On local

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I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the death of newspapers. I’m not too worried about the loss of the paper based medium itself but I am concerned about the loss of quality journalism.

I have just finished reading Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion. The book is about the problems faced by the poorest countries and what can be done about them. Collier refers to four ‘traps’, one of which is the natural resources traps. I have often thought that more often than not abundant natural resources is more of a curse than a blessing. This has proven so in poor countries because bad governments loot the money. Collier found that the element of democracy most likely to restrain a bad government from wasting the revenues from natural resources was a free press.

Professional journalists are an important part of any democratic society and I don’t think they are adequately replaced by citizen journalists. There are some bloggers who do original reporting but speaking from my own experience as a blogger I generally react to original reporting done by others. David Simon wrote:

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I agree with him, we need good journalists. Without them official action goes unscrutinised and officials start to get the idea they can do anything which is corrosive to good government.

One of the reasons that local papers are dying is that they are competing with the whole of the internet. On global stories a reporter has no advantage over a blogger as they have access to the same source. They do have a massive advantage where they have access to information not already on the internet.  And that means local. Mike Elgan writes:

Local media must focus all resources on the coverage of local events. People in Lodi don’t want to pay the local paper for the coverage of national news also covered in thousands of stories available on their cell phones and Internet-connected PCs.

It’s time the so-called local media opened its eyes to the new reality: Nothing is local anymore. And it’s a huge opportunity. The new mantra should be: Cover local events exclusively, but for a global audience.

The problem at the moment is that the business model is not there. The technology exists to produce local news with a far lower overhead but to retain a staff of reporters on decent salaries there needs to be a far better model than CPM banners and Adsense.

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• In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police – washingtonpost.com (tsurch.com)
• David Simon Whines About The State Of Journalism While Undermining His Own Point (techdirt.com)
• NewsCred founder Shafqat Islam about startups and the future of media (onlinejournalismblog.com)
• Review: The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier (guardian.co.uk)