| There are certain open questions with Radar style localized template based news. Mainly it's about automatization, changing the way things are done. New skillsets are needed, while old ones are out of the door. There's the existential problem this kind of centralized local news creation has on smaller desks, mentioned in the article, but then again the trend appears to be that owners are running the small, unprofitable ones down anyways, regardless of Radar. There's also the question whether this style of localization, but not personalization, of news, is the best way to serve readers. Could these same local news be served in some other way? IMO, the way Radar works, mainly happens the way it does, as there exists a need from small papers, for quality journalism that they don't have their own resources to conduct. Of course, nothing is stopping Radar of doing something different in the future. Then there's also the hypotetical (?) threat on press diversity. Basically a multitude of superficially distinct voices are repeating the same liturgy. This zerg of articles on a specific topic, might appear to a news consumer, as many credible sources supporting a specific view or point. There's similarity with Reuters et al in this problem, and clearly Reuters hasn't destroyed news. But with Reuters, the text is most of the time identical in all the places where it is published. In the case of localized templates, it might not be clear to the reader that all the different versions are instances of the same master template, with same bias from a single writer, if the template is well enough written. |