The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers).
All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.
Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.
So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.
This discounts the critical role of local news in informing citizens about the performance of and candidates for local government, as well as the investigative role. If the above is all we have in most municipalities, America will likely become a high corruption country.
This discounts the possibility that at lower levels of government, America might already be a high corruption country.
Let’s break this down:
1. The performance of the local government. You can already see this when you talk with your neighbors or walk or drive around the streets. Are the potholes in your area getting filled? Are the police doing a decent job? Are houses burning down left and right? Are your kids coming home from school and not getting progressively more literate and numerate? To the extent that there is room in the market for even more coverage of the local government, it really depends on how big the local bureaucracy is.
2. Candidates in local elections. Did you know it was the job of candidates running for office to get themselves and their message in front of as many people in their constituency as they can? They have a message to sell, and if they are at all effective, they’ll sell it as widely as possible. If the local papers and broadcasters aren’t doing the job, they’ll find other ways to get their message out or else just lose the election. Anybody with any interest against this candidate will also be selling messages to get in front of you, in whatever channels you’re paying attention. I don’t think we’re any less informed about our politicians than we ever were, it’s simply a matter of how interested we are in what they do for us. For example, I care very much who is repping me on the Board of Supervisors, but without children of my own, I struggle to stay interested in school board elections, and I find it questionable that we are electing any judges at all.
3. Investigative journalism. This is a separate kind of informational product, and there is a generally competitive market here, but the trick is to see each story as a separate product. Organizations which attempt to specialize in this product tend to not bring in much revenue, but the investigative arm of an organization can bring prestige to the whole organization by putting out investigative products. In any case, investigative journalism does not stand on its own without a supporting organization, and brings in more revenue if you get a book deal.
I don’t think all we have is all that I outlined above. I think the market supports reporting and editorializing just fine, but for the local variants, there just isn’t a lot of demand for the same kind of reporting, maybe because the stakes are lower, maybe because people are just less interested in the community they live in, or maybe there’s less government, less stuff, to keep tabs on.
Not a great comparison. Of course exercise has intrinsic value! It’s just the grueling hard work that used to be life isn’t such grueling hard work anymore, and we haven’t yet adapted to that. It’s too easy to not work hard and make a good living, and a symptom of that is obesity. There’s still vocations out there that are hard, but most jobs don’t require you to lift more than 50 pounds and only infrequently at that.
Exercise as a hobby has no intrinsic value though. You either do it for whatever reasons that you find compelling, or you don’t.
Getting back to the local news, I guess the way for it to be more compelling is for your local market to be more interesting, or for the people in that market to be more interested in their neighbors. I am struggling to find a niche in there that can’t be filled in other ways by a hundred other means. I think the case for local news these days is only when a market is so big that keeping tabs on the goings on of the city’s bureaucracy is a full time job, and even then, only to the extent that the bureaucracy has an effect on people’s daily lives. I think the market has already mostly optimized for this. You’re not going to make the product as it existed in the 20th Century any more compelling than it is now, unless conditions in the market change to allow for this. I think we’re going to have to collectively let go of our romantic notions of the local paper from times past.
This strikes me as conspicuously focused on market value.
The market will only find a solution if it is profitable to find one.
I don't think most people who are concerned about the loss of "local news" are concerned about anything NextDoor or Facebook have creatively virtualized.
The market is nothing more than a resource allocation methodology for exchanging resources, goods and services for other resources, goods and services.
The local news is nothing more than another set of market participants. There actually are markets where the local news receives enough revenue to be competitive, I live in one of them. To those that don’t, they’ll find replacements or other ways to adapt because it turns out people are pretty damn creative.
People concerned about the loss of local news aren't concerned about the reallocation of attentional resources and eyeball-seconds. They don't agree that the social value of local news is equal to the market value.
Where exactly are you drawing the distinction between the social and market value?
The local news is just another type of information, and if you don’t spend your money on it, you’re at least spending your time. Near as I can tell, the people who are concerned about the loss of local news are concerning themselves with how people are choosing to not spend their time. The people most concerned with this are the people whose jobs are on the line or lost because of how people weren’t spending their time and/or money, and due to the nature of their jobs, are or have been in the position to complain in a very vocal and visible manner.
Sorry for the slow response. Came down with a cold and haven't felt very lucid.
I'm just talking about positive externalities: anywhere the social value created by producing + consuming local news exceeds the social cost of producing + consuming it.
It seems like you're focused more on the consumption side (i.e., pearl-clutching over whether people spend their time/money consuming local news, or whatever they spend time/money on instead). I wouldn't say that the consumption side is irrelevant, but I'm more concerned about the production side. For example:
The social value of reporting out a local corruption scandal isn't necessarily linked to the market value of the associated column-inches. The lion's share of the social value comes from rooting out the corruption.
Try flipping it around. If a news outlet had enough metrics on past scandal coverage to know that breaking it won't increase profits, should they make a shrewd decision to accept payment from one or more participants in the scandal to bury the story, save the time on reporting it out, and run a wire piece in its place?
> The local news isn’t an intrinsically valuable product, that’s why it is often subsidized or paid for by people who are paying to get a message in front of you (advertisers).
This is a myopic take that ignores externalities. Local news has significant positive externalities: better informed citizens (important for a democracy), anti-corruption effects, etc.
All the other value in a newspaper, which is largely entertainment, is accruing to a few big publishers or spreading to some combination of websites, blogs, podcasts or email newsletters.
Financial news is one of the big exceptions because people can adjust their positions, and the paper can earn its keep in subscription revenue.
So what’s the solution? If there is a solution to be had, the market will find it, but near as I can tell, the local news by itself just isn’t very compelling in most places, and that’s probably because most places are pretty boring and there are other institutions for getting word around about this or that: Church, blogs, neighborhood meetings, Facebook groups, NextDoor, Slack, or whatever.