Local News Ecology Dry And Barren Filled With Preditors

Michael Hedges April 2, 2019 - Follow on Twitter

Observers of journalism and the news media are peering into past for solutions for the future. Local news has become a rallying cry for the salvation of the news media. Nostalgia plays a large part in this. Local newspapers and, not to forget, local radio stations remain an anchor in the memory hole.

Last week Google, subsidiary of Alphabet, drew the attention of many in the news sphere with an “experiment” in local news funding. In association with publisher McClatchy’s Compass Experiment, Google will provide tech support and cash for “dozens of new local news websites around the (US) and eventually around the world,” reported Sara Fischer in Axios (March 26). The Local Experiments Project is part of the Google News Initiative, a three-year venture worth US$300 million. First recipients will be digital-only multi-media local news providers in US cities under a half-million people.

The Facebook Journalism Project was unveiled in January to “support” local news gathering and reporting. That initiative funded, along with the Online News Association and Knight Foundation, Accelerate: Local News Summit, an event for start-ups and others looking for money in Denver, Colorado (March 19). While the social media giant took a low profile (somewhat), different spokespersons waxed poetic about the need to get local news onto the Facebook News Feed (or whatever it’s called today). The tone of participants was skeptical, summarized Columbia Journalism Review (March 22). “Accepting help from the company is like the fly accepting an invitation from the spider.”

The closure of US newspapers, estimated by the AP (March 18) at 1,800 shuttered in the fifteen years since the social media explosion, put a crimp in Facebook’s Today In feature, meant to highlight local news. The criteria established required a selected source to publish five local news stories in any given day in any given month. Forty percent of US cities could not, then, be represented.

Academics looking at the phenomenon coined a new painful term: news desert. It is highlighted in the title and major theme of a 2016 paper by University of North Carolina professor and Knight scholar Penelope Muse Abernathy - The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts - describing the convergence of disappearing news outlets, weak economics and weaker societies. A news desert, thus, is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

Local radio, once a source of “grassroots” news, is also taking a beating. In the US, once with nearly 10,000 licensed local stations, ownership consolidation began in the 1980s with significant deregulation. Now local content has almost completely disappeared in favor of what one observer called “a dozen formats.” Unsurprisingly, total radio listening has fallen, to the point broadcasters demanded those figures not be reported publicly. It is a trend that has traversed the Atlantic.

The power of local media has been nefariously harnessed. The Hungarian model developed in recent years has given almost singular control over local newspapers and radio stations (with the associated online portals) outside major cities to the ruling Fidesz political party through obliging ownership. News content - essentially press releases - is distributed by the state-controlled news agency. Owners are rewarded by generous state-sponsored advertising. The model can now be seen in Serbia and Slovenia.

One truth about the disappearance of local media is indisputable. The best possible training ground for reporters, writers, editors, show hosts and producers has been inching away for decades. The result is appalling. The craft, not to forget discipline, learned by covering and presenting the stories important in local markets cannot be duplicated in the great metroplexes where big media outlets reside nor solely in the realm of online news.

Too, there is the economics of it all. Local news is the classic example of market failure or, in post-modern business-speak, it is just not “scalable.” Market failure, of course, trickles upward.

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