Hacker News Reader

Comment by pevey | Hacker News Reader

My hometown newspaper has been completely gutted since the late 90s. It's not just FB's fault. There are other factors. The Internet in general. But it is disturbing to me. The local politicians are more corrupt than ever because nobody is watching. The only local journalism now is the evening news, and viewership of that declines and skews older more and more each year because of cable cutting. A few reputable news outlets have survived on a national scale, but local journalism is mostly dead. And this is normal for younger people, so they don't even realize what they are missing.

View on HN

Yep. Local corruption was already fairly bad but is gonna get a ton worse now that local papers are all but completely dead, and that shit's corrosive to democracy. [edit] and a huge drag on economic productivity, for that matter.

In 20 years of thinking about this stuff I've gone from being a huge Internet optimist to wondering if the open Internet is even compatible with a healthy, free society, at all. I'm starting to lean toward "no". McLuhan nailed it, and the message of the medium of the Internet may not include liberal democracy.

What happens when instead of killing bookstores, the market "decides" to kill something absolutely necessary for democracy's health?

If something beyond individuals voting is absolutely necessary for democracy's health, then it is already dead.

Because however you provide that thing, it will be co-opted and controlled.

So... it's never been alive? Several things beyond the franchise are necessary.

Canada (and other countries[1]) levy a tax on blank media (cassettes, CD-Rs, DVDs, etc...) to compensate rights holders for piracy of their work.

Do you think something like that would help? I'm thinking of an ISP tax where the proceeds are used to support local journalism.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

State-funded media isn't great for liberal democracy either.

The only state-funded media that I know of (BBC, CBC, and PBS) are all pretty good. I'd be sad to see any of them go away.

PBS, or really mostly member stations, do get some funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but it’s not really state-funded media and the best known programming would probably easily find a home elsewhere.

What public funding there is has also been a political sticking point from time to time when some show or other has ruffled some legislative feathers.

> the best known programming would probably easily find a home elsewhere

You're right - the popular stuff doesn't really matter when it comes to subsidies. If CBC has their funding slashed, Hockey Night in Canada will continue there or elsewhere. It's the unpopular stuff that needs support.

I share your concerns.

It brings to mind seeing videos of primitive tribes being given automatic weapons and thinking "you don't 'deserve' this, you haven't evolved to create them and therefore shouldn't have your hands on them"

That's the way I feel about the internet with "modern" society -- we're still too primitive to use these tools. We're still of tribal mindset but we've been given something quite dangerous that we are not well equipped to handle.

I see the tribalism here in HN (which I consider to be a top site for intelligent dialog).

It's not clear people even want democracy at all now. It takes a lot of work and moves slowly. People want an autocracy like Disneyland which permits only the right thoughts and actions.

Indeed. Nobody complains about the evils of suppression and oppression anymore; they complain about how the wrong thoughts are being suppressed and the wrong people are doing the oppressing.

It's not freedom vs suppression anymore; it's "ban teaching about racism" vs "ban saying naughty words". The idea that you should defend the rights of people you hate is completely dead in the water.

"the open Internet" in theory should be good for local newspapers because it enables fast easy(ish) efficient publishing but the fact that it also enables fast easy efficient copying kills existing models of monetization.

The fundamental problem is that copying digital media is so easy that it breaks the intuitive publishing model reliant on physical possession of any media inherently acting as license to access that media.

Right—I think there are two chief problems:

1) There is no longer a business model that can support strong local media. It's completely gone, and there doesn't seem to be any replacement or substitute coming from "natural" market action in the current environment.

2) The rage-algorithms and radicalization-rabbit-holes of social media giants have so completely captured everyone's attention that it's not clear anyone would read local reporting, anyway, even if it could somehow get funding. Unless it could serve the rage-algorithms and radicalization-rabbit-holes. Though perhaps at least the most shocking stories would get picked up more widely and be noticed.

Sort of.

What I am saying is that the ease with which digital media can be copied and distributed is the fundamental problem.

Prior to the free open Internet and widespread access to digital media, physically producing and distributing the actual newspaper was the hard part.

The time and difficulty of physically printing and delivering the actual paper media automatically covers for all the effort that goes in to producing the content of that media.

Anyone who would want to steal that content still had to do the actual hard part (physical production and delivery of the paper media).

Now though, with the free open Internet, production and distribution of the physical media (beeps, boops, zeros, and ones) is ludicrously cheap and easy. The content is now not only the most valuable part of the deal it is also easier than ever to steal.

There was also a forced bundle and local monopoly. The person with an apartment to rent out probably didn’t especially want to pay for the reporter covering the local town zoning board meetings. But they didn’t have much choice but to take out a classified as.

You are conflating separate concerns. Advertising is a whole different ball game. Though, to belabor this metaphor, it is played in the same arena.

As far as I am aware, newspapers did not typically have de jure monopolies. Presumably, you are thinking of telecoms as a comparison. But an apparent de facto monopoly could easily arise based on the previously mentioned physical constraints for actually handling paper media. It only makes sense to send the trucks so far. But in populated areas customers could easily have access to multiple different papers.

Edit: as far as the "forced bundle" is concerned, that AGAIN comes back to the inherent difficulty of producing and distributing paper media relative to the content contained on that media. It's pretty easy to include a simple report of the zoning board meeting in the content you are already printing and distributing but it doesn't make sense to run a separate production line to produce a separate version of the paper.

Has anyone tried this model of monetization: The articles are free online, but only the paying customers can write comments below them (that anyone can read)?

You could of course link the articles from elsewhere and have a discussion there, but then your comments would not appear under the original article.

I strongly agree with the corruption bit of your statement while strongly disagreeing with the rest of it.Newspapers were begging to be killed because they have been abusing market power to drive large profits for decades because the controlled the main chokepoint for the average person to learn about world and town recent events. They grew their wage/benefit structure to eat a lot of their monopoly profits and that killed them when their ability to abuse their chokepoint for excess profits and that killed them. There are lots of citizen and independent journalists popping up to fill in their place these days with much more streamlined cost structures.

The really big problem is lack of effective self directable filtering and aggregation of news for the average person. Nerds like me can kind of make it work with an rss reader, rss bridge and hundreds of rss feeds across broad content sources (i.e. websites, twitter, youtube, specific mastodon users, etc.) combined with a service like ground news to give some feedback on who is promoting what and point to other sources for the same story, but it's really hard to impossible for the average person. Instead what the average person has are echo chamber creating things like their facebook feed that tend to amplify the loudest, often cringiest voices.

> There are other factors.

Like Craigslist. I think loss of classified ad revenue was the first deep wound.

Local news has been dead for decades from Craigslist; this howling is because national news is dying, and they will not go quietly into that dark night.

I've heard an argument that more disclosure and coverage on local politics actually leads to more accountability, but not the way you think. If no one reads and makes decisions based on local news or the dump of accountability disclosures, then it doesn't do anything. But lobbyists do follow these. So it helps a lobbyist to see which senator amended the bill or proposed what kind of spending. It helps the lobbyist keep the politician accountable.

Most people are caught up on national politics for some reason. I see people in NYC protesting laws in Texas while they neglect real issues affecting their quality of life.

People don't pay for newspaper subscriptions either. I have coworkers whose kids have grown up without ever getting a paper delivered to their house. It's a totally foreign concept to them, an anachronism you see in movies from the 80s/90s. I'd lament about how kids nowadays never get to experience the Saturday morning comics in them but they've got webcomics now, which are debatable better quality than the dull, mass appeal cartoons found in papers.

The decline of newspapers, and journalism in general, is 100% due to the now common practice of writing a story that says "<another outlet> reported ...". Why would anyone spend the time money to do actual journalistic research when it's so much cheaper to steal someone else's work. When stories became a commodity, it became a race to the bottom.

The local paper around these parts charges about 4x what I'm paying for a high quality national paper. I'd pay a little more for local (economies of scale pretty much guarantee their marginal costs are higher) but not that much more. Especially because even at that higher price it's still filled to the brim with advertising and copies of news from other sources.

Are we sure it's not that politicians seem more corrupt because everybody is watching their every move?

Harvard's Shorenstein Center has studied this, and there's a strong correlation between local newspapers closing and corruption in local politics increasing. (You may be addressing national politics which is a different matter entirely.)

Tried to find the study you're referring to by googling but came up empty handed -- could you point me in the right direction?

Funnily enough the closest I came was another comment of yours :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561773

Lots of resources on the actual site mentioned https://shorensteincenter.org/?s=corruption

Nothing about a link between corruption and lack of local journalism, however

I found this: https://shorensteincenter.org/solutions-americas-local-journ...

> Research shows that the disappearance of credible local news and information contributes to widening political polarization, increasing costs for local government and meaningfully suboptimal community outcomes as independent oversight decreases or, in the worst case, evaporates entirely.

I guess the "increasing costs for local government and meaningfully suboptimal community outcomes" bit. It's worth noting that I can't seem to find anything in the references that specifically links that with a decline in reporting by local news.

I subscribe to 5 online newpapers. I wish more people did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com