Thoughts On News
The site that I go to for technology news recently put up a subscription which I decided I had a bit of a moral obligation to pay for. Journalism is hard but beneficial for society. It would be nice if journalists which hold themselves to something like a standard for truth were able to be paid for that. I spend like 2% of my life listening to or reading journalism from the people behind this site. I use an ad-blocker on their site because I don’t like being tracked around the internet, and I wish there were other ways good web sites could get money. I would feel like a hypocrite and a leech if I wasn’t paying them when I could, and they made the subscription cheap enough that I felt like I could afford it. It costs less than going to a movie theater every month, I could afford that if there were any movies I actually wanted to see, and I get more enjoyment out of their work than that every month.
This got me thinking about news in general. With the nationalization of news, most people care much more about what is happening at the national level than what is happening at the local level. The rise of social media and its natural incentives helped drive this, as you get more scale to your advertising targets if you can create the largest pool of engaged users as possible. The most engaged political actors at a local level seem to mostly care about national level politics. The people running for county boards of elections use a platform of (supposed) national election fraud to drive votes. City council meetings need to put off the zoning cases they are charged with deciding for hours while people argue for and against resolutions condemning Israeli military action in Palestine. Within this context, local news is kind of in a death spiral right now. There exist giant cities where local news is in enough demand to be profitable, but newspapers across America are shutting down or being bought by financial interests outside of the communities they serve. Local television news still has some financial viability, but that is also being bought up by private equity, because they love some financial viability which can be squeezed drier via economies of scale.
Local news used to play a vital role in protecting people in medium-size cities from abuses from people in power. Local reporters held local politicians to account. Local reporters made sure that if some influential local company was strong-arming some small group of residents or illegally polluting a poor neighborhood, the wider community they relied upon for labor could express their outrage, or local authorities would be driven to enforcement action which might have been otherwise mildly embarassing. The institutions which supported this sort of activity are withering, and nothing substantial has grown up to replace it. The first thing I thought of was people organizing locally and sharing their stories on social media, but social media has no mechanism to make sure local gossip is true, and all of the incentives are to do anything else. The people with time to do local organizing or sleuthing without pay often have different priorities than salary workers which make up the plurality of most communities.
I like to think that I’m more locally engaged than most people. I’m a member of my neighborhood association board. I listen to recordings of all of my city council meetings. But I’m barely supporting local journalism. I tried to subscribe to my local newspaper on principle, but I barely read anything in it while my subscription was active, and I couldn’t justify the expense. I am lucky enough to live close to the state capitol of the state I live in, which means that my market has a few local news options which I will actually use, and I can see how I’m supporting the journalists who perform that reporting. Some news conglomorate bought all the local newspapers, but at least some of the reporters run a state politics podcast which is ad-supported, so I feel like I’m contributing a little bit to local journalism by tolerating those ads. I’m not opposed to ads in general. I feel like attention for journalism is a good trade, and podcast advertising lacks many of the tracking concerns I have with letting people pay to run arbitrary javascript on my computer when I visit a website. Likewise, I get the Axios local newsletter for my metro area. They send me a newsletter by email every day and I get some ads which won’t track me included with my local news. Axios encourages me to contribute to local news with an optional subscription, but I only get like 5 minutes of utility from them every day, so I can’t really justify to myself paying for the lowest tier they offer. This is easily interpretted as me falling for the same trap as society, which is not caring as much about what’s happening in my local community as in my weird nationalized fandom. Frankly, I’m a victim of national trends. I only have so much money. I’ll probably be leaving this city in a few years for a job elsewhere. Putting down more roots doesn’t actually make that much sense for me, and yet I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve done a better job of it than many people who don’t intend to go anywhere.