Bridging the gap in local news
Everyone’s wondering what the next four years will mean for their families and neighbors, and local reporters are in the perfect position to find out.
In the first week of the Trump administration, we’ve seen an immigration ban and subsequent protests, Steve Bannon placed on the National Security Council over intelligence officials and ongoing questions around transparency and stability within the White House. These are all huge stories, some of the most important that journalists will tell in their careers. They’re also deeply personal events that affect people far away from Washington. National news tends to neglect the local angle in favor of big, front-page stories, but doing so leaves out a huge swathe of readers. Hometown newspapers can fill the gap.
What better way to make a national story hit home than by showing the effect policies have next door? This work creates empathy by putting a human face on the decisions made in the Capitol. It shows the trickle down from the president’s pen to real life that we so often miss, and it can expose people to the consequences of our decisions as a country. Every town with an international airport — from Appleton, Wisconsin, to Anchorage, Alaska — could be directly affected by the immigration ban. Residents deserve those stories.
To be sure, they are challenging to tell. Most newsrooms are stretched thin in precarious financial positions. They’re devoted to strictly local stories: crime, business openings and closings, high school basketball games and the like. National news comes from the Associated Press and, aside from some commentary and opinion, the two rarely mix. But keeping news organized that way overlooks great stories at the intersection.
It misses the nearly 500 Alabamians who traveled to march in the Women’s March on Washington, the immigrant communities in San Diego wondering what will become of Trump’s executive order. And while bridging the gap between large and small takes more time and resources than a straightforward local story, doing so provides readers with a valuable connection to the outside world.
Drawing those connections makes local news useful to national distributors, too. Papers like the Washington Post and the New York times don’t have the resources to report out stories from all corners of the country, but they can pay for great work on the ground that supplements their own. Sharing stories opens up a new source of potential revenue, and the resulting exposure brings in web traffic and potential subscribers. A little investment in great work up front would pay off for papers in the long run.
Your hometown paper should translate wonky policy into human stories taking place in your community. Everyone’s wondering what the events of this week and the next four years will mean for their families and neighbors, and local reporters are in the perfect position to find out. National news happens far outside the Beltway. Ignoring that fact isolates people from what’s going on in their country.
