Our national news coverage is probably better than ever, but our local news is falling apart.
Reporters like to complain about all sorts of things now that news and publishing have moved online. Some of this is totally justifiable. I was born in 1983 and back then if you wanted to know what the weather was going to be like, or look for a job, or find a movie time you either had to have a piece of a tree delivered to your doorstep or go out and buy a piece of a tree. Out of this “piece of a tree” business model came a lot of great journalism, and it was also incredibly lucrative and let ordinary newspapers open foreign bureaus and hire battalions of reporters to go out and cover everything.
To hear a lot of old school journalists talk about it, this was a golden age. A time when men were men (and women were allowed to cover…umm…schools?) and Jeffersonian virtue was engendered by rumple shirt clad gladiators battling for the public interest in front of bizarre contraptions called “typewriters.”
Then somebody invented computers and the internet and it made more sense to look at a screen for free to find out about the weather than pay a monthly fee to have a piece of a tree delivered to your door. Then came twenty-somethings writing on the internet and all was lost.
So, is this whole story true?
I’d say it’s about half-way right. The old model of journalism is really ending, and the industry has been devastated by layoffs, buy outs, and cut backs across the board. But at the same time what was lost wasn’t perfect. Major issues covered by the manly men of that golden age in 1984 included if presidential contender Gary Hart had been breast fed as a child and if he changed his signature when he was a teenager. In 1988 journalists quite literally went crazy about whether or not Garry Hart did in fact have sex with Donna Rice. We never found out the answer to that question, but it was still enough to sink Hart’s presidential ambitions.
Meanwhile notably things not written about included how the Soviet Union was falling apart, but Gary Hart’s mom sure did move a bunch around their town when he was a kid! (Yes this was a major subject written about by national political correspondents.)
Golden ages may live in our memory, but they’re not that golden to those who live through them.
Which brings me back to the question of where the press goes from here. I’d agree with Jonathan Bernstein that in some way that our current national media is in many ways better than it’s ever been:
I’d guess that the last two presidential elections were probably the best-covered ever. I’m just about certain that the Affordable Care Act has been the best covered public-policy story. For readers who want to know what’s happening with health care, climate, immigration, civil liberties or Afghanistan, today’s media menu is vastly superior to what was available 30 years ago.
But at the same time I agree with Bernstein’s contention that coverage of local news, the things decided in your state house or in your city hall, are increasingly hard to learn about:
But at the state level, we’ve gone from day to night, and we are headed toward darkest midnight. There doesn’t seem to be much of a local market for the kinds of reporting and analysis that have emerged at the national level.
Bernstein doesn’t give us much hope in his take on the state of local news. But I have to disagree. It’s true the “pieces of trees” model doesn’t work well anymore and following a national news source won’t tell you much about your neck of the woods.
But then again all models in media are always changing. Some of the biggest papers in New York used to be filled with drawings and wood carvings in no small part so illiterate immigrants could figure out what was going on. Indeed newspapers themselves were basically created in the 19th Century and if I can get all historical on everyone, the whole idea and tradition of authorship only came into being in the last 400 years or so.
So yes local news is getting the short end of the stick these days, but that doesn’t mean that quality coverage of what’s going on if your state, city, and neighborhood are impossible. It just needs a new economic model that can sustain itself. What would that model look like? I don’t know, but there has to be one. After all turning trees into pulp to spread information every day is kind of weird if you think about it.
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