Local news is good for us, we’re told daily, most recently this week in a FiveThirtyEight piece and seconded by the Reliable Sources newsletter.
So, why is local news collapsing, a trend spotted over the past two years by everybody from the New York Times to the Brookings Institution to the Harvard Business Review? The blame is often placed on rapacious publishers like Alden Global Capital or online advertising giants like Facebook and Google.
A Pew Research Center survey from that year found that an astonishing 42 percent said they would miss their paper “not much” or “not at all” if it vanished.
Another marker of how scarce local news has become: Last year, when Facebook went prospecting for local news to include in a new section called “Today In,” it found that one in three of its users lived in places where there wasn’t enough local news published to sustain the section.
In her book Ghosting the News, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that her old paper, the Buffalo News, was once so flush that, for many years, “the News would send a million dollars a week” to its owner, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
The advertising dollars that once helped to support local news fled for the Web, where ads could be better paired to content—sometimes at a lower cost—to sell an advertiser’s wares.
There’s evidence that low-cost, quality national news online from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC and other outlets has siphoned off readers who might otherwise partake of local news.
Axios has set up small local news operations in a half-dozen cities and promises to expand to others, although one of its founders told the Wall Street Journal last year that its localized newsletters would focus on business, technology and education, not politics.
The groups most enthusiastic about saving and expanding local news are journalists, whose self-interest is self-evident; good-government types who savor the watchdog function of the press; tech giants like Google and Facebook, which have donated millions to local news to disarm critics who claim they destroyed newspapering ; politicians like Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, who regard the news as “infrastructure”; and academics and foundations that say local coverage is integral to a functional society.
But even if you were to underwrite local news with taxes and philanthropy, and distribute it to citizens via subsidies, you’d still have to find a way to get people to read it.