care at all about their community can find new ways (and keep using old ways) to provide solid journalism and help local business grow with services and advertising. I believe tech giants should be paying journalists for using their work.
Newspapers aren't the money machines they used to be. The impetus for innovation won't be tax breaks for companies focused on this quarter's earnings. I remain hopeful that resourceful and creative people will find local journalism models that work - not as high-profit investments, but as sustainable nonprofits or small businesses. And if they work in tandem with national or regional consortiums that optimize revenue on the business side, we'll have a model that can be used to reinvent the sector.
> The impetus for innovation won't be tax breaks for companies focused on this quarter's earnings.
The whole post is great, but I really like this line in particular.
> I believe tech giants should be paying journalists for using their work.
You put this in almost as a throwaway, but it's obviously a pretty contentious issue!
Anyway, thanks for writing this, a lot of great ideas in here.
What we need is local news. What we don't need are local newspapers. Propping up a legacy of the past makes no sense. Private companies have PR departments that generate press releases. It's in their interest to make sure the public knows what they are up to. It should be the same for public institutions, but they have always gotten by without it because they could depend on the Daily Ledger or whatever to cover all the student council meetings and high school basketball games for them. The Daily Ledger didn't mind because they could sell classified ads to pay the salaries of the reporters and editors. Municipalities, school districts, police departments, transportation departments, etc., should generate content that could be on their websites and/or distributed via Facebook or other social media. Just like everything else. It's 2024, not 1924. Every local newspaper reader I know also is active on Facebook. Seems like a match made in heaven.
My local government does a great job pushing out information about what they are up to but that doesn't seem to take the place of people fact checking if they are lying about what they are up to.
IMO, semi-automated AI tools could help with the local news supply problem. Well made tools could create nearly press ready local news articles from mundane public meetings and police logs.
Just like with software engineers, AI tools should increase the productivity of each local reporter and that could reverse the local news quality doom loop. Using automated tools to efficiently cover the mundane stenography would leave more time for reporters to focus on higher value actual reporting.
Then you have the DC NPR station close their local news online service (after already having shut down it's comments section).
I get a physical copy of my local news publication home delivered. They throw in decent national and international coverage too. They won two Pulitzers last year and were finalists in four other categories.
Maybe not a lot goes on where you all live? ;)
> the law should mandate that 80% of their news is original to the paper.
That seems excessive to me. My local paper (the Seattle Times) has a lot of original local content, but it also publishes a lot of articles from national papers and wire services and so on, and I don't see why that should bother me. And if the tax credit is only for hiring journalists, then anyway it would promote more original content rather than republished stuff.
I'm a news junkie and mourn the shrinkage of my local paper (still exists, still covers local news, just less of it).
But my 3 children (and their spouses) don't read newspapers or watch tv news. They seem to get their info from social media. They were born in the 1970's and I think they are set in their ways.
So I like the idea of financial assistance for local journalism -- but I wonder who's going to read it?
I'd argue that this can't be fixed as long as we still have such an oversupply of newspapers purporting to do national coverage. We still have many big cities with their own newspaper claiming to do national coverage and doing just enough local coverage (and providing it online -- often for free) to make it really uneconomical to do the local coverage. I fear that right now any subsidy would go to these papers.
I still believe that, long term, a model where a handful of major national papers let you subscribe to their 'local coverage' (and, critically thereby gain access to it in every locality they hire a local affiliate) will be profitable. At least for me, and I expect many people, getting access to local news everywhere (so I can see what's going on where I went to school, back where I grew up etc etc) offers much more value than just a single local newspaper (especially if I can access it in the same app as my main news). That kind of bundling requires a national distributor but so far no one has taken up that role.
Congressional and state legislators subsidized local newspapers for decades (even centuries) with legal notice requirements. Subsidies of local news sources would be nothing new (and very political).
"Congressional and state legislators subsidized local newspapers for decades (even centuries) with legal notice requirements."
They still do to a certain extent -- last year I was required to put notices in two newspapers "of general circulation" for a particular legal proceeding, one in Denver and the other in a specific county where a property was located. The problem is that other than in major metro areas, there probably isn't nearly enough activity to generate a sufficient volume of legal notices to support a newspaper that does original reporting, which is what I understand to be the goal here.
Those notices usually actually go to Journals of Commerce who just do those notices not real newspapers because they qualify and are cheaper.
Idea (this may be good, or not, it may be feasible, or not): What about approaching it from the opposite end? Instead of subsidizing local news to hire people, subsidize people to produce local news. The tax credit goes to the journalist who chooses to cover the Board of Zoning Appeals instead of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Back in the oven with this idea! It’s not even half-baked:
“…the local or state government shouldn’t be the ones making the funding decisions”
The notion that the federal government is any better than state or local governments when it comes to respecting the privileges and immunities of citizens is hopelessly naive.
Once again the American solution to any problem is [drum roll] more tax credits!
I don't say this to make fun of Ben, these are reasonable ideas, it's just notable how much of spending money on any issue is done with the bass ackward way of subsides for the middle class via the tax code instead of like, just spending the money. Hillary's child care plan was a great example of this, or see Matt's post from back in the day about how we should just give new mothers breast pumps if that's what we want to do instead of really complex systems: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/24/8277827/7-things-becoming-a-parent-taught-me-i-was-right-about-all-along (see also his description of why American health care is so bad, summs it up pretty well in just a few graphs.)
If I had a nickel for every time Ben Krauss mentioned eating at a South East Asian restaurant in a Slow Boring article, I'd have three nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.
I suspect that's in part because Denver has had a large Vietnamese community since the late '70s/early '80s and we have a lot of Vietnamese or "stealth Vietnamese" Asian fusion restaurants.
South East Asian food is really good!
It is! I had banh mi yesterday in fact.
That might be my favorite sandwich at this point right now.
"our fruit fly attention spans"
I feel offended.
Overall, though, great piece and great ideas! Just, as Ben rightly notes, we'd have to make sure government support doesn't cause local papers to collapse into "This Is Why Denver's Housing Situation Is Cisheteronormative And White Supremacist" type stories.
“I feel offended”
It‘ll all be over in a month or so. At least for you.
Oh sure, first Ben mocks my attention span, now you mock my life expectancy?!?
Are you still with us?
No, I died of old age a week ago and now my angry ghost shall haunt the SB threads forever more.
spooky