A Plea to Save Local News
(First of a series of posts on the state of local news)
Over the past few months, we have seen the COVID-19 pandemic deal a devastating blow to local news. Yet, in reality, the pandemic simply accelerated an existing phenomenon: Since the rise of the modern tech giants, the news industry has been grappling with the death spiral of local news.
Today, only 19% of American adults still depend on newspapers as a primary news source. Meanwhile, 68% of American adults at least occasionally get their news from social media. This massive shift in the dissemination of news has been catastrophic for news publishers.
News publishers’ revenue primarily comes from two sources: subscriptions and advertisements. With an ad-based revenue model, publishers offer readers free access to their articles while selling ad spaces on their websites. In other words, publishers see revenue when people go to their site and stay on their pages to read their content.
Tech giants have been benefiting from publishers’ content without directly compensating the publishers. For years, companies such as Google have been offering users access to publishers’ work without paying these publishers for their content.
This is a one-sided relationship, or, as the New York Times describes it, a “significant market failure.” Major players like Google and Facebook have been able to rise to the top, profiting from the work of traditional news publishers while simultaneously pushing them out.
The effects of this change have particularly devastated one segment of the publishing world. While the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publishers with national readerships may be able to survive in this new media order with subscription revenue models, local publishers have been decimated. The rise of social media has triggered a domino effect for local journalism: rapidly vanishing revenue forces local publishers to reduce their staff, which diminishes the quality of their journalism, which reduces their readership, which further accelerates the death spiral.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the value of local news. The New York Times has provided excellent COVID-19 coverage and has deployed an impressive array of visualizations to make data comprehensible. But the New York Times will not tell me that two employees of my local Whole Foods tested positive for COVID-19 last month, or that there may be an alarming shortage of ICU beds in my California city. Large national papers simply cannot cover the nooks and crannies of America. And in the end, the news that impacts everyday life the most is hyper-local.
Local news is shriveling on the vine. We need to take action to save it. While there are no silver bullets, there are many important ideas that we can translate into action.
First, we need to create a more equitable relationship between large tech companies and local news publishers. Currently, there are some partnerships between the two, such as the Facebook Journalism Project. However, there needs to be a larger shift in industry structure and relationships to empower smaller news publishers. These two groups can develop a more symbiotic relationship, and this starts with paying publishers for their content.
Second, we need technological innovation. Local publishers will never have the same resources as tech giants, but technology can help bridge this gap. That is what HiGeorge does — HiGeorge provides data visualizations that local publishers can use to better leverage the world’s data. With the help of HiGeorge, local publishers would not need to maintain armies of data engineers to provide comprehensive and tailored coverage for their communities.
Moving forward, tools like HiGeorge will be instrumental in supporting smaller publishers. A lot of work needs to be done to rectify the current state of the news industry, but it is still possible — and absolutely necessary — to save local news.
To find out more about why local news is so vital to communities across America, stay tuned for future posts.