O I don’t think any of what is standing in for journalism is a good substitute. I’m just talking about what I perceive as the way things are going.
I’m not on Facebook so I can’t get on Nextdoor but I used to be and I will say that more information was often available faster there but that didn’t necessarily make it correct.
“That, and the flight of ad dollars to free web classifieds.”
And spending part of the first phase of my career looking for one, the local newspaper was at that time chock full of careers
and they were the go to source.As the saying goes “follow the money”.
Yes I should have made clear you weren’t saying Nextdoor is some kind of journalism substitute. I’ve yelled at people for responses that made it look like I said something I didn’t so I should meet my own standard there. : )
There are efforts to do journalism that succeed pretty well here and there, mostly because there’s a need that’s met with talent and dedication. Cool weeklies, stuff like that. You combine the old and new technologies and worldviews if possible, attend the council meetings, understand the issues, write good features, reflect the community back at itself, if you work all day every day you can do it. We’re hard-wired to want to know things. But on a broad scale, the conditions aren’t favorable so we’ll just have to wait and see.
You don’t need to be on Facebook to be have an account on Nextdoor. I’ve never been on Facebook and have a Nextdoor account. Supposedly, Nextoor is a closed system that doesn’t feed data to Facebook, but I’m not 100% sure of that, given Facebook’s entire reason for existing is profiting off data mining.
Anyway, I’m Facebook-paranoid but haven’t noticed any issues with Nextdoor so far. It’s just not very useful for anything other than telling the neighbors you’re putting a free sofa out on the curb, or reporting a car break-in. For “Neighborhood Watch” kinds of things, it’s very useful… if a bit prone in some areas to “strange person in our neighborhood” profiling problems.
I didn’t know that because once I shut down my page on Facebook I quit getting email from Nextdoor. Hmm - I may see what I can do to get back on because when I’m in New Mexico it’s helpful to know what is happening here.
What’s happening in places like Waynesville is called “harvesting market position”. Predatory buyers find a newspaper with negative growth yet has a circulation base that is dwindling at a slow rate, mostly due to a large population of oldsters who will keep subscribing until they die. In such a situation the earnings forecast is super easy to predict. Until that tipping point of lower profitability approaches, the owner continues cutting costs and raising prices, milking the cash cow. Then the building is sold (and perhaps the name of the paper).
A must-read is Phil Meyer’s “The Vanishing Newspaper.” He makes a convincing argument that many papers could be turned around if they stopped running the shop as if it still were the 1960s.
Which is why I appreciate PBS with Frontline and their partnership with Pro Publica. I don’t know where Pro Publica is based, but their stories always have relevance to things I care about, and since I don’t go to their site online, I appreciate the TV coverage.
I really care about water quality. But after working all day I just can not make myself sit through a long boring meeting. Which is why I value local news who will do that and then condense the contents of the meeting.
I know.
I’ve been to those meetings. They are at night usually and you just want to die. I’m not saying this is how it should be, it just seems this is where things are going. First they made us pump our own fucking gas. Then they made us check out our own fucking groceries, Now we have to be our own fucking journalists and that’s true even when you have a daily you can read. Most of them are into the “we give you two sides, you decide” brand of ‘journalism’.
you said it, sister
I only went because I was paid to. And I wasn’t paid enough.
This is the usual story. And it has been the cycle before - note that many of these papers were only started in the 50s or 60s. But it used to be relatively easy to start a new one; now it’s nearly impossible.
There’s a much broader problem here. It’s not at all just an issue for newspapers. Almost all local economic sectors are affected, because small towns are increasingly not economically sustainable. Small businesses of all kinds are struggling. In retail they’re either unable to compete with a local Walmart, or if there’s no local Walmart the local businesses can’t provide the range of merchandise people want these days - so residents stock up every month or go somewhere else. Maybe that requires 100-mile round-trips, but it’s the only alternative.
Local schools can no longer provide the education needed for youngsters in the modern world. Local hospitals are closing. Health care professionals need to associate with larger group practices in larger cities. Even most national chain restaurants (except for bottom-feeder fast-food ones) won’t locate in small towns. Quality restaurants can’t stay in business, since running a good restaurant is tough enough anywhere, but folks in small towns, working for the minimum wage, can’t afford to eat out regularly. Oh, and by the way, this lack of local businesses is one reason why newspapers can’t get income from ads.
I live, by choice, in a fairly small town (whose population is declining), so I know how this works. Since I’m retired I can make this choice, but people who need well-paying jobs can’t.
This trend isn’t going to reverse any time soon. Anywhere you go in rural America, you find yourself passing through towns that “used to be here”. People who need good, modern jobs have to live in or near metropolitan areas. They need all kinds of modern services, too, like airports, high-speed internet, cell phone towers, experienced vehicle maintenance providers, modern hospitals, etc. Unless a town is “lucky” enough to get an Amazon warehouse, there’ll be few jobs, and even then only at minimum wages.
By chance, I just reread Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The fictional town had been around for maybe 250 years and the population circa 1900 was 2642. The whole way of life - for “ordinary” people - depicted in the play simply isn’t possible any longer. (And even then, people had substance abuse problems.) Incidentally, one of the town’s leading citizens owns and runs the town newspaper
It’s tragic for the whole country that states with mostly rural populations have at least half the political power in this country. No wonder things are so fucked up.
The only thing that could make a difference is to bring back very high tax rates on the wealthy, so that the other 99% of the population can get enough of the pie to be able to afford modern infrastructure in small or smallish towns. Yet the very people who suffer the most as a result of how things are keep voting for politicians who’re totally owned by the wealthy.
I’m sad for the newspapers that can’t afford to stay in business. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. (But once they’re gone, local populations will be even less informed of what they need to know.)
Our last remaining daily newspaper bought out the most prosperous weekly chain of locals and promptly closed it. Now we have two small local independents in my area. One is a conservative rag bankrolled by a GOP billionaire and one run by former reporters and columnists from our other daily which closed over a decade ago. Guess which one lays in the gutter till it washes down the sewer and which one everyone can’t wait to read even more the last remaining big city daily?
My theory is that the lack of competition is what really killed print. The fewer papers out there, the more the news seemed unimportant. There have been several renegade progressive weeklies pop up to fill in the void but they, too, get bought out by the one remaining daily or a national chain.
One might wonder why conservatives talk so much about trying to save capitalism from socialism when all they do is create monopolies. And then kill all free speech in their wake as well.
I believe that’s the whole purpose. Authoritarian regimes know what works for them. Rich authoritarians have the means to speed things along if the population shows signs of resistance.
That’s the lazy corporate media divas for you. It’s so much easier to go with the flow. Less time preparing for a show and more time to apply makeup and check the latest on the Karen Hughss Newswire now called Breitbart since Drudge got in trouble for questioning The Fuhrer.
The way I explained it to my kids is that it’s the job of every successful CEO to destroy the competition and create a monopoly; it’s the job of government to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Well other authoritarian regimes have famously sent large numbers of people away from the cities into the country.
I see this whole thing as another historical change in the way human beings live and work. It’s rather like the Commercial Revolution of the 13th century and the Industrial Revolution. It is arguably the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. We’re moving into another era of technology that will change this again. The more mechanized jobs become the more people can choose to move away from cities back into the country and smaller towns and I would ultimately expect that inasmuch as history tends to move in pendulum swings.
Thinking of the Kia and Hyundai factories, just off the freeway and seemingly in the middle of nowhere between Atlanta and Montgomery, and also the Foxconn, Wisconsin compound, it makes me wonder how viable cities are. Not just small towns. Industry locations are chosen for cheap labor, cheap real estate and expensive government subsidies, not proximity to workers and support staff. Same for that abortive Amazon warehouse in NY.
