Local News Is Still King!
I started working at WLRN Public Media in 2014. The station had a relationship with the Miami Herald, and thus we had desks and a couple of studios in their offices in Doral, Florida. I loved working in the Herald newsroom because it still had that newspaper newsroom vibe.
WLRN had a little more than a dozen reporters for the station, but they were scattered between two newsrooms, and most of them were always in the field working. The Herald newsroom always had its editors and a couple dozen reporters working frantically day in and day out on assignments.
There was a joy watching the editors meet a couple of times a day to discuss the big stories and top assignments. There was poetry to the banter between editors and reporters over the tiniest details in their reports. The energy of the room always filled me with joy.
Those days are gone, long gone. Covid-19 ended it all.
The Miami Herald no longer lives in Doral. One of the former most prominent papers in the country no longer has a home. Reporters and editors now work from home, and the paper isn’t even printed in the press room that existed across the parking lot. What’s happening? Was this inevitable?
As I watched the paper shrink even more over the past eight years, I’ve seen the newsroom at our station grow — though slowly. We can talk for days about the shifting sands under the feet of the news media industry these past twenty years, but instead, let’s focus on the future.
Local news is not disappearing just yet. Local is still the most important news we have. And in some places, it’s having a sort of renaissance.
I spoke with Kristen Hare from the Poynter Institute about the importance of local news and to get a better picture of what’s happening in the local news biz. We also spoke about which business models work best. And, I asked her to give me the metaphor to best describe journalists. We both have two different ideas on this point. Listen to podcast to hear what she has to say about these issues.
<iframe style=”border-radius:12px” src=”https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/1J3txSFyJ0dr4OaJRtmiYr?utm_source=generator&theme=0" width=”100%” height=”152" frameBorder=”0" allowfullscreen=”” allow=”autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture”></iframe>
Thank you, for visiting the website. Remember, you can listen to the full podcast in numerous places. This is a production of City of Dreamz Media Inc.
