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CogSciLibrarian, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In the past 10 years, more than 2,000 newspapers across the US have closed, most of them local.
This is a very serious problem, because a democracy requires a well informed and well-educated public, and newspapers, particularly local newspapers, were the foundation of that kind of public education.
Without viable newspapers we have a public that is increasingly ill-informed or un-informed about both local events, and to a greater extent, about the world around them. More and more communities are fast becoming news deserts, and what is even more frightening, that vacuum is rapidly being filled by social media sites like Facebook and TikTok, where you can find out that the earth is actually flat, that the moon landings were all fakes and that, well, you fill in the blanks for any event taking place around the world at any given moment.
In a rather terrifying statistic, nearly 50% of adults and more than 85% of those 18-34 use social media as their primary source of news and information.
Newspapers died because the business model that sustained them for 200+ years no longer worked. The lifeblood of papers was advertising, a business that has been eviscerated by the Internet.
When there is no revenue, there is no journalism. Revenue has to come first; journalism follows.
In a recent piece in The Washington Post, Leonard Downie, the Post’s former Editor, offered some solutions to the way to save local news and journalism – none of them any good, in my opinion.
Downie’s answer (and sadly the answer offered by many others) is to turn to a non-profit model, or failing that, to have some billionaire (as Bezos did for the WaPo), underwrite the projects.
Beggaring and relying on the nobless oblige of the wealthy are no model for a robust journalism for the future, particularly when it is the very foundation of a functioning democracy.
How then to save local news?
Let us begin by separating news from paper. The era of the printed newspaper, much as I like them (and I am old) is clearly over. The average newspaper reader in the US is over the age of 50; almost no one under 30 reads them at all. Instead, they go online, and what do they find online? Video.
Video is the dominant online medium. According to Cisco, 82% of all online traffic is video. The AC Nielsen company tells us that the average American now spends nearly 8 hours a day watching TV or video and a mere 19 minutes a day reading. (If you are reading this newsletter, you are in the minority. If you are watching the video version, you are the future – for better or worse).
But print or video, news, particularly local news, is still a business. How do you make it profitable enough to pay journalists to do the reporting necessary to inform a community and pay their mortgages at the same time?
Newspapers are expensive because they are physical. You need paper and ink and trucks to deliver the paper to your readers every day.
Conventional television news, either network or local, is also incredibly expensive to produce. If you want to make it profitable, particularly in local markets, then you have to cut the cost of production. Fortunately, the technology now affords that opportunity – if it is used correctly.
You have all seen local TV news crews in your communities- a team descends on a story – a reporter, a producer, a camera person carrying a large and very expensive camera that weighs a ton, along with the microphones, cables, tripod, lights and from time to time, microwave truck for ‘remotes’. Behind the scenes there are veritable armies of producers, associate producers, writers, editors and so on, not to mention the studio, the set, the anchor, the floor managers – it is endless. This is what is required to get news on the air, at least in the ‘conventional’ model.
That’s fine for major cities with big advertising bases, but for the kinds of smaller communities that can no longer sustain a local newspaper, this approach is a non-starter.
Fortunately, there is another answer, and that is to build local TV news stations in a totally different way.
Lisa always says, “if Google were starting a local news channel, what would it look like?” What it would not look like is a conventional TV newsroom, which is a remnant of the 1950’s, when video and television were incredibly complicated to make. It also would not have TV news crews cover stories. That is also a remnant of the 1950s.
Instead it would be 100% online. It would use only iPhones.
There are nearly 2 billion users of TikTok and 1.8 billion users of Instagram. Do you think any of them use ‘camera crews’ to produce their videos? Almost all of it is done on phones. Shot on phones; edited on phones and uploaded from phones. Marry journalism to the Instagram or TikTok production method and you’ve got an incredibly cost-effective way of producing local ‘TV’ news.
You will note that neither TikTok nor Instagram have studios or anchors, yet they seem to attraction viewership in the hundreds of million daily.
It’s all about the content. Compelling content. Produce compelling content; content that reflects the concerns of the community; content people actually want to see, and you are pretty much home free. When you reduce the overall cost of producing the news, you can also pay the journalist a living wage for their work. It can be a win/win. It’s not a newspaper, but it is very much a local news business that is sustainable without contributions from ‘viewers like you’ or depending on the whims of some billionaire to foot the bill.
Some of the world’s very first newspapers were produced in the United States, when it was still the 13 original colonies. Printers like Benjamin Franklin delivered one of the very first newspapers, The Pennsylvania Gazette, because he was first and foremost a printer. His primary business was printing documents for the British colonial government as well as books and pamphlets, like his famous ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’. His newspaper was in many ways an afterthought about what he could use the then rather cutting-edge technology of the printing press for. The concept of advertising in the paper came even later.
Franklin was able to marry the tech of the printing press to journalism to create newspapers. Today, we can do with the iPhone what Franklin did with his press – inform the community and make a profit doing it.
Small town local newspaper do not have to die. In fact, they can both survive and thrive, but it requires a change. The paper part has to go, as does text. Small papers, when faced with fiscal problems, often respond by cutting back on the reporting staff. This makes no sense. The stories that reporters produce is what news companies sell. It is their only product, but the medium in which it is presented can and must change.
The model I am presenting is scalable. It can restore local journalism if you invest in your reporters, report in a medium people actually want to see and do it in the most cost-effective way possible.
A lot of people believe that iPhone video is at best a fall back, an add-on for ‘professional’ TV crews. In fact, in the hands of someone trained to use it properly, iPhones can make news stories as well, or even better, than the conventional method. More on this in later newsletters, but first, an example:
This is a local news story done by Robbie Vaughn, a journalist with Spectrum News 1 in Austin, Texas, and a graduate of one of our bootcamps. All of this was done by Robbie on an iPhone and nothing more. He found the story, he reported it, he shot it, he scripted it, he edited it and he produced it. And he did it all on one day.
That’s what a well-trained local news reporter can do on their own with an iPhone.
That’s local journalism.
4 Comments
George Hughes October 26, 2023
I actually hosted a hyperlocal community website back from 2003 through 2015 in which I used crowd-source news gathering backed up with direct reporting on local government/ police, etc.
Among the attractions ‘donated’ to the site was a lady who literally transcribed the police band reports and others who, often gave wrenching descriptions of accidents like the guy pulling a wheelie on a motorcycle and losing it in traffic.
During a 100-year storm where flash flooding in the community was really rather widespread, we did a live net-cast that garnered nine-hundred concurrent viewers, many of whom were also sending us photos and calling in with reports.
The site had 25,000 registered members and a paid membership back then of about 1200 residents.
The issues that led to the collapse of the community was local jealousy, and, national jealousy (AOL’s “patch” network discovered my site, and literally spent $200,000 literally paying folks like the realtor whom I had extracted a $100 commercial membership who had used that membership to write about real estate and sell his properties. The other guy simply paid him to do that making it easy for him to switch.
Another factor involved was this site was created in the largest county in Georgia’s 14th Congressional district which, if you look at the folks sent to DC (Yeah-MTG) are known for their radical political views. One quote I got from MTG’s predecessor was, “I don’t believe in compromise” which was so ignorant a statement by a sitting congressman that the comment insulted my intelligence and I refused to cover the dumb ass.
I have a background in democratic politics and ran for office as a democrat in the county in 2014 as I was struggling to save the site. Hell, a decade earlier before the GOP went off the deep end, the locals tried to recruit me using the logic, the democratic party is the ‘n****r” party.
As I was, by 2015 (retirement age) an old white guy, my effort to rally democrats was confounded by the understandable reluctance of the majority of democrats in the county (about 15% African American) who considered me a hold-over from the traditional Georgia democratic party. No traction there.
Still, some of the highlights included remove video via smart phone and even a more elaborate remote netcast using cell phones. I remember successfully producing the ribbon-cutting for the new local hospital from the middle of a field.
I should also note my prior experience was as the local newspaper editor and I had spent years in a variety of media-type jobs (advertising/marketing for an ad agency) and even syndicated a fishing/outdoor program. I was a news and sports editor back in the ’70s as well, so came to the field with a variety of associated experiences that led to relative success. I.e. in 2007 the effort earned recognition as one of 15 “21st Century Newschallenge winners” of a Knight Foundation project to recognize such efforts.
The ultimate problem was that people who do community journalism have to be dedicated to the community. Effort like Patch ultimately fail despite their substantial financial backing because you don’t get the type of commitment needed from hired folks.
Before I end this I should point out that of the 25,000 registered users, over half actually made a post and at the height of the effort, the average visit was over 22 minutes. It was really rather dramatic but this was a self-funded effort as financial types, well, they wanted national/international reach to a centralized entity that can maximize the profit to feed the greed.
Simon October 24, 2023
I agree with what you say, Michael. Over here in the UK things are much the same.
Curiosity drags me down rabbit holes, and when I get to the bottom I like to understand the fundamentals. Some years ago I read the outcome of a seminal study done in the US. A book, ‘The Elements of Journalism’ by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. It’s the result of a collaborative study involving some of the major players in journalism around the US, and some of the rest of the world.
My own experience in TV leads me to believe that very few who call themselves journalists have read it. In brief, it defines the single purpose of journalism as enabling free citizens to make informed choices. From this purpose spring ten principles: 1 journalism’s first obligation is to the truth – 2 its first loyalty is to citizens – 3 its essence is a discipline of verification – 4 its practitioners must maintain independence from those they (un)cover – 5 it must serve as an independent monitor of power – 6 it must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise – 7 it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant – 8 it must keep the news relevant and proportional – 9 its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience – 10 citizens have rights and responsibilities too.
Emile Zola defined art as a corner of reality viewed through a temperament. This suggests that the meaning of a truth depends upon your perspective on it. A man kills another – to some he is a murderer, to others a terrorist, and to others a freedom fighter. Within those ten principles comes the journalistic responsibility to find a perspective that is useful, justifiable, and reasonable.
When Lincoln met Harriet Beecher-Stowe at the White House he remarked “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the world. There are many examples of both factual and fictional stories that have done this.
A perusal of YouTube shows that amongst the pretty pixels and rich waveforms there are also examples of powerful storytelling, many made without training, and many shot and edited on iPhones. The gatekeepers are gone, equipment is cheap and publishing is free. There is no excuse not to change the world.
Tim Karr October 24, 2023
Agree. The secular commercial model for newspapers — which is largely dependent on having a local monopoly over timely print advertising — has run its course. You claim that newspapers moving to a not-for-profit model doesn’t work. But do you see noncommercial models working for the type of local video-news production you’re highlighting here?
Boyd Staszewski – Executive Producer October 24, 2023
Agreed. If your brand is not available on smart phone… that everyone has in their pocket along with keys and wallet… you a missiing where your audience is. Especially with sms push notifications being ready by 99% of people receiving them on their phones.