The Internet Is Killing Local News, Says the FCC 271
Art3x writes "The rise of the Internet has led to a 'shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting' (Here's the AP's version) says a 475-page report by the FCC, and the consequences could be 'more government waste, more local corruption,' 'less effective schools' and other problems. Even though there are more media choices today than ever, newspapers have been laying off reporters, leaving a gap that is yet to be filled."
Yeah, that's it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that the majority of local businesses are multinational franchises with no need for local advertising.
Re:Yeah, that's it (Score:5, Informative)
Lets see, if I make a trip outside my local area, working for a multinational. Am I going to want to go to the local news company's website (so the internet is promoting local news), or am I going to go to another news website, although both obviously don't mean reading the local news or watching tv news.
Is that really a surprise in this day and age?
Meanwhile, shitty/shoddy reporting has killed news in general, not shortages of staff. Considering that they wont' even cover tough topics pretty much sealed the deal for any form of regular news website being considered legitimate or worth a glance. I'd sooner read fark than new york times, since at least I can get more info from fark, such as when they actually covered iran protests and NYT/CNN/Fox news/ABC/NBC/AP were nowhere to be found. Only Al Jazeera has been stepping up as a news org.
Re:Yeah, that's it (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, shitty/shoddy reporting has killed news in general, not shortages of staff. Considering that they wont' even cover tough topics pretty much sealed the deal for any form of regular news website being considered legitimate or worth a glance. I'd sooner read fark than new york times, since at least I can get more info from fark, such as when they actually covered iran protests and NYT/CNN/Fox news/ABC/NBC/AP were nowhere to be found. Only Al Jazeera has been stepping up as a news org.
Personally, I have long since ignored local news media outlets because of the level of bias they all seem to carry. There are more choices for national and international news, you can find more sources online and sources based overseas, but here in America most of the media is pushing the same agenda - why would I waste my time watching what are essentially 20 minute news-based political cartoons?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
Re:Yeah, that's it (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I have long since ignored local news media outlets because of the level of bias they all seem to carry. There are more choices for national and international news, you can find more sources online and sources based overseas, but here in America most of the media is pushing the same agenda - why would I waste my time watching what are essentially 20 minute news-based political cartoons?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
My local internet-only news is actually quite good, but the TV news is exactly as you say. There's usually brief segments of news, weather, and sports, followed by the lengthy feature story about how likely I am to be murdered if I sell something on Craigslist or how terrorists can make my computer explode if I share too much personal information on Facebook.
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BBC isn't going to report on your mayor, city council, governor, or state legislature. Up from there, maybe they've got your back, but there's still a gap.
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Re:Yeah, that's it (Score:5, Informative)
That, and the Fox News "We won the right to blatantly lie and call it news" SCOTUS case pretty much clenched it.
Humorously enough, this is a blatant lie. The case you are referring to had nothing to do with Fox News [wikipedia.org]. Also, the case wasn't a SCOTUS case (it was a Florida court case.)
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By the way, the court didn't rule that the story WTVT told Akre to run was a lie. The rule in question says that whistle-blowing is alerting the proper authorities to violations of the law. The lower
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I stopped watching and reading the news once it was legal for them to lie. Until they fix that... I can never believe anything they say.
At least it's not legal in many foreign countries. So your post makes a lot of sense and I am pretty much of the same mind here.
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Whining about biased sites while posting to Slashdot? LOL *head asplodes*
While your opinion is probably perfectly valid, and in fact may be reality, such a viewpoint does not match well with the biases and precognitions of the fanatics at such social media sites.
Just because someone said something negative about Apple does not mean it is probably valid. It is very likely to not be valid considering the rabid anti-Apple nuts. All you've done is expose your own bias.
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> Just because someone said something negative about Apple does not mean it is probably valid. It is very likely to not be valid considering the rabid anti-Apple nuts. All you've done is expose your own bias.
My guess is that you wrote this on you Macbook (if you had used your iPad the text would be messed-up because of the shitty spellcheck)
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You can tell that those are flukes/artificially increased because it's not normal when a Pro-Right article makes it to the front page of Reddit. And while there's a lot of "pro right-wing stuff" going on, it's always the *big* articles that make it there, never the small stuff--al
Government waste is already here,,, (Score:2)
Re:475 Page (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a waste, since that's not the results of the report. Let me help out.
How the Internet Has Improved Journalism
---
Greater Depth
Improved Quality of Commentary and Analysis
Enabling Citizen Engagement
Speed and Ease
Expanding Hyperlocal Coverage
Serving Highly Specific Interests
Cheaper Content Distribution
Cheaper Content Creation
Direct Access to Community and Civic News
Sound different from TFS?
Yep. Same report. Time to fork slashdot to make it less inflammatory. They took the only concern, "lack of clarity how well trained bloggers are" and made it into a siren favoring Big Media.
Re:475 Page (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a waste, since that's not the results of the report. Let me help out.
How the Internet Has Improved Journalism --- Greater Depth Improved Quality of Commentary and Analysis Enabling Citizen Engagement Speed and Ease Expanding Hyperlocal Coverage Serving Highly Specific Interests Cheaper Content Distribution Cheaper Content Creation Direct Access to Community and Civic News
Sound different from TFS?
Yep. Same report. Time to fork slashdot to make it less inflammatory. They took the only concern, "lack of clarity how well trained bloggers are" and made it into a siren favoring Big Media.
Time to insert a Bill Hicks quote - I'll leave it to those with brains to work out the relevance to TFA:-
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
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Any Hicks reference needs to be modded up. +1 insightful
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Any Hicks reference needs to be modded up. +1 insightful
Here have some more - there's at least one for *every* situation. And why not "We pay for life with death - so everything in between should be free" A man who *lived* life and never backed down despite having a leg broken and a gun pointed at his head.
We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution. ~ Bill Hicks
Even for death:-
I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit. [wikipedia.org]
It's just a ride and we can change it any time we want. It's only a
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TFA may have a (very) small point in that the Internet, by bringing news from all around the world faster, has a large scale homogenous effect tending towards more global type stories with less localized focus; but much more significant, I think, is that the net also gives a voice to everyone, whether
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> Cheaper Content Distribution *
> Direct Access to Community and Civic News *
* Might not apply in Alaska.
it is a shame too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that unless you've got enough eyes peering onto your site to somehow support some sort of revenue stream, you're going to be spending half your day at work, the other half doing reporting and you're going to be pretty burnt out from all of it.
This is the advantage of professional journalists, they get to eat because of their work.
Re:it is a shame too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that unless you've got enough eyes peering onto your site to somehow support some sort of revenue stream, you're going to be spending half your day at work, the other half doing reporting and you're going to be pretty burnt out from all of it.
This is the advantage of professional journalists, they get to eat because of their work.
They gave up a long time ago, and now they're paying the price. Rather that doing journalism like a profession, they went for the lazy option and reduced news to celebrity gossip, and even using forum posts and twitter as items within their pointless articles. Tough titties, these "journalist" are getting exactly what the deserve.
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They gave up a long time ago, and now they're paying the price
So if there was a quality newspaper in your jurisdiction doing hard reporting and research, employing professionals earning a good salary, you'd subscribe to it? You'd pay, I dunno, $300 per year for this newspaper? And all your friends would too?
Re:it is a shame too. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm 55. I'm also a voracious reader. I've read many, many US newspapers, certainly all the really big ones -- and I've never seen such a thing. What I see are papers that won't address the real issues, papers that kowtow to the superstitious, papers that throw up "the other side" even when there's absolutely no facts on the ground supporting the other side, etc.
Newspapers have a conflict of interest: They have to make money; and in order to make money, they have to leave a very large number of readers content with what they've read. So they can't honestly address political corruption, unjust wars, affronts to liberty, superstition, the fact that the legal system has devolved to corporate and moneyed-group serving process, and no longer even pretends to implement justice for the citizens at any level... I could go on, but the point is made: newspapers are pap-filled rags written for the lowest common denominator in their audience.
A blogger doesn't have to be dependent upon how many people read. zero, one or a thousand, it's all the same. So they can -- and do -- say whatever they think. Then we, as netizens, simply find the ones that are thinking clearly. The difference is that there are actually things worth reading on the net. In newspapers... not so much. I can point you to quite a few blogs where the reading is interesting, informative, pertinent, and well thought out, and few, if any, subjects are "off the table." I can't point you to even one newspaper where the same is true.
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So they can't honestly address political corruption
Nonsense. Political corruption is the bread and butter of media because it sells. As noted in the first linked article, the LA Times investigated and broke the Bell corruption story.
the fact that the legal system has devolved to corporate and moneyed-group serving process, and no longer even pretends to implement justice for the citizens at any level
Bullshit. While there's corporate influence and corruption, it's not like ordinary citizens don't benefit from the justice system every day. It's not all doom and gloom as you make it out to be. Get some perspective and cut back on the screechy rants if you want to take the high road of honesty and justice.
Re:it is a shame too. (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. Political corruption is the bread and butter of media because it sells. As noted in the first linked article, the LA Times investigated and broke the Bell corruption story.
Nonsense right back at you. Stories about the tweets and love lives of politicians are the bread and butter of media because it sells, and it creates distractions from the real issues. Actual political corruption, such as Obama secretly negotiating [huffingtonpost.com] with Health care companies, running a covert war in Yemen [reuters.com], and then lying [telegraph.co.uk] about it, and of course I shouldn't even have to mention all stuff that went on under Bush. Actual corruption gets very little, if any, coverage.
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" papers that won't address the real issues,"
Correct. I grew up during the Viet Nam war. I graduated the year our soldiers came home. Every day, reports of body counts, in towns, villages, and provinces with unpronouncable names - but NEVER a question about "WTF are we even doing in some insignificant jungle country?"
Again, correct. We've been reading all our lives about the evil of drugs. The papers parrot the government's stance on drugs, report arrests, report numbers of deaths, report convictions a
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Somehow, everyone these days have become lazy. Reporters are now lazy. Teachers are lazy, working only until 4 PM and getting half the year off. Firemen are lazy and overpaid, just sitting around the firehouse playing cards. Politicians are lazy, just interested in expensive trips and chasing women. Illegal immigrants are lazy, walking across the border here so they can live the high life with food stamps and free medical care at the expense of hard-working legal citizens. Policeman are lazy, because
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I don't think anybody got lazy. The local beat reporters got laid off because the local newspapers were hemorrhaging money. If they got a job covering the celebrity beat, they would consider themselves lucky to be able to put food on the table.
This story has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with market forces. Craiglist and eBay killed the market for local classifieds, Monster et. al. killed the local job postings, and Google ate up the advertising dollars that used to go to print.
The onl
Re:it is a shame too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that unless you've got enough eyes peering onto your site to somehow support some sort of revenue stream, you're going to be spending half your day at work, the other half doing reporting and you're going to be pretty burnt out from all of it.
This is the advantage of professional journalists, they get to eat because of their work.
On the other hand, a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking. The citizen journalist is going to blog their suspicions and air unfounded allegations. A low signal-to-noise compared to a legit newpaper, but a lot of tip of the iceberg stuff which might appear earlier.
Remember that the two-newpaper town is only the news paradigm we can remember. Until about the time Hearst figured out how to make money out of buying up papers, there were hundreds of small run papers, many full of partisan vitriol. It was the internet without a net.
Re:it is a shame too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on the source and it depends on how they present it.
I take great time to fact check, ensure human sources are valid and have proof of their whistleblowing, and provide all documentation procured from the agencies as evidence.
Just because some bloggers don't, doesn't mean that signal to noise ratio is high, it just means you aren't paying attention to the right sources.
----
As for making money and burning out. Yeah, it sucks. My site makes some money (and rarely any from political posts) but I don't do it for that. I do it because I enjoy the topic, I enjoy doing data analysis, and I like having a hobby.
YMMV.
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Re:it is a shame too. (Score:4, Interesting)
a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking
Often stated, rarely proven. "Proper" news organizations aren't exactly paragons of virtue here, as anyone with detailed knowledge of a complicated story will tell you. Sometimes, they'll just publish anything at all - this [wikipedia.org] example by CBS is just one of the most egregious.
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a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking
Often stated, rarely proven.
Here's a recent story [npr.org] that might support your view, where the international got all excited over dozens of bodies supposedly discovered in a house in Texas, even though the only evidence was a psychic who called in a police tip.
On the other hand, from what I've read in the aftermath of this story, what caused this story to spread initially was lax standards about who could post to a Twitter feed at a local news organization; Reuters read the Twitter feed, and the rest is history. By the time the local ne
Re:group of unvetted people many times as large (Score:2)
I'll coin the term "Monte Carlo News".
If I get 100 "OMG 6.8 Earthquake in CA" blips, chances are... there's an earthquake! For news stories like that, "the news is in the title". That's why MicroPosting is becoming a killer app. Because it's a *parallel* phenomenon, it's faster than a news writer trying to find an Angle. Those come later, in the followups.
Sometimes yes, the flashfire effect burns the wrong way on a bad post, but when it burns right, it becomes the news that Big Media loses the scoop on and
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Oh, it's even worse than that - that sloppiness is fueled by blatant political bias. I don't think they even really care about the issues anymore, as long as the current Democrat party gets and keeps power. Anything that slams a Republican gets published with little to no fact-checking, as long as it has nothing to do with any actual issue. And anything that slams a Democrat gets ignored no matter what the facts are until there's so much attention on it that they'd look like complete idiots not covering it,
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On the other hand, a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking. The citizen journalist is going to blog their suspicions and air unfounded allegations. A low signal-to-noise compared to a legit newpaper, but a lot of tip of the iceberg stuff which might appear earlier.
Maybe on some of their own stories, the ones they decide when to publish. But the general news is all about pumping it out on the web ASAP, they want you to hear it on their site first. Where before maybe you'd spend an few hours researching an article for tomorrow's paper, it's now about getting the headline out there in less than 2 minutes. Apart from on the surface being more neutral in the commentary the rest isn't much better than the blogs.
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On the other hand, a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking. The citizen journalist is going to blog their suspicions and air unfounded allegations.
Perhaps you missed all the "mainstream" media coverage of Palin last week. She said something about Paul Revere, which was easy enough to look up, and they all blasted her for being an idiot and getting the story wrong (This includes the "perfect" NPR as well). Once they began their follow ups the next day with experts to corroborate how stupid Palin is the experts all told the media Palin was right.
You seem to think professional journalists fact check when they can't be bothered when smearing women in po
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Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Flat Earth News [amazon.co.uk] published in 2008 goes into this in great detail from a British point of view. Interestingly, it's not the internet that started the rot but massive cost cutting - which for ten years created huge profits - started in the mid-80s. By the mid to late 90s serious journalism and local news were already dieing. The internet merely savaged the corpse.
... and little of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that the Fourth Estate (right?) is important, but its value is historically overstated, and it is easily co-opted for outright propaganda.
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with these programs been cheered on by most of those in journalism
... and please hold the snarky comments about editing; I thought I reviewed it ... :)
--> " ... with these programs being cheered on ..."
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Three names.
Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Markos M... well, no, Kos is pretty critical regardless of party uh... Arianna Huffington? Yeah, the site promotes alt-med quackery that those on my side of the isle quite love for some bizarre reason, so that's the ticket.
You get the point. It doesn't matter if you're pro or not, you can still be an empty shill who stumps endlessly for whatever brain dead point of view you want.
The question of quality in media isn't a matter of whether or not they're professiona
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I'm sure there's an objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts reporter working somewhere
Where?? And, more importantly, when??
Look back over the history of newspapers. There has never been a time in history when media has been "objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts." Why? Because it's boring as hell to most of the population. People want to read about dramatic events, tragedies, horrors, tales of deception, even the occasional outrageous muckraking article. That's what sells media today, and that's what sold them a century ago, or two centuries ago. Ben Franklin and other publi
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I'm sure there's an objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts reporter working somewhere, but to pretend that the internet is the reason these jobs are going away is silly. They're going away because the local reporting is, in the main, just as vacuous as national reporting and probably less well-edited.
The fact is that small-town newspapers are doing pretty well, compared to the big boys - but it's not because they're paragons of journalistic virtue. In fact, by and large, they stink at journalism. What keeps them afloat is local ad revenue - advertising mom-and-pop businesses and coupon specials for grocery chains and the like.
Meanwhile, the reasons their reportage sucks wind and blows air are:
Poor newspapers (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Simply bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I live the local news has rarely ever exposed anything. In fact, they gloss over the details, fail to provide links to documentation for the reader to learn for themselves, and use so many quotes from the elected officials or city staff members that no true analysis can be done.
One professional reporter suggested to me privately that the public, "read between the lines," in order to see what's really being said. While that's great for someone in the know, it doesn't work for 99.9% of the population.
What has helped are local, non-professional sources who take the time to do what reporters used to do. Researching documents, providing them to the public and going back to school to have an even better understanding of how local government is supposed to work.
While I don't want to toot my own horn or even step on the toes of the pros, the work I do actually does expose the issues in local government and shows their general incompetence when compared to how they are supposed to act.
I am going to school for Public Administration, I use my skills as a data analyst to provide crime dashboards to aggregate data, and I post public documents requested and researched for MONTHS so that the public can ignore my own analysis and do their own if they so choose.
The rise of the Internet has done nothing to change the business model of the print papers. They're still pushing out 500 word blurbs of city council meetings instead of 1000+ word analyses. They are the ones at fault here, not the Internet and shame on the FCC for stating anything else.
Guess it depends where you live (Score:2)
Atlanta's paper while very far to the left has done a good job riding the Atlanta school board's ass over the cheating scandal. At first when our Republican governor pushed even more investigation we had the regular race warlords trot out but they seemed to have taken to the sidelines after the press focused more on the schools than what party the governor was.
Local TV stations do a good job of going after local companies for their misdeeds. Most every city has multiple stations all with their own Consumer
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I post one article a day. About the average for most pros. The MONTHS part comes about due to inefficiencies in government and/or lack of desire for the info to become public. It has nothing to do with me.
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And I'm talking mostly about the hyperlocal outlets who publish weekly and concentrate more on sports scores; profiles of athletes, students, or business owners who are opening yet another chain; and exciting coverage of every single planning commission meeting.
Here, at least, the dailies have little staff, cover too-wide of areas, and are stretched too thin for me to even mention.
Media consolidation..? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not sure if it's the main cause, but it surely doesn't seem to have helped. In the last two medium-sized cities I've lived, the "local" paper was owned by MediaNews Group, and was sort of a superficially localized version of their larger regional papers. As Wikipedia explains, the company's founder was:
Why (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped watching the news many years ago and never did get a paper. It wasn't because of the Internet. It was because I got tired of hearing nothing but trivial, shallow, or sensationalistic crap. I don't care who slept with whom and soundbites don't do anything any good. Plus, since I live in an area with many connected cities, invariably the remaining content usually didn't apply to my locality, anyway.
Quite frankly, the national news isn't much better in many ways. To me, the fact that there was some conflict in the Middle East is simply not news, it is life. Yes, gas prices are high. Republicans did X and Democrats did Y. Some other bill just passed that either raises taxes, takes away state's rights, stomps on the Constitution, or takes away citizens' personal liberty.
I hope that doesn't make me irresponsible. I do try to stay informed. And usually the things that do matter somehow reach me. I am just burned out from negativity, information overload, and feeling completely apathetic about government in general.
IMO: misleading (Score:2)
Right?! Because it is not news if I choose to subscribe directly to things like the county school board news letter instead of watching/reading commercial laden media hype.
Trying to imply that the Internet is to blame for the downfall of investigative journalism is ridiculous, I have seen more expose's as a result of rapid information spread on the Internet than I ever saw from some local yokel reporters drek on how bob's bakery was vandalized last night.
If anything this means that the FCC should be pushin
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I'll use this example because you made fun of the idea of local reporters investigating bakery-related crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Black_Muslim_Bakery#Chauncey_Bailey_investigation [wikipedia.org]
That's the kind of thing that the internet simply ignores and national news ignores because it's not sexy to 20 year old twitter users or infuriating to middle aged voters. Local news sources doing real investigative reporting addressed a need that is increasingly being ignored.
Someone should blog about this (Score:2)
This could be newsworthy.
Nothng wrong with that... (Score:2)
Craigslist killed the local news (Score:2)
Aggregators. (Score:2)
The source is given for every item, I never click on ones that go to blogs. Someday, perhaps, blogs will be effective just not yet.
Grab your ankles... They're after freedom or money (Score:4, Interesting)
Statements like this by gigantic Federal bureaucracies always leads to some move against freedom.
They will look to either restrict the ability of the internet to report news (which the government would love, the ruling democrat establishment would love nothing more than to shut down Andrew Britebart and Matt Drudge amongst others). Or they will be after confiscatory taxes on the internet, on news sites, on bloggers, to subsidize "local" news.
As others have said in this story, the lack of support for local news couldn't have anything to do with the fact that businesses aren't local anymore like they were 50 years ago... 50 years ago every town had more than one newspaper. Every radio station had a full airstaff AND a news department. Why? Because local advertisers PAID for this.
The FCC realizes that it's reason for existence (over the air radio and TV) is coming to an end because it's being overtaken by internet broadcasting. They also realize that the chink in the 1st Amendment that was created for them in 1934, the fact that radio spectrum has limits, ie, there is scarcity, which paved the way for the Feds to decide who could broadcast and who couldn't, is mooted by the fact that the Internet has NO LIMIT of channels.
So they have to invent some other form of "scarcity" to give them some toehold on the Internet.
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Too big to fail. Or, rather, too important to fail, after all we'll need that emergency broadcasting system when the commu... erh, sorry, old habits... when those terrorists attack!
Imagine it's terror and you're not properly scared!
Nice case of projection (Score:2)
"the ruling democrat establishment would love nothing more than to shut down Andrew Britebart and Matt Drudge amongst others"
Yep, the Republicans shut down legitimate enterprises like ACORN because of a con job by the likes of Britebart and you do the usual projection: blaim the democrats for wanting to do the same thing. Look in the mirror asshat to see who is doing this now.
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Except there's a huge difference.
With terrestrial TV and radio, every station in the area broadcasts at the same time, so there's a hard maximum on the amount of people who can send content to you at all. With the Internet, you can pick and choose who gets to send data through your line. You may only get X number of "channels" at once, but you can swap them out for other "channels" whenever you like.
Because it used to be so much better (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the Internet local schools were all awesome, local politicians were honest and dutiful, and the zoning board members could never be bought off, because everyone was cowed into sincerity by the local newspaper.
Or am I delusional.
This not a loss of local control, we haven't had that since the 1860's, it is loss of central control by big media companies who are pulling desperately on the strings they still have.
Most local news is a joke (Score:2)
If you live in small and medium-sized communities, local news is often filled with fluff and oddball stories.
Weather reporting is the big draw for local TV news, and sites like weather.com usually tell you what you want to know when you want to know it. Local TV news put the weather segment at the end of their broadcasts and tease you about it throughout their show ("will it be warm and sunny this weekend? stay tuned to find out!")
I pitched a project to the Knight Foundataion (Score:2)
A while ago I pitched a web-based regional news system to cover small and medium markets. The idea was to use new DSLR technology and pay one-person investigators to build up coverage of under-served areas. Shoot the stories to large market standards and make the material available to major market stations for free. A lot of big stations have digital news channels and small to medium markets in the shadows of big cities could use those to improve their coverage of local events. I thought it was a good p
Buggy Whips (Score:2)
Explanation #2: A free market dictates that the consumer will pay for the level of quality that they want. A trend away from traditional journalism indicates that the consumer is getting sufficient quality from the internet. The consumer is a lot more honest about what the consumer wants than the FCC is.
Explanation #3: Nothing to see here. Move along. Move al
Posture (Score:2)
And people have abandoned the media in a steady stream ever since.
Quelle surprise?
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Not to mention ads. You'd be surprised how many ads are taken out just to silence certain stories. I'd call it hush-money, but then again, what do I know about marketing...
Sure it's not just the editing? (Score:2)
The Press has been catering to the LCD soo long (Score:2)
that there is nobody left that can take the news seriously. I can be better informed watching sponge Bob Square Pants for .5 hours that I can watching the local news. The one shining light in the sea of trash journalism is the PBS TV News. Not the Radio, the radio program is just as biased and uninformative as Fox or CNN.
Actually the PBS TV programs are a real breath of fresh air. No fancy graphics. Just professionals talking about the news. It is kind of like the rest of the news outlets used to be 20
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't say LCD. I'd simply say it's a matter of price. If well researched, unbiased and founded news that took a few reporters some weeks to dig up sells the same amount of copies than a copy/paste AP story, why bother with the research?
Sure, in one way the customer is to blame, if fast food hamburger meat is the same to him as prime sirloin, what will you serve him? OTOH, it seems they overdid it. They crossed the threshold where the people who actually bought newspapers reconsidered and saw that the "
News (Score:2)
No, It's Not (Score:2, Insightful)
What's killing all press (from local to world) isn't the Internet -- the Internet is just what's replacing the press.
What's killing the press is that the industry is laced from top to bottom with ignorant Statists capable of neither investigating nor reporting accurately on the events of the day. Almost every news story in existence originates with some Google search by a flunky desperately seeking something for the talking head to say so as to keep butts in the seats and hands off the remotes.
Amazingly, t
BS (Score:3)
Local news was killed in suicide decades ago when they stopped reporting actual facts and switched to 'commentary'.
Internet is just helping clean the mess up.
Content sells (Score:3)
Yeah, lets force the government to $upport "local news" that will fix the economy and everything.
Re: (Score:2)
In a nutshell, what kills local media is that they're nothing but a repetition of press agency material, and that's simply available for free. Why bother buying a newspaper?
Fires, murders, crashes (Score:2)
That pretty much sums up local TV news. If it bleeds, it leads. That being said, local news isn't really local once you live 25-50 miles from the broadcaster. I grew up less than 25 miles from Manhattan and it seemed like anything that was on the local news might as well have been happening in a foreign country. These days, Internet media and local talk radio will have local stories plus, with the Internet, you can search for a story rather than being forced to accept what the anchor is saying, when the
Local news is killing local news (Score:2)
Seriously, outside of just being paid advertisements and shills for the syndicated programming, there's not a lot of reporting going on for local news. The product is just terrible to watch, at least in our area.
I'm sure at some point they're going to say that the Internet is killing CNN. On that, I can fully agree: Reading comments from Twitter, voting on stories via Twitter, and showing cat videos from Youtube will definitely kill CNN dead.
Typical crap summary lifted from bad article (Score:2)
Most of the posts above seem to be individual extrapolations based on the short summary of an LA Times article. The word internet appears exactly once in the LA Times article, "the government regulatory agency, which has oversight over television and radio as well as certain aspects of the Internet." but since the post headline claims "The Internet is Killing Local News, Says the FCC" that must be what the FCC says right.
I'd suggest glancing through the actual r
The Internet has little to do with it (Score:2)
looks like a trend (Score:2)
The Internet killed the Weatherman...
Living Near Chicago in Cook County (Score:2)
What professional reporters? (Score:2)
Are they sure it's the internet, and not just a lack of "professional, accountable" reporters? I mean, have they ever -watched- a modern news show. The era of professional reporters was dying when I was a kid in the 80's. Have we had any truly great, honest, accountable reporting done in this past decade at all?
Oh sure, blame the internet (Score:2)
Don't blame newspapers being simply not interested in what used to be "good journalism". Ya know, digging up a story, researching it, sending out reporters to interview people, take pictures, the works.
If you browse through your local paper, you'll notice that nearly all stories are either taken from some press agency (most of the time even verbatim copy/paste journalism), pointless drivel about someone's prize poodle having puppies (i.e. crap that some people who take themselves too serious sent them) , so
subject (Score:2)
"The Internet Is Killing Local News"
Good. Let's brainstorm other ways we can do it as well. I'll help twist the knife.
Of course the FCC is dead wrong, since the "local news" died out 20 years ago and has been replaced by shambling undead horrors spouting off about puppies and weather, but if the internet can help put them back in the ground a little faster I'm all for it.
Houston, we have several problems (Score:2)
You might think that specializing in local news would be a way for local media to survive (as opposed to trying to compete with heavyweights on national/world news or something), but it seems they're doing a really hamfisted job of it. Details of that have already been thoroughly mentioned in previous comments.
The local free alternative newspaper sure seems to do a better job focusing on local issues
Media Consolidation killed local news. (Score:2)
poor reporting isn't helping the local or nat news (Score:2)
FCC, it's not the internet
FCC BS (Score:2)
There are tons of local accountability broadcasts on a variety of media.
The problem that the FCC is pointing out, is that corporate media is dying.
Nobody wants to listen to canned spoonfed BS news anymore when you get crap like, "Oh listen up!! Unemployment is getting better, a bunch of little people who bought homes caused the world wide banking crisis and if you don't pay your carbon taxes, the earth will over heat and kill us all."
FoxNews and CNN can suck it.
-Hack
Allow me to toss this in. (Score:3)
From Ted Koppel on the death of news.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html [washingtonpost.com]
Re: (Score:3)
So long as Fox News is the first to go, I fail to see a problem here.
Except that outlets like Fox News - which are essentially company newsletters, not put out to make a profit but to support an ideology - will be the only survivors.
Re: (Score:2)