Yesterday, I asked my students, “How many of you spent $4 on a cup of coffee in the last month? How many have spent that much to support local news?”
“If people don’t get local news, they don’t know what’s going on in their community. If they don’t know what’s going on in their community, they don’t get involved in their community. If they’re not involved in their community, and others aren’t involved in their community, their government may not actually function very well. If people aren’t involved at the local level, and they don’t know what’s going on, and the government’s not performing at the local level, they start to lose trust. And when they start to lose trust, they start to have concerns about whether or not democracy is working, whether the government is working. And those feelings are naturally then extended to the national government.” –Lee Shaker, quoted in Wired article by Henri Gendreau: Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers
Post was last modified on 2 Dec 2017 11:09 am
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We need to figure out a way to sustain journalists in this day and age.
There was on old episode of the Simpsons where Lisa takes on Mr. Burns (who bought all of the newspapers and news stations) with her own paper. At the end, everyone in town is printing their own staple-bound, photocopied newspapers. That’s my solution going forward.
Starting up a local news blog only costs time. It doesn’t make money either, so I guess it’s a hobby (in an industry that deserves professionals). But it’s a way to break the bad habits and soiled reputations (real or perceived) from the ground up. The guy down the street can’t make things up because the community will hold him accountable and his biases are generally known.
I tried to do this a while back (Steven Levy style writing about a local tech company), but the first place I visited liked my questions and offered me a job (content marketing). I’m hoping to restart the community project sometime in 2018, though...?
Dobler Aaron I haven't seen that Simpsons episode. Most of the students in my News Writing class won't be working as professional journalists, but they will all be news consumers, and as citizens of a democracy they should be alert in a world full of trolls and astro-turfing.
Also: I live in a town where the local newspaper is actively hated to the point that I don’t publicly talk about freelancing with them.
The experiment was “What if we gave local people and companies Wired and New Yorker-level attention?”
Even as journalism students, how many read local news?
My own freshman writing class is probably similar. Students who signed up for a news writing course are a filtered group.
Dennis G. Jerz In my second term comp class, where they do more research, many are writing about local issues and I've pointed them to the local publications, which none of them read otherwise. Not even the sports! Or comics!
There are some who follow local sports, and one journalism major wrote an article about funding of our local library. I have told the students that if they want to write a review of cafeteria food or campus parking, those topics will be enough to show me they understand the form of journalism, but if they want to include their work in a job application portfolio they should pick topics that are newsworthy to the community.