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The Internet Is Killing Local News, Says the FCC
Art3x writes "The rise of the Internet has led to a 'shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting' (Here's the AP's version) says a 475-page report by the FCC, and the consequences could be 'more government waste, more local corruption,' 'less effective schools' and other problems. Even though there are more media choices today than ever, newspapers have been laying off reporters, leaving a gap that is yet to be filled."
It's not that the majority of local businesses are multinational franchises with no need for local advertising.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Seems to me the FCC doing a 475 page report on something that was pretty obvious is Government waste.
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that unless you've got enough eyes peering onto your site to somehow support some sort of revenue stream, you're going to be spending half your day at work, the other half doing reporting and you're going to be pretty burnt out from all of it.
This is the advantage of professional journalists, they get to eat because of their work.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Flat Earth News published in 2008 goes into this in great detail from a British point of view. Interestingly, it's not the internet that started the rot but massive cost cutting - which for ten years created huge profits - started in the mid-80s. By the mid to late 90s serious journalism and local news were already dieing. The internet merely savaged the corpse.
I'm sure there's an objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts reporter working somewhere, but to pretend that the internet is the reason these jobs are going away is silly. They're going away because the local reporting is, in the main, just as vacuous as national reporting and probably less well-edited. Factor in that with local reporting we're still getting more government waste, more local corruption, and less effective schools with these programs been cheered on by most of those in journalism, and this seems to boil down to "if that fox stops guarding the henhouse ..."
I agree that the Fourth Estate (right?) is important, but its value is historically overstated, and it is easily co-opted for outright propaganda.
Gosh, I'd almost feel sorry for newspapers, if they hadn't ruthlessly used their mainstream media status to advance personal and political agendas, both through their choice of stories to report as well as deliberate omissions ("that's not a story"). Bizarrely, journalists still cling to the "we are heroes and white knights" self-narrative, and still in the year 2011 have not had a heel realization.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Where I live the local news has rarely ever exposed anything. In fact, they gloss over the details, fail to provide links to documentation for the reader to learn for themselves, and use so many quotes from the elected officials or city staff members that no true analysis can be done.
One professional reporter suggested to me privately that the public, "read between the lines," in order to see what's really being said. While that's great for someone in the know, it doesn't work for 99.9% of the population.
What has helped are local, non-professional sources who take the time to do what reporters used to do. Researching documents, providing them to the public and going back to school to have an even better understanding of how local government is supposed to work.
While I don't want to toot my own horn or even step on the toes of the pros, the work I do actually does expose the issues in local government and shows their general incompetence when compared to how they are supposed to act.
I am going to school for Public Administration, I use my skills as a data analyst to provide crime dashboards to aggregate data, and I post public documents requested and researched for MONTHS so that the public can ignore my own analysis and do their own if they so choose.
The rise of the Internet has done nothing to change the business model of the print papers. They're still pushing out 500 word blurbs of city council meetings instead of 1000+ word analyses. They are the ones at fault here, not the Internet and shame on the FCC for stating anything else.
FCC approved media consolidation had nothing to do with this?
I stopped watching the news many years ago and never did get a paper. It wasn't because of the Internet. It was because I got tired of hearing nothing but trivial, shallow, or sensationalistic crap. I don't care who slept with whom and soundbites don't do anything any good. Plus, since I live in an area with many connected cities, invariably the remaining content usually didn't apply to my locality, anyway.
Quite frankly, the national news isn't much better in many ways. To me, the fact that there was some conflict in the Middle East is simply not news, it is life. Yes, gas prices are high. Republicans did X and Democrats did Y. Some other bill just passed that either raises taxes, takes away state's rights, stomps on the Constitution, or takes away citizens' personal liberty.
I hope that doesn't make me irresponsible. I do try to stay informed. And usually the things that do matter somehow reach me. I am just burned out from negativity, information overload, and feeling completely apathetic about government in general.
It's not a waste, since that's not the results of the report. Let me help out.
How the Internet Has Improved Journalism
---
Greater Depth
Improved Quality of Commentary and Analysis
Enabling Citizen Engagement
Speed and Ease
Expanding Hyperlocal Coverage
Serving Highly Specific Interests
Cheaper Content Distribution
Cheaper Content Creation
Direct Access to Community and Civic News
Sound different from TFS?
Yep. Same report. Time to fork slashdot to make it less inflammatory. They took the only concern, "lack of clarity how well trained bloggers are" and made it into a siren favoring Big Media.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Right?! Because it is not news if I choose to subscribe directly to things like the county school board news letter instead of watching/reading commercial laden media hype.
Trying to imply that the Internet is to blame for the downfall of investigative journalism is ridiculous, I have seen more expose's as a result of rapid information spread on the Internet than I ever saw from some local yokel reporters drek on how bob's bakery was vandalized last night.
If anything this means that the FCC should be pushing the protections afforded to journalists toward the more independent sources like bloggers and whistleblowers.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Statements like this by gigantic Federal bureaucracies always leads to some move against freedom.
They will look to either restrict the ability of the internet to report news (which the government would love, the ruling democrat establishment would love nothing more than to shut down Andrew Britebart and Matt Drudge amongst others). Or they will be after confiscatory taxes on the internet, on news sites, on bloggers, to subsidize "local" news.
As others have said in this story, the lack of support for local news couldn't have anything to do with the fact that businesses aren't local anymore like they were 50 years ago... 50 years ago every town had more than one newspaper. Every radio station had a full airstaff AND a news department. Why? Because local advertisers PAID for this.
The FCC realizes that it's reason for existence (over the air radio and TV) is coming to an end because it's being overtaken by internet broadcasting. They also realize that the chink in the 1st Amendment that was created for them in 1934, the fact that radio spectrum has limits, ie, there is scarcity, which paved the way for the Feds to decide who could broadcast and who couldn't, is mooted by the fact that the Internet has NO LIMIT of channels.
So they have to invent some other form of "scarcity" to give them some toehold on the Internet.
Corporatism != Free Market
Before the Internet local schools were all awesome, local politicians were honest and dutiful, and the zoning board members could never be bought off, because everyone was cowed into sincerity by the local newspaper.
Or am I delusional.
This not a loss of local control, we haven't had that since the 1860's, it is loss of central control by big media companies who are pulling desperately on the strings they still have.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
Whining about biased sites while posting to Slashdot? LOL *head asplodes*
While your opinion is probably perfectly valid, and in fact may be reality, such a viewpoint does not match well with the biases and precognitions of the fanatics at such social media sites.
Just because someone said something negative about Apple does not mean it is probably valid. It is very likely to not be valid considering the rabid anti-Apple nuts. All you've done is expose your own bias.
So long as Fox News is the first to go, I fail to see a problem here.
Except that outlets like Fox News - which are essentially company newsletters, not put out to make a profit but to support an ideology - will be the only survivors.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It's not a waste, since that's not the results of the report. Let me help out.
How the Internet Has Improved Journalism --- Greater Depth Improved Quality of Commentary and Analysis Enabling Citizen Engagement Speed and Ease Expanding Hyperlocal Coverage Serving Highly Specific Interests Cheaper Content Distribution Cheaper Content Creation Direct Access to Community and Civic News
Sound different from TFS?
Yep. Same report. Time to fork slashdot to make it less inflammatory. They took the only concern, "lack of clarity how well trained bloggers are" and made it into a siren favoring Big Media.
Time to insert a Bill Hicks quote - I'll leave it to those with brains to work out the relevance to TFA:-
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
Local newspapers rarely have the stones or interest to actually go after local corruption. For example, in the case of Ryan Frederick, the local news was basically regurgitating the local police reports until Radley Balko dug into it and found that it was full of corruption. Much of that corruption, I might add, was just barely concealed beneath the surface.
The fact is that the local media outlets have been compromised for a long time. It's not because of "teh corporashunz" it's because they're both too lazy and too afraid of risking local relationships with key officials who might shut them out of future scoops.
that there is nobody left that can take the news seriously. I can be better informed watching sponge Bob Square Pants for .5 hours that I can watching the local news. The one shining light in the sea of trash journalism is the PBS TV News. Not the Radio, the radio program is just as biased and uninformative as Fox or CNN.
Actually the PBS TV programs are a real breath of fresh air. No fancy graphics. Just professionals talking about the news. It is kind of like the rest of the news outlets used to be 20-30 years ago. I can actually watch the program and not think everyone on the program is retarded.
The Major new outlets say they just cater to what the public is buying. Well, I guess they are not buying it anymore. Even if the argument was valid, it would kind of be like one of those faggety ass drug dealers saying, 'well i am just selling what the public wants'.
-The owner of this post is a fagot
-Nancy Grace.
What's killing all press (from local to world) isn't the Internet -- the Internet is just what's replacing the press.
What's killing the press is that the industry is laced from top to bottom with ignorant Statists capable of neither investigating nor reporting accurately on the events of the day. Almost every news story in existence originates with some Google search by a flunky desperately seeking something for the talking head to say so as to keep butts in the seats and hands off the remotes.
Amazingly, the entire industry is so insular and elitist that is neither capable of seeing its own obvious incompetence nor or recognizing the truth about their entire industry:
That is now nothing more than a batch of scandal sheets and hack-rags, and its former customers are starting to figure that out. Result: they're no longer buying what the press is selling -- because the press is selling total bullshit.
For thirty years, I've made a hobby of de-bunking the press. In the age of the Internet, give me any press story, Google, and fifteen minutes, and I can usually prove that the story never occurred in reality. There's typically a kernel of truth, but it will have been sensationalized and transformed to the point where it bears only a tangential relationship to reality.
Mark this and mark it well: the world beyond your immediate experience isn't what you think it is. Do not assume that anything the press reports is accurate -- in fact, it's a good bed that every report is made up of almost whole cloth.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Local news was killed in suicide decades ago when they stopped reporting actual facts and switched to 'commentary'.
Internet is just helping clean the mess up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When "local" news stops being a recap of AP wire stories, and when "commentary" stops being a mix of advertising and thinly veiled slander maybe I'll watch a "local" newscast. Most "local stations" or owned and operated by media conglomerates for the sole purpose of selling advertising space. Actual local news in TV always seems to open with a violent crime, followed by a car chase, followed by pre-weather then a commercial. Then it's part of the weather, sports, cute story, and then the weather recap. There is no "reporting" there is political spin, reporting the news stopped years ago and the public has finally caught on. Now the "local" stations are complaining that the "regional" stations are unfair competition. Well the "local" stations help create the short attention span of the public now they have to live with it.
Yeah, lets force the government to $upport "local news" that will fix the economy and everything.
From Ted Koppel on the death of news.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html