[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