I think it's ironic (and I mean that, nothing more) that you write this piece during NPR's public melt-down. NPR is probably the prime example of a partially government-funded news organization. What could go wrong?
Eh, NPR is not funded very much by the government these days. If anything, the *reduction* in government funding for NPR appears strongly correlated with it moving further and further left in its reporting.
Those tax expenditures support a lot of conservative organizations as well (churches—freedom of religion does not require government to underwrite religious institutions, but we do).
NPR gets 1% of its funding directly from the feds. It gets 10s of millions indirectly through fed grants to local stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Or so I’ve read.
If so, no fed, no NPR.
Even at 1%, why do taxes support political propagandists?
I would also add that NPR was (is?) a poor news organization. I listened daily to Morning Edition until 2016 when Trump won the election. I didn't know it was possible he could win. So much for NPR keeping their audience informed. I found my news elsewhere after that.
"Lose its mind" isn't really wrong, but my go-to is the late and lamented Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which once had a segment where the caller had to guess what figure said such-and-such quote that was in the news, and after 2016 it literally was *always* "this stupid shit thing Donald Trump said". Literally every Saturday. And the tone wasn't exactly world-ending, but more like "ha ha remember how fucking dumb and backwards and horrible Donald Trump is?".
And while I concur wholeheartedly with that sentiment, *that is not how the game show works*!!!! Fundamentally breaking and upending the core concept of all your listeners chatting amongst themselves in the car and trying to outsmart the doofus on the call. It's like if every Jeopardy answer was "This is the color of the sky" and the winning question was "What is blue?". It completely undermines the foundation.
Man, I remember the Wait Wait, Car Talk glory days. Driving to some sports practice/game or the hardware store or road trip to my grandparents. Excellent memories.
My local public radio station, which buys a lot of their content from NPR, predicted that there was a strong possibility that Trump would win even though we are in a blue city in a blue state. ( I lot of people thought the director of the station was nuts for predicting this though). So this is another indication that a more diffuse news system might lead to better news.
Actually being government-funded might impose a stricter requirement to report in a way that serves the public broadly? I could imagine that producing good outcomes rather than bad ones.
It's a shame that NPR decided to go all in on progressive hackery because (public) radio is probably one of the better ones for a news organization in 2024. It doesn't have as much of the studio overhead of live TV, but its also something you can just put on in the car or in the background when you do something else, you can cut it up into chunks to put on podcast apps for non-live listening, and there's enough time in the broadcast day to balance out the news/politics content with fluffy, non-ideological, normie-appealing shows and interviews.
If I understand the jist of Ben's idea, it's not to replicate the NPR model so much as to tell local newspapers, "Here's some free money - take it, don't take it - publish what you want, don't publish what you don't want, it's up to you."
I was thinking of that example throughout this piece too. If you were going to get bipartisan buy-in on this, I wonder if a requirement that local news organizations that make use of the tax credit have some kind of viewpoint diversity quota would support from Republicans.
This would quite predictably generate a mass of local, Buzzfeed listicle quality “local” newspapers (check out my original piece, “Top 10 Sidewalks in Springfield”), all priced at $taxcredit-1.
I agree, these targeted subsidies won’t do anything about the real problem.
The real problem is that there’s too much competition in the modern attention economy. Under sufficient competition, everyone is forced to follow the same incentives, and everything gets squished into the same market and psychology optimized shape.
The only real solution is RETVRN to less competition. My recommendation is a plausibly deniable regulatory agenda to kneecap the modern internet, by, for example, fucking up cell spectrum licensing and cell tower zoning regulation, ending local loop unbundling and net neutrality, and creating a world where broadband ISPs have real monopoly power over local digital communication.
The 1st amendment will live on in physical paper, but our society needs to get some kind of handle on the Molochian race to the bottom that is the modern open internet.
My biggest frustration with local news here in Chicago isn't that it doesn't exist or seems to be lacking coverage: but the quality. Very little understanding of statistics and confusing of type one and type two errors. Main example recently is coverage over the debate whether to keep shotspotter.
Drives me crazy that local news editors seem to universally have no understanding of formal logic or statistics when approving stories.
Sham 'newspapers' would use the tax credit for journalist employees to finance some kind of dodgy business that's not really a newspaper. In between that and the tax credit for readers, you'd be financing a huge number of scams. I doubt the government has the capability to really go in and examine whether each business claiming the tax credit is actually a 'newspaper', so maybe your local building supply company or restaurant publishes a couple articles on Facebook and pretends their employees are 'journalists'. Customers can redeem their 'tax credit' in exchange for reduced prices or something
I haven’t looked at it recently, don’t know how successful it ended up being, but this was basically done by ESPN. Setting up reporters and pages for local beats. I vaguely recall it not ending well, but it seems similar to this notion.
I go back and forth over whether this really is much of a problem, let alone one that requires government subsidies.
The immediate ways I can see this going wrong is seeing to what extremes recipient can publish content. They could go full gossip/scare story and scan the local police blotters for arrests. They could go full shill and run PR work for businesses and nonprofits in the local community. (A lot of local TV news from my experience has plenty of these two types). And, as the NPR saga is teaching us, every publication is going to have its bias from who they hire and what they cover. So they could also go full ideologue and push an agenda within what they report on. And any sort of attempts to try to prevent publications from doing any of this is going to fall into First Amendment problems very quickly.
We're all in shock that the aberration of the mid-late 20th century of limited mass media with large audiences is gone, and we're reverting to the wilder times of the 19th century. But we're still relatively early in the transition, and I think we'll see some phoenix rebirths alongside just outright deaths. That's been my experience here in Boise, at the very least, which is by no means a major media market.
Maybe people in bigger cities thought local news was fine five years ago but rural America saw local news falling apart in the early 2000's. I remember talking about it with my dad back in 2004, the group that owned USA Today had bought out or local news and it got way worse.
Also, there is lots of "local news" but its all free on Facebook and other social media. My boomer parents and many others get all the local gossip and stories through social media now. It's dumbed down the discourse by getting rid of local policy stuff but it's given people what they really want from local news "Why is Becky such a heathen", "That preacher pulled his dick out at a Wendy's" and "Did you hear what so and so said at the church potluck".
"it's given people what they really want from local news "Why is Becky such a heathen", "That preacher pulled his dick out at a Wendy's" and "Did you hear what so and so said at the church potluck"."
See, that's the problem right there; that's gossip, not news. News would be something like "City council to vote on XYZ resolution that would affect zoning/housing/a new homeless shelter/bicycle paths, be informed so you'll know how to vote in the next local election! Want more housing? Support Councilmember Smith, who pledged to vote yes on YIMBY 2024!" That's what it means to be a well-informed electorate, not who did a public indecency at a fast food place.
I love my local paper, pay ~$400/year for it despite its myriad faults, and love to give new friends a short subscription when they move to town. But I don't accept this kind of justification for large-scale federal interventions:
> [Tim Franklin] cited studies linking the decline of local news to lower civic participation, lower turnout in local elections, and even more wasteful public spending.
The "linked to" rationale is, at its very best, a cause for further research. In most cases, it's just a paper-thin post-hoc rationalization of the researcher's preferences.
Our relationship to government is changing at every level; our methods of collecting and processing information is changing, at every level. Things are moving rapidly and it's hard to see where we're headed. I respect established institutions that have clear popular support, but don't support taking heroic steps to preserve a status quo that very few people seem to want.
Totally agree that our relationship to government is changing. “We” are the problem! I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t see how a democracy can function for very long with an electorate as ill-informed and unwilling to participate in a meaningful way as the one toward which we seem to be heading.
When I think about issues like this, I’m reminded of some fictional characters (though I can’t recall the exact quotes). In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart *wants* to be noble, moral, and courageous in her choices, but she wishes it were easier. In a novel about Americans living in Paris (I think Le Divorce?), a character observes that unlike Americans, French people understand that in order to live well, one must be willing to do the difficult things and not just give in to temptation all of the time.
As someone said here (I think, or on another of my substacks?) the other day, many Americans’ revealed preference is to be obese and unmarried. Similarly, many “choose” to while away large swaths of time consuming the “content” equivalent of doritos. Nobody can make us want better things, but we have to live with the consequences of our actual choices.
Not sure that I claimed that "the electorate is substantially less informed than it used to be." I don't know how informed it used to be. I have run no RCTs. But having spent countless hours over the past decade planning, managing, and participating in public processes, I have learned that it's pretty easy for people to coalesce in opposition to things, and really, really hard to draw people together to engage in a sustained and meaningful way in favor of things, at least in the places (big and small) I've lived. Maybe it's always been like that.
A lot of this resonates - Lily Bart's story is one of my favorite themes in literature.
Nonetheless, I'm more optimistic about these developments - mostly due to my personality I'm sure, but I think a bird's-eye view of history makes the optimism plausible, even if isn't exactly an argument. Like CoT wrote elsewhere in this thread, I think we're at the very beginning of an extremely disruptive historical transition. I think these changes will necessarily involve rebuilding chains of trust from the ground up *, and that will drive us in a more local direction, eventually inducing better engagement with our physical communities. On top of the structural economic reasons Matt has written about so well, local news can't really compete with the drama and glamour of national or global politics.
* Partly due to AI, but also because our brains are poorly suited to deal with globalized streams of information and expertise.
I broadly agree that we're in a period of transition (though as an Old I hope it doesn't take *too* long). Sometimes (like this week, when among other things I'm surrounded by gloating NIMBYs celebrating the demise of a long-planned project in my neighborhood) it's a little harder to imagine it. I do think you're right about "globalized streams of information and expertise" - ultimately it's unsatisfying and kind of experience machine-y to spend too much time focused on things that have very little to do with our actual lives.
A day later... I really like this "gift a local subscription to new locals" idea, and I'm going to do this with my future new hires. Annoyingly, it seems like I can only do one month--I'd prefer something like six months.
Is it consensus that a local library is still essential to a community? I actually don't see local news as analogous to either your Vietnamese restaurant or the library because of the watchdog role that a local news source should play.
Yes, libraries are absolutely essential! Libraries are awesome! We should support libraries.
A library is a rare example of a "third space" (not home, not work/school) where people may enter without paying or being expected to spend money, like a shopping mall or coffee shop. It's protected from the elements, so you can stay there regardless of the weather, unlike a public park or hiking trail. Not only can you check out free books (a wonderful thing in and of itself), you can just sit down and rest and relax for a while, which can be absolutely invaluable for, say, a teenager with abusive parents at home. And if your home is warm and loving, sometimes it still feels good to have a change of scenery. If you need to sit down and really focus on a work or school project without your young children pulling on your leg and your cat sitting on your keyboard, you can go to your local public library.
In addition, many (most?) libraries offer public services for free, anything from story time for young children to activities for the elderly to helping immigrants fill out their US citizenship applications. In women's restrooms at some libraries, I've seen signs: "Is your spouse/partner abusive/scary? Call this helpline." This can be an absolute lifeline for someone who is being abused and doesn't know where to turn. My local library has a ballot drop-box in the front.
Back when I lived in Boston, I would often go to the public library in Copley Square, not necessarily to check out books, but just to hang out and relax. I liked the atmosphere. The majestic stone facade had a quote on it, I forget the exact words, but it was something about how an educated public is essential for democracy.
Yes, I would say so. Library budget votes pass more than any other types of votes. (This may change in the near future with all the publicity about libraries supposedly harming children in red areas ) I visit my state legislature on library advocacy (i.e. lobby) day, and some of the most conservative Republican legislators are libraries biggest supporters because of what they hear from their constituents. (This is New York State, though). This has been eye-opening to me. Urban and rural communities tend to support their libraries more, but there is still strong support in suburban areas
I think, like schools, libraries are often expected to take on too much - e.g. other agencies tell people the library will help them navigate unemployment or SNAP or citizenship applications, but those are not areas of expertise of library staff, although they try as best they can.
Tax incentives are the least onerous government subsidy.
But you also have to define who is eligible. This essay focuses on written news but what about TV, video, audio? This might just be a huge subsidy to Sinclair. Unfortunately, people are very good at gaming tax incentives, but I think this is worth exploring at the state level to see if it’s workable.
I don’t spend much time on it, but where I live, a lot of local “news” and info is found on Nextdoor. I wonder if a social media company that is locally focused like that might have the revenue to hire journalists.
Media outlets should stop requiring journalists to have journalism degrees (especially journalism degrees from Columbia and Northwestern). Journalists having specific subject-matter knowledge other than journalism will write better content.
Isn't this issue one where we all need to undertake the "slow boring of hard boards?" (if I correctly remember the quote.) Much of this discourse waves away the demand side problem. It also reflects a golden glow memory of the past. I guess I'm saying we still need a more complete understanding of why people don't seem to want the nice nutritious diet of local news that the journallists say we need.
Many (most?) people likely never wanted it. They consumed the local news for the rest of the bundle in weather, news, sports, entertainment, job listings, and so on, that let the news be a loss leader.
Exactly. As I think further about this, I wonder if it shouldn't be reframed as "how can the people who want more local news still manage to get it?" Perhaps it's an argument for more (are there any?) local news substacks or substack-like mechanisms.
I subscribe to a local news substack for my city and honestly it is pretty bad. It is hard for me to see that as a viable path forward.
Actual journalism, as opposed to the opinion columns Matt and 99% of other substack writers are able to fire off 3-5 times a week, just requires way more effort than a substack can sustain financially.
My local substack author frequently goes essentially dark (realistically posting pointless content or just regurgitating something from a single source that sounds little better than a paid advertisement) because he's spending weeks following stories that go nowhere, or require more work, or whatever.
Or, alternatively, he sometimes gets stuck on some issue I don't care about and posts mostly about that for two or three weeks.
I feel like you'd need to have something like 3-5 journalists on staff to have meaty enough stories on a regular enough basis.
There's maybe a dozen substacks in the world making enough money for that to work.
Exactly. The issue is lack of interest in local goings-on. One enterprising journalist with a Substack (or whatever) can do all that is needed on real local news (zoning, elections, budgets), but whether that will be economic for that person depends on whether anyone in the community really cares
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.
Who will bell the cat? I think you are creating a large agency to check on all the newspapers meeting your standards. That said, I do like your idea. I also read Mr. Will's opinion piece and it is consistent with his usual political stand. "The attention span of a fruit fly." This statement points to a problem that I don't think we can overcome - people don't read much anymore. The National Enquier newspaper has solved this problem with many large headlines and pictures. I would appreciate hearing more of your thoughts on this issue.
You've talked me into getting an online subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. I'm not sure if that's the best source of local news for the Bay Area, but it must be better than nothing.
I think it's ironic (and I mean that, nothing more) that you write this piece during NPR's public melt-down. NPR is probably the prime example of a partially government-funded news organization. What could go wrong?
Eh, NPR is not funded very much by the government these days. If anything, the *reduction* in government funding for NPR appears strongly correlated with it moving further and further left in its reporting.
You, too, may be forgetting about the tax expenditures driven by donations.
Those tax expenditures support a lot of conservative organizations as well (churches—freedom of religion does not require government to underwrite religious institutions, but we do).
That has jackshit to do with the point here?
NPR gets 1% of its funding directly from the feds. It gets 10s of millions indirectly through fed grants to local stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Or so I’ve read.
If so, no fed, no NPR.
Even at 1%, why do taxes support political propagandists?
I would also add that NPR was (is?) a poor news organization. I listened daily to Morning Edition until 2016 when Trump won the election. I didn't know it was possible he could win. So much for NPR keeping their audience informed. I found my news elsewhere after that.
I kept listening a little while after the election, when NPR seemed to collectively lose its f***ing mind.
"Lose its mind" isn't really wrong, but my go-to is the late and lamented Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which once had a segment where the caller had to guess what figure said such-and-such quote that was in the news, and after 2016 it literally was *always* "this stupid shit thing Donald Trump said". Literally every Saturday. And the tone wasn't exactly world-ending, but more like "ha ha remember how fucking dumb and backwards and horrible Donald Trump is?".
And while I concur wholeheartedly with that sentiment, *that is not how the game show works*!!!! Fundamentally breaking and upending the core concept of all your listeners chatting amongst themselves in the car and trying to outsmart the doofus on the call. It's like if every Jeopardy answer was "This is the color of the sky" and the winning question was "What is blue?". It completely undermines the foundation.
Man, I remember the Wait Wait, Car Talk glory days. Driving to some sports practice/game or the hardware store or road trip to my grandparents. Excellent memories.
And "My Word" and "My Music."
And here we are some 7-8 years later and many minds seem still to be lost.
My local public radio station, which buys a lot of their content from NPR, predicted that there was a strong possibility that Trump would win even though we are in a blue city in a blue state. ( I lot of people thought the director of the station was nuts for predicting this though). So this is another indication that a more diffuse news system might lead to better news.
"Partially" is doing a lot of work here. The vast bulk of NPR funding comes from donations.
Actually being government-funded might impose a stricter requirement to report in a way that serves the public broadly? I could imagine that producing good outcomes rather than bad ones.
Those corporate and individual donations qualify as tax deductions that drive government expenditures that you may not be counting.
NPR is a *media* organization. I might try to argue that their apparent attempt to pivot toward news qua news is a big part of their problem.
It's a shame that NPR decided to go all in on progressive hackery because (public) radio is probably one of the better ones for a news organization in 2024. It doesn't have as much of the studio overhead of live TV, but its also something you can just put on in the car or in the background when you do something else, you can cut it up into chunks to put on podcast apps for non-live listening, and there's enough time in the broadcast day to balance out the news/politics content with fluffy, non-ideological, normie-appealing shows and interviews.
If I understand the jist of Ben's idea, it's not to replicate the NPR model so much as to tell local newspapers, "Here's some free money - take it, don't take it - publish what you want, don't publish what you don't want, it's up to you."
Isn't that the NPR model?
I was thinking of that example throughout this piece too. If you were going to get bipartisan buy-in on this, I wonder if a requirement that local news organizations that make use of the tax credit have some kind of viewpoint diversity quota would support from Republicans.
This would quite predictably generate a mass of local, Buzzfeed listicle quality “local” newspapers (check out my original piece, “Top 10 Sidewalks in Springfield”), all priced at $taxcredit-1.
I agree, these targeted subsidies won’t do anything about the real problem.
The real problem is that there’s too much competition in the modern attention economy. Under sufficient competition, everyone is forced to follow the same incentives, and everything gets squished into the same market and psychology optimized shape.
The only real solution is RETVRN to less competition. My recommendation is a plausibly deniable regulatory agenda to kneecap the modern internet, by, for example, fucking up cell spectrum licensing and cell tower zoning regulation, ending local loop unbundling and net neutrality, and creating a world where broadband ISPs have real monopoly power over local digital communication.
The 1st amendment will live on in physical paper, but our society needs to get some kind of handle on the Molochian race to the bottom that is the modern open internet.
My biggest frustration with local news here in Chicago isn't that it doesn't exist or seems to be lacking coverage: but the quality. Very little understanding of statistics and confusing of type one and type two errors. Main example recently is coverage over the debate whether to keep shotspotter.
Drives me crazy that local news editors seem to universally have no understanding of formal logic or statistics when approving stories.
To be fair, national news editors aren't a heck of lot better!
Sham 'newspapers' would use the tax credit for journalist employees to finance some kind of dodgy business that's not really a newspaper. In between that and the tax credit for readers, you'd be financing a huge number of scams. I doubt the government has the capability to really go in and examine whether each business claiming the tax credit is actually a 'newspaper', so maybe your local building supply company or restaurant publishes a couple articles on Facebook and pretends their employees are 'journalists'. Customers can redeem their 'tax credit' in exchange for reduced prices or something
It’s a UBI with a “journalism” requirement.
I've always wondered why national newspapers haven't added a local news add-on
Like if the NYT gave me the ability to buy a local Cleveland beat to my homepage there I would do it in a heartbeat
Maybe even a "What this means for Ohio/Cleveland" addendum to some national stories
Axios Local is trying
I haven’t looked at it recently, don’t know how successful it ended up being, but this was basically done by ESPN. Setting up reporters and pages for local beats. I vaguely recall it not ending well, but it seems similar to this notion.
Agree, I've been thinking the same. They have the economic muscle to do it
I go back and forth over whether this really is much of a problem, let alone one that requires government subsidies.
The immediate ways I can see this going wrong is seeing to what extremes recipient can publish content. They could go full gossip/scare story and scan the local police blotters for arrests. They could go full shill and run PR work for businesses and nonprofits in the local community. (A lot of local TV news from my experience has plenty of these two types). And, as the NPR saga is teaching us, every publication is going to have its bias from who they hire and what they cover. So they could also go full ideologue and push an agenda within what they report on. And any sort of attempts to try to prevent publications from doing any of this is going to fall into First Amendment problems very quickly.
We're all in shock that the aberration of the mid-late 20th century of limited mass media with large audiences is gone, and we're reverting to the wilder times of the 19th century. But we're still relatively early in the transition, and I think we'll see some phoenix rebirths alongside just outright deaths. That's been my experience here in Boise, at the very least, which is by no means a major media market.
Maybe people in bigger cities thought local news was fine five years ago but rural America saw local news falling apart in the early 2000's. I remember talking about it with my dad back in 2004, the group that owned USA Today had bought out or local news and it got way worse.
Also, there is lots of "local news" but its all free on Facebook and other social media. My boomer parents and many others get all the local gossip and stories through social media now. It's dumbed down the discourse by getting rid of local policy stuff but it's given people what they really want from local news "Why is Becky such a heathen", "That preacher pulled his dick out at a Wendy's" and "Did you hear what so and so said at the church potluck".
"it's given people what they really want from local news "Why is Becky such a heathen", "That preacher pulled his dick out at a Wendy's" and "Did you hear what so and so said at the church potluck"."
See, that's the problem right there; that's gossip, not news. News would be something like "City council to vote on XYZ resolution that would affect zoning/housing/a new homeless shelter/bicycle paths, be informed so you'll know how to vote in the next local election! Want more housing? Support Councilmember Smith, who pledged to vote yes on YIMBY 2024!" That's what it means to be a well-informed electorate, not who did a public indecency at a fast food place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpxMUaSH4oQ
Knowing Homer is better at differentiating between opinion and fact than many Americans puts this bit in a new light.
> See, that's the problem right there; that's gossip, not news.
That’s just a classic 90s tick tock, it’s just about people no one assumes are important.
I love my local paper, pay ~$400/year for it despite its myriad faults, and love to give new friends a short subscription when they move to town. But I don't accept this kind of justification for large-scale federal interventions:
> [Tim Franklin] cited studies linking the decline of local news to lower civic participation, lower turnout in local elections, and even more wasteful public spending.
The "linked to" rationale is, at its very best, a cause for further research. In most cases, it's just a paper-thin post-hoc rationalization of the researcher's preferences.
Our relationship to government is changing at every level; our methods of collecting and processing information is changing, at every level. Things are moving rapidly and it's hard to see where we're headed. I respect established institutions that have clear popular support, but don't support taking heroic steps to preserve a status quo that very few people seem to want.
Totally agree that our relationship to government is changing. “We” are the problem! I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t see how a democracy can function for very long with an electorate as ill-informed and unwilling to participate in a meaningful way as the one toward which we seem to be heading.
When I think about issues like this, I’m reminded of some fictional characters (though I can’t recall the exact quotes). In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart *wants* to be noble, moral, and courageous in her choices, but she wishes it were easier. In a novel about Americans living in Paris (I think Le Divorce?), a character observes that unlike Americans, French people understand that in order to live well, one must be willing to do the difficult things and not just give in to temptation all of the time.
As someone said here (I think, or on another of my substacks?) the other day, many Americans’ revealed preference is to be obese and unmarried. Similarly, many “choose” to while away large swaths of time consuming the “content” equivalent of doritos. Nobody can make us want better things, but we have to live with the consequences of our actual choices.
This sentiment that the electorate is substantially less informed than it used to be--I think this *strongly* requires evidentiary backing.
Not sure that I claimed that "the electorate is substantially less informed than it used to be." I don't know how informed it used to be. I have run no RCTs. But having spent countless hours over the past decade planning, managing, and participating in public processes, I have learned that it's pretty easy for people to coalesce in opposition to things, and really, really hard to draw people together to engage in a sustained and meaningful way in favor of things, at least in the places (big and small) I've lived. Maybe it's always been like that.
A lot of this resonates - Lily Bart's story is one of my favorite themes in literature.
Nonetheless, I'm more optimistic about these developments - mostly due to my personality I'm sure, but I think a bird's-eye view of history makes the optimism plausible, even if isn't exactly an argument. Like CoT wrote elsewhere in this thread, I think we're at the very beginning of an extremely disruptive historical transition. I think these changes will necessarily involve rebuilding chains of trust from the ground up *, and that will drive us in a more local direction, eventually inducing better engagement with our physical communities. On top of the structural economic reasons Matt has written about so well, local news can't really compete with the drama and glamour of national or global politics.
* Partly due to AI, but also because our brains are poorly suited to deal with globalized streams of information and expertise.
I broadly agree that we're in a period of transition (though as an Old I hope it doesn't take *too* long). Sometimes (like this week, when among other things I'm surrounded by gloating NIMBYs celebrating the demise of a long-planned project in my neighborhood) it's a little harder to imagine it. I do think you're right about "globalized streams of information and expertise" - ultimately it's unsatisfying and kind of experience machine-y to spend too much time focused on things that have very little to do with our actual lives.
A day later... I really like this "gift a local subscription to new locals" idea, and I'm going to do this with my future new hires. Annoyingly, it seems like I can only do one month--I'd prefer something like six months.
Is it consensus that a local library is still essential to a community? I actually don't see local news as analogous to either your Vietnamese restaurant or the library because of the watchdog role that a local news source should play.
Yes, libraries are absolutely essential! Libraries are awesome! We should support libraries.
A library is a rare example of a "third space" (not home, not work/school) where people may enter without paying or being expected to spend money, like a shopping mall or coffee shop. It's protected from the elements, so you can stay there regardless of the weather, unlike a public park or hiking trail. Not only can you check out free books (a wonderful thing in and of itself), you can just sit down and rest and relax for a while, which can be absolutely invaluable for, say, a teenager with abusive parents at home. And if your home is warm and loving, sometimes it still feels good to have a change of scenery. If you need to sit down and really focus on a work or school project without your young children pulling on your leg and your cat sitting on your keyboard, you can go to your local public library.
In addition, many (most?) libraries offer public services for free, anything from story time for young children to activities for the elderly to helping immigrants fill out their US citizenship applications. In women's restrooms at some libraries, I've seen signs: "Is your spouse/partner abusive/scary? Call this helpline." This can be an absolute lifeline for someone who is being abused and doesn't know where to turn. My local library has a ballot drop-box in the front.
Back when I lived in Boston, I would often go to the public library in Copley Square, not necessarily to check out books, but just to hang out and relax. I liked the atmosphere. The majestic stone facade had a quote on it, I forget the exact words, but it was something about how an educated public is essential for democracy.
Long live public libraries!
In fairness, Copley Square Library is one of the world's best, so that's not quite a fair comparison. It has carved in its stonework
THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY
and only an institution that good can pull that off without even a hint of irony.
So let them run digital newspapers. :) That people could subscribe to with a partial tax credit contribution.
Amen.
Yes, I would say so. Library budget votes pass more than any other types of votes. (This may change in the near future with all the publicity about libraries supposedly harming children in red areas ) I visit my state legislature on library advocacy (i.e. lobby) day, and some of the most conservative Republican legislators are libraries biggest supporters because of what they hear from their constituents. (This is New York State, though). This has been eye-opening to me. Urban and rural communities tend to support their libraries more, but there is still strong support in suburban areas
I think, like schools, libraries are often expected to take on too much - e.g. other agencies tell people the library will help them navigate unemployment or SNAP or citizenship applications, but those are not areas of expertise of library staff, although they try as best they can.
I'd say local news coverage is *less* dispensable than a local physical library
Tax incentives are the least onerous government subsidy.
But you also have to define who is eligible. This essay focuses on written news but what about TV, video, audio? This might just be a huge subsidy to Sinclair. Unfortunately, people are very good at gaming tax incentives, but I think this is worth exploring at the state level to see if it’s workable.
I don’t spend much time on it, but where I live, a lot of local “news” and info is found on Nextdoor. I wonder if a social media company that is locally focused like that might have the revenue to hire journalists.
Media outlets should stop requiring journalists to have journalism degrees (especially journalism degrees from Columbia and Northwestern). Journalists having specific subject-matter knowledge other than journalism will write better content.
Local news outlets
A) do not require journalism degrees
B) particularly not institution specific degrees
Isn't this issue one where we all need to undertake the "slow boring of hard boards?" (if I correctly remember the quote.) Much of this discourse waves away the demand side problem. It also reflects a golden glow memory of the past. I guess I'm saying we still need a more complete understanding of why people don't seem to want the nice nutritious diet of local news that the journallists say we need.
Many (most?) people likely never wanted it. They consumed the local news for the rest of the bundle in weather, news, sports, entertainment, job listings, and so on, that let the news be a loss leader.
Exactly. As I think further about this, I wonder if it shouldn't be reframed as "how can the people who want more local news still manage to get it?" Perhaps it's an argument for more (are there any?) local news substacks or substack-like mechanisms.
It's probably a return to some combination of subscriptions and finding charitable benefactors, both models of which come with other tradeoffs.
I subscribe to a local news substack for my city and honestly it is pretty bad. It is hard for me to see that as a viable path forward.
Actual journalism, as opposed to the opinion columns Matt and 99% of other substack writers are able to fire off 3-5 times a week, just requires way more effort than a substack can sustain financially.
My local substack author frequently goes essentially dark (realistically posting pointless content or just regurgitating something from a single source that sounds little better than a paid advertisement) because he's spending weeks following stories that go nowhere, or require more work, or whatever.
Or, alternatively, he sometimes gets stuck on some issue I don't care about and posts mostly about that for two or three weeks.
I feel like you'd need to have something like 3-5 journalists on staff to have meaty enough stories on a regular enough basis.
There's maybe a dozen substacks in the world making enough money for that to work.
One Billion Substacks.
(One day I will get tired of posting "One Billion XYZ" on Slow Boring, but that day is not today.)
"One day I will get tired of posting "One Billion XYZ" on Slow Boring, but..."
...only after One Billion Postings.
Someone needed to get Matt to do the Dr. Evil pinky pose and say "One Billion Americans!".
It would have made an awesome jacket photo for his book.
Exactly. The issue is lack of interest in local goings-on. One enterprising journalist with a Substack (or whatever) can do all that is needed on real local news (zoning, elections, budgets), but whether that will be economic for that person depends on whether anyone in the community really cares
Not going to lie- I clicked on the monkey hugging a kitten video.
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.
Who will bell the cat? I think you are creating a large agency to check on all the newspapers meeting your standards. That said, I do like your idea. I also read Mr. Will's opinion piece and it is consistent with his usual political stand. "The attention span of a fruit fly." This statement points to a problem that I don't think we can overcome - people don't read much anymore. The National Enquier newspaper has solved this problem with many large headlines and pictures. I would appreciate hearing more of your thoughts on this issue.
You've talked me into getting an online subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. I'm not sure if that's the best source of local news for the Bay Area, but it must be better than nothing.
The best news in my area is so good I donate to them even though they have no paywall.