[spurdoman77]

"News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.

Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether."

No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content, you are voting with your wallet. Everyone should do that. Definitely dont stay with sucky provider but give the same money (or more) to someone better, that helps things to develop.

[reaperducer]

voting with your wallet

That works for cans of soup, it doesn't work for journalism. This isn't a fight between companies. It's about preserving democracy.

You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections. That simply won't happen.

That's why we need local media. Those local, low-level politicians have to be held accountable, or they end up becoming congressmen and senators, and other high-level officials.

[dragonwriter]

> You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections.

Not implausible; enough US attention drawn to a particular British publication got GuardianUS to happen; why wouldn't enough paying attention to a national publication and the stories it already has about a particular locality from local residents be a signal that would lead that publication to opening up a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?

[reaperducer]

Not implausible

Actually, the 20 years I spent in journalism tells me it is completely implausible.

a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?

Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.

The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.

And even if it did, people would demonize it because it was centralized, or at one time published an article they didn't agree with, the way they do with the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.

I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public. That was when television journalism started dying.

[dragonwriter]

> Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.

> The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.

So, what? It wouldn't happen all at once or with just one organization, anyway. Maybe the Guardian sees demand from it's subscriber base for an additional product with local coverage in a couple of places, initially, and expands imto that. Maybe someone else does it in other localities.

Now, personally, I don't think there is an adequate market for profitable paid non-ad-supported local news of the type that we are used to thinking of as general need coverage because the people willing to pay are a narrower group with deeper and more focussed needs, but nonprofit quasi-patronage model like the Guardian and some others could work.

> Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.

No, what destroyed the traditional news media is not understanding the value proposition and drastically cutting newsrooms in shortsighted consolidation, a mistake which it hadn't recovered from and was maybe just starting to recognize when new media came along and made it impossible to recover other than by largely becoming the new competition.

What killed journalism is...nothing. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about the more opaque bias of the time when the media, top-to-bottom was far more uniform in it's bias than it is today, and when the major media were even narrower in their ownership, because people mistook (and mistake Even more in retrospect than contemporary audiences did) the uniformity of vías for neutrality and objectivity, but journalism is no less alive today than at any time in the past. Probably far more.

[Pokepokalypse]

>I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public.

Dang. You old. It's like a different world now, that there's no news you can rely on. Oh they'll scream and cry and say "but they don't exert editorial control . . ." (but they fucking do).

[gnopgnip]

They don't need to cover the entire US to cover some local news

[mcny]

> They don't need to cover the entire US to cover some local news

The New York Times does cover New York regional news (examples below)

but I doubt even the New York Times could do this nationwide (even with the famous slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print").

https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion

archived just now, https://archive.fo/1KRju , it contains news such as

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/nyregion/nyc-subway-derai... archived at https://archive.fo/WTOgz and at https://archive.fo/lR9A1

> Subway Car Derails After Object Thrown on Tracks, Police Say

> Three people had minor injuries after a northbound A train jumped the tracks at the 14th Street station, officials said.

It also has pieces like this

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/nyregion/coronavirus-food...

archived at https://archive.fo/UXgM0 and at https://archive.fo/P7kU8

> Why Giving Food Stamps to the Rich Is Not a Terrible Idea

> Every child in N.Y.C. public schools was given a $420 benefits card. The well-off should use theirs to support food banks.

> A few weeks ago, I received a text from an 855 area code telling me that I might be eligible for food stamps and to call the number provided to find out. Given that I am sufficiently compensated for what I do, I deleted the message assuming it was a scam (which it turned out to be).

> Soon enough, though, friends living in well-appointed Brooklyn brownstones began reporting, with appropriate astonishment, that they had received debit cards, in the mail, issued by the state for $420 each, which were meant for purchasing food.

...

[anigbrowl]

No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content [...]

But that manifestly doesn't happen. Nobody wants to pay 20 different local bloggers to cover 20 different local issues, large firms asset strip or crowd out small firms, and if all else fails the truth is denounced as 'fake news'. The market is not a meritocracy.