Local news is under even more stress than before, with an increasing number of "news deserts" where local coverage is nearly nonexistent. The only bright spot, according to this article, is local TV news. Gift link (New York Times): The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer
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"The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer"
- Thread starter Mark Roberts
- Start date
I posted this link on another discussion about the changes in news and media, particularly at SI. I subscribe to a podcast from the NY Times called Hardfork, which did a great job of explaining the recent, and not-so-recent changes in what's considered traditional media:
For anyone interested in media, or is struggling with understanding the changes, give this a listen/watch because these guys hit the nail on the head:
It depends on what you call news. There's lots of free information that appears to be based on news available on the web. Its up to the reader to determine if it's based on facts or not.
The problem is the funding. Right now, most news is either ad-supported or subscriber supported. Neither of them are dependable. There have been discussions about having government support of news, but that gets into a very sticky first amendment situation, as well as the issue over who is a journalist and who is not. Who decides who is a journalist? What criteria is used? Those are the kinds of questions being asked.
There was an assumption that if the FCC created a bunch of low power TV & radio stations, they would create hyper-local news services. As it turns out, that didn't happen. Instead you mostly have either hobbyists running music stations or religious groups running religious stations. Once again, the issue is funding. The smaller the coverage area, the smaller the potential revenue.
Then you have the disinformation groups. You have politicians and celebrities who are attacking news organizations, making it harder for them to get funding, and to get credibility with audiences. So it's a complicated situation.
www.editorandpublisher.com
The problem is the funding. Right now, most news is either ad-supported or subscriber supported. Neither of them are dependable. There have been discussions about having government support of news, but that gets into a very sticky first amendment situation, as well as the issue over who is a journalist and who is not. Who decides who is a journalist? What criteria is used? Those are the kinds of questions being asked.
There was an assumption that if the FCC created a bunch of low power TV & radio stations, they would create hyper-local news services. As it turns out, that didn't happen. Instead you mostly have either hobbyists running music stations or religious groups running religious stations. Once again, the issue is funding. The smaller the coverage area, the smaller the potential revenue.
Then you have the disinformation groups. You have politicians and celebrities who are attacking news organizations, making it harder for them to get funding, and to get credibility with audiences. So it's a complicated situation.
The future of funding journalism - Editor and Publisher
One of the evergreen questions Editor & Publisher ponders as we chronicle today’s business of news is: How will newsrooms — now and in the future — be funded? As we stand, one quarter into 2023, it felt timely to reach out to news publishers to hear their goals for revenue this year; how their...
www.editorandpublisher.com
Mark, gift links (at least at the Gray Lady) are one-and-done. I send you a gift link to some article, you click on it, you read the piece, and it's used up. You can't forward it to a third party and pass it along. You definitely can't post it to a message board and have 100 other people expect to click on it and read it. (Unless someone's adept at slugging through screens of raw HTML code.)
It worked for me.
Me too.
I don't.
I was able to read the article and I don’t subscribe.
The gift links works for everyone who clicks on that particular link.
This has been happening a long time. Print has been hurting for years. When I worked small market border stations, no local station did any local news whatsoever. In one market, the daily paper was pretty dominant but now struggles with 2 people in the building and 2 editions a week. The free weekly just went subscription because print costs have gone up so much. In another market, 3 of the 4 towns the station serves had their newspapers go under and the 4th went from weekly to 26 a year. The sole local station is barely hanging on and never replaced their news director when they got a new gig.
Meanwhile, crowdsourced news sites, such as Barstool Sports, are becoming billion dollar businesses.
The future for journalism is probably something like that, where the writers get a percentage of the business their stories attract.
The New York Times has become a brand, and its podcasts are among the most popular in the world. That's a business model that works.
The future for journalism is probably something like that, where the writers get a percentage of the business their stories attract.
The New York Times has become a brand, and its podcasts are among the most popular in the world. That's a business model that works.
Indeed, and this has been something the journalism commentariat kept overlooking as long as regional prestige newspapers were raking in the money. Until they weren't. What was going on in broadcast, particularly radio, and in small-town or ethnic journalism, was beneath their attention. Those attitudes were also decades in the making.
It is going to be a harder landscape to figure out. The podcast that Kelly referenced used AI and the concentration of platforms as an example. When listening to that, my first thought went to the reader and the listener, many of whom are not well equipped in media literacy. This is where our educational system has been a big letdown. It isn't a new problem, and we could all slide by as long as there were trained and experienced gatekeepers to filter out junk "information". There are fewer gatekeepers now, and the ones remaining are less effective and some of their motivations are different and often more politicized and less bound to conventions of fairness that had prevailed for roughly the last 100 years. The Hardfork podcasters mentioned declines in information quality from Google search results; Google has no motivation to fix things because it profits regardless.
The other thing the podcasters mentioned was the imperative to provide a service that people want to pay for. This is where newspapers in particular fell down badly. They went in for long-form reporting tailored to the tastes of prize-awarding panels. That problem has mostly corrected itself, but in a way that has caused substantial damage to the viability of the publications that remain. It also doesn't mean pandering to an audience; that's a fuzzy boundary to be sure. Sometimes you have to tell people what they don't want to hear but you should have a good reason for doing so when you do it.
Regarding the Medill "news deserts" study, one detail caught my attention. It mentioned that only slightly more than half of public radio stations have local news coverage. This proportion is hard to nail down because it depends on whether you cont repeaters; leaving those aside, Medill counts "about 400" public radio operations, of which 213 provide local news coverage. It appears that Medill's definition of public radio means radio stations that get CPB funding, which could exclude other outlets that provide some form of coverage, such as community-access stations. Oddly, Medill's map of public radio stations appears to leave out Iowa Public Radio altogether. IPR is sort-of-statewide - basically the eastern 2/3 of the state - and does provide local news coverage. I think, at least as far as this part of the study goes, more attention should have been paid to definitions and to data quality.
They're also not in the content creation business. Just distribution. Same with MSN and Yahoo. They pay for the rights to distribute, and that appears to be a model that works. But in that model, the creators only get paid if someone clicks on their links. So it's more like getting a commission, rather than getting a salary plus benefits. That model might be harder to sustain now.
I remember hearing that Vallejo Times Herald was cited for having gone through severe cuts among suburban newspapers whenever we hear of news outlets going through tough times in the past. For those wondering some of this is that the current demos have to rely on both news outlets in Sacramento and San Francisco to get a clue of similar stuff happening in their area. Also we have to consider how much in royalties do suburban newspapers pay AP and Reuters in National and International content that's a factor here.
Here is one story that gets overlooked because most of the time the news outlets in California whenever Police brutality is discussed it's directed at ones happening in Los Angeles, San Francisco Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento in the core cities itself and rarely in suburban areas as one example. Or recessions the national media will focus on Downtown Sacramento and the Financial district of San Francisco for that one.
How Did Things Get So Bad Between Vallejo and Its Police? | KQED
It's not just police shootings people are concerned about in Vallejo. It’s also everyday run-ins with Vallejo officers that for years have added to a sense of mistrust that’s blowing up in City Hall.
19 dead in a decade: the small American city where violent police thrive
Police killed Sean Monterrosa amid protests against brutality. His death is part of a fatal pattern in Vallejo, California
www.theguardian.com
There really is no 'news desert'. Everyone gets their "news" on their smartphone, most of it is national news aggregators or social media versions of "news", and the local press in every metro has been in decline for 20 years as everything goes national and even global in scope, thanks to the internet.
And newspapers in general -- even online -- are in decline.
The LA Times, for example, loses tens of millions of dollars a year, and just laid off another 20% of their staff. They were bought by a billionaire in 2018 and he dumped millions of dollars trying to prop up the paper. If the LA Times goes, it's a definite loss for the country. But what it faces isn't an anomaly. The other large papers -- NYT included -- aren't doing so well financially.
The average amount of time spent on a newspaper website is just over one minute per visit, maybe long enough to click and read until you hit the paywall. That's it. Time spent reading newspaper sites has dropped since before the pandemic. Pew Research has an excellent series of articles on the situation with news, and newspapers.
In 1985 there were probably 350K journalists in the US, and we had only 235 million people. In 2024, we are closing in on 340 million and there are less than the 46K journalists that there were in 2022 (the 1985 figure was from a news analysis article I read last year -- the more current figure is the NAICS data from the BLS).
Just last year we lost 30% of the local newspapers and thousands of journo jobs were made redundant.
Of course, "what's a journalist?" Which actually is a very good question anymore.
Consider another thing Op-Ed's and comics used to get people to buy a newspaper in the past. Also one can get the direct access of this content now on the site of the owners.
tribunecontentagency.com
40 Years of Distinguished Commentary: Cal Thomas’ Legacy of Insight - Tribune Content Agency
This year marks an extraordinary milestone: 40 years of syndicated columns by Cal Thomas, one of the nation’s most esteemed voices in journalism. Thomas’ prolific career has not only spanned four decades but also enriched the national dialogue with his incisive analysis and balanced...
tribunecontentagency.com
Theres a local desert in many places
And that's sort of a broad definition of "local" because so many public radio operations are networks.
The nearest example to me is WKU Public Radio, which has WKYU-FM/Bowling Green and three satellite full-power transmitters across West Kentucky. If they were to only cover Bowling Green news, that leaves a lot of cities and towns that wouldn't be covered.
Understood. In rural AK perhaps, and in other rural places. But it also depends on the definition of "news desert". Do locals in your area have knowledge of national news? I'm sure if they have internet access through their phones they probably have access to news websites and the like. And through your station, of course.
So, for national and political news, I don't think there are many news deserts, at least where people have some sort of internet connection, or access to cable.
But for purely local news, obviously there are news deserts. I see it here in suburban Seattle. There used to be probably 10-15 local weekly newspapers in suburban Seattle (as well as 'local' neighborhood weeklies within the city itself) and since the late 1990's, when they began to disappear, that number now is probably much closer to zero. A few of the suburban locals attempted to go online, but that really hasn't worked out that well.
I know my own suburb is a "local news" desert, any local news filled in by social media like Nextdoor and the like, where individuals 'report' what's happening in the area to others, much like they'd do on a FB or other internet forum.
But the marketplace won't and can't support a purely local, small town or suburban news outlet, which historically fell to local newspapers. And I don't think in rural areas it's much different. The only 'local' news outlets are the Seattle Times and the three or four main TV stations, and maybe three radio stations that have news staffs. But they don't cover everything that's going on in the outlying suburban communities. They can't.
It's one of the problems that hit local (and regional) journalism after Craigslist wiped out 45% of local newspapers' revenues.