Now is the time to revive local news (before it’s too late)
Over the last 20 years we have been slowly chipping away at everything local. Now is the time to stand up and defend what we have left and rebuild what we’ve lost.
The Coronavirus pandemic has exposed many of the vulnerabilities that we have exposed ourselves to in the pursuit of globalization. In making our world a more globally connected place, we have paid a price at the local level that we have either been unaware of or not impacted enough to care.
That means that local jobs selling and repairing electronic appliances were sacrificed as long as the price for TV’s made somewhere else were so cheap that I could afford not only a much better one, but I could throw it away and get a new one as soon as something went wrong with it.
It also means that more and more products that don’t require any special knowledge to produce (think face masks and other personal protective equipment) were gradually manufactured further and further away in the pursuit of finding the cheapest cost.
Maybe not as obvious, but the same process has happened with information. At the expense of local newspapers, we have given our attention over to global platforms with the promise that they will keep us better connected with the world. But as a trade-off we oftentimes end up less connected to…
