A friend — wait, better than that: a print subscriber to this publication — sent over a story from Politico about who is to blame for the decline and fall of local newspapering.
Answer: You.
Well, and me.
And especially that neighbor of yours who always blasts the professional yakkers on opinionated cable news out her open living-room window, and doesn’t get a paper thrown on her drive every morning
Ostensible readers of local news.
Research shows that while we all say we want to read local news, the more of it the better — we claim to desire insight into the innermost machinations of our city’s Planning Commission; we say we want to peruse a chronological run-through of the last school board meeting — the fact is, we’re lying.
We’re like those California voters who overwhelmingly told pollsters they were voting for Tom Bradley for governor when they really knew they were voting for George Deukmejian.
We’re liars. Or so says Jack Shafer in Politico.
“Despite all the impassioned calls from academics and journalists to salvage it, local news’ most vital constituency — readers — have withheld their affections,” Shafer writes.
“Local news makes representative government more accountable, scholars claim. Books and monographs extolling the virtues of local reporting on everything from public health to economic vitality abound. When local reporting goes south, researchers tell us, political polarization, civic corruption, lower voter turnout, reduced civic engagement and even authoritarianism follow.”
There is some evidence, it turns out, that the appetite for news in general as opposed to local news in particular has not diminished.
Yes, daily newspaper circulation has been in decline practically since the invention of radio news, our first competition. With the rise of television news in the 1950s and particularly in the ‘60s, when Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley were in every home with a Philco every weeknight, a bigger rival appeared. Today, with the almost limitless flow of information through electronic pipelines into our pocket phones, everything’s a rival — obviously including the social media platforms pretending to boost our content while making the billions our publishers used to make.
It’s become so weird to see a foldable newspaper in public that Los Angeles Times reporter Lila Seidman last week tweeted a photo of an Oregon airline passenger reading a paper-paper on the plane and wrote: “In Portlandia, a fever dream of the ‘90s, where print is not dead.”
The broadsheet reader appeared to be, as they say, of a certain age.
And Shafer points out that “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.”
That especially was the case in the Trump era, which, say what you will about it, was excellent for producing news in wondrous volume, captivating, addictive stuff for political junkies.
But now that the circus has left town, will readers still feel a need for that same quality in political reporting and observation? Because there’s where I think the heart of the local-news issue is, or any news-perusing issue. It’s a simple one. There is only so much time in an information-consumer’s day. Those hours on TikTok add up to time not spent pondering the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.
Same thing for your truly local newspaper. When I learned to read, by swapping sections of the paper with my dad in our Altadena living room, this paper was so local it carried Little League box scores — and sometimes prose stories from the kids’ diamonds that week. We were the only news game in town. We no longer are. Facebooking with the grandkids is what feels like local media to older Boomers. I could complain that means they have no idea what’s going on inside their City Hall, which is crazy-dangerous. I could complain about that forever, and it would make no difference.Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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July 11, 2021 at 02:43PM
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Most people only say they want local news - The Pasadena Star-News
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