[softwaredoug]

When we edit down the civic value of local newspapers, what is there? What value does a local newspaper offer that, say, a subreddit for a city doesn't offer?

For common, everyday occurrences, usually they are parroting whatever press releases are made by the authorities. OK, we can share and get that information ourselves these days.

What's left is local investigative journalism. Most local newspapers are pretty gutted to the point they don't provide this. Yet many still do. We want someone to dig into some issues with high journalistic standards, and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another. If that's the gap, how do we achieve this at a local level? How do we fund that work? Are there other mechanisms that do this well?

[rnk]

I disagree. In the old days, when there were lots of small newspapers, most of them had reporters who went to city hall events and wrote and did investigations of things, went to school events, other city happenings. They usually didn't attack the foundations of the city, but making those events public with discussion was a great value. I love reddit and use it daily, but there's no way to know what neutral info there is, it's far from the neutrality of journalism.

[Jarwain]

This triggered a thought; this puts emphasis on reputation, right? If there was an active redditor on a city's subreddit who builds a reputation for quality journalism, that kinda fills the gap.

But reddit doesn't emphasize reputation in that way; karma tracks activity and popularity. Some users can build up a reputation for a specific type of content, but that feels different.

Mastodon (haven't even really used it yet so just going on an outsider's understanding) enables both locality via servers (like the subreddit) as well as emphasizing identity/reputation (a la Twitter) so one could follow or otherwise tag certain users, allowing them to build a tracked and public reputation for quality journalism

[1123581321]

Most of the worthwhile content in my city’s sub are links to local journalists who are paid to do more than cursory research. Outside of food and apartment recommendations, a lot of the user-generated subreddit content is unreliable.

I don’t doubt there are exceptions, and in subreddits for large cities, perhaps a few users are willing to do free in-depth journalism for those audiences. But I’ve looked at several other cities’ communities, mostly of small and medium size, and seen similar dynamics.

[logicalmonster]

> and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another.

I think one clear lesson of the last few years should be that every human being has their biases. Trying to provide unbiased and objectively accurate information about things that are in nature often very nuanced and subjective is a foolhardy endeavor. Even with the big technology firms trying to provide "independent fact checkers", there's no way to accurately gauge truth on social media without essentially picking one point-of-view and censoring other perspectives.

Instead, taking into account human bias should be part of the system. Take ProjectVeritas as one example. I think that it's great that they're biased and argue their own point-of-view as long as their bias is known by people. That way you can take that into account when judging how likely something is to be true. I'd love it if there were more organizations like ProjectVeritas with their own biases who worked to expose corruption on issues they care about regardless of political perspective.

IMO, the worst situation to be in for determining truth is the one we're in with the media now where we have journalists who are playacting at being unbiased who clearly have a point of view they push for.

[throwawaysleep]

ProjectVeritas is about manufacturing traps, not any real kind of investigation.

[joecool1029]

Good journalism should try to challenge or at least knock the subjects out of their comfort zone in order to slip from their script. I think that's the main complaint anyone paying attention has with large media organizations (that they are just retweeting/reblogging press releases and propaganda).

Unfortunately Project Veritas goes further than just trying to challege their subjects and instead manufactures their own 'truth' out of manipulated b-roll. Sourced document of some of the claims they've manufactured: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/media/2018/projectve...

[egberts1]

an essential tools to uncovering the truth.

[rnk]

Project veritas is less than worthless. Anytime they have a story or video you can guarantee they took any info, including video, and mis-edited it to convey something that didn't happen. It's another grift to get money from people who pay for supposed false facts.

[logicalmonster]

I probably shouldn't have mentioned ProjectVeritas because many people instantly go into "sports team" mode and ignore the main point, but I wanted to point out how understanding a media entity's bias is a good thing and I used them as an example of a media entity that has a well-understood bias.

My greater point is that any media entity's work only conceivably presents a barrier to accurately understanding the world if you don't understand that they have a point of point of view they advocate for.

If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood; and the visceral reaction to them here very clearly indicates that their bias is well-known.

The real risk comes when a media entity claims to be objective and unbiased when this should be understood to be impossible: no human being has zero bias.

[acdha]

> If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood

That’s how it’s supposed to work but in practice it’s messier: not everyone is fully informed and following these stories, and context is often stripped as a story is promoted to other levels of media. The fairly large fraction of people who only read the headline probably don’t make it 6 paragraphs in where the reporter at a larger journal mentions the original source, or have the context to realize that the dueling quotes they’re presenting were all inspired by a dubious outrage-bait story rather than something real.

[_-david-_]

You do know they release the full unedited video as well...

[hotpotamus]

If you consider ProjectVeritas as a positive example of investigation into corruption, who would you consider a poor example?

[BrotherBisquick]

> What value does a local newspaper offer that, say, a subreddit for a city doesn't offer?

I live in a city that's majority non-white and at least 50% conservative.

The subreddit for my city is 99% white and hyper-leftist.

At least local newspapers attempt to be unbiased.

[bjourne]

Reddit is run by an American company. Thus, whatever is featured on the site needs the implicit approval of that company's owners. Thus, the content on Reddit needs to be palatable to that company's advertisers or else the company will lose money. This leads to homogenization and mainstream voices drowning out everything else. Small, independent, local newspapers are supposed to counteract that. It doesn't happen though since most local newspapers are owned by large conglomerates.

[throwawaysleep]

> If that's the gap, how do we achieve this at a local level?

You have to pay for it. It used to be that advertising space was limited, so it was paid for through that, but that revenue is gone and nobody wants to pay.