Local journalism's supply-side problem comes mainly from the demand side; fewer people seem to want local news

By Al Cross

Director and professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

Local news is in trouble because not enough people want it, Politico media reporter Jack Shafer writes, and I agree. But I think he misses some causes of the problem.

Shafer lays out the familiar arguments for local news, with references: "Local news makes representative government more accountable, scholars claim. Books and monographs extolling the virtues of local reporting on everything from public health to economic vitality abound. When local reporting goes south, researchers tell us, political polarization, civic corruption, lower voter turnout, reduced civic engagement and even authoritarianism follow."

Photo from Politico

Then he notes the hard facts: "A 2018 Duke University study of 16,000 local news outlets (including broadcasters) in 100 communities deemed only about 17 percent of articles as truly local (i.e., they took place in or were about the local municipality), and just over half were hard news. Another 2018 finding by Pew revealed that only 16 percent of Americans get their news 'often' from a newspaper, further lowering the status of the press. . . . Last year, when Facebook went prospecting for local news to include in a new section called 'Today In,' it found that one in three of its users lived in places where there wasn’t enough local news published to sustain the section." Meanwhile, newspapers are in a death spiral of fewer readers, fewer ads and high subscription costs that make up some ad-revenue losses but also drive away readers.

Shafer cites a 2018 Emory University study of local TV news suggesting that "low-cost, quality national news online . . . has siphoned off readers who might otherwise partake of local news." Surprisingly, he does not note the study's top two findings: "substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics" and "a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage," driven partly by Sinclair Broadcasting, which disproportionately serves TV markets with high rural population percentages.

And what was going on during the study period? Donald Trump was getting elected, dominating news coverage with his unorthodox approaches and attacking traditional news media. That affected rural and community journalists even before Trump was inaugurated, as I wrote in early 2017. In the last four years, some newspapers (notably those of Arkansas-based publisher Walter Hussman) have done a better job of explaining how journalism is supposed to work, but overall I don't think most news outlets do that well, and they fail to remind Americans of the differences in news media and social media.

Social media and the torrent of other online information leave readers with less time to consume local news. And that news is often not as interesting or entertaining as what they are getting from outside their community. As people spend more time in those communities of interest, they have less time to spend with their geographic communities, and those communities are the basis for most news outlets. Lower readership means fewer ads, which leaves less room for news, which drives down readership and continues the decline. Stopping it requires smart decisions about giving readers what they want, but also giving them what they need to be good citizens. The real trick is making them want what they need.

Despite his omissions, Shafer's piece is worth reading. He concludes:

"The groups most enthusiastic about saving and expanding local news are journalists, whose self-interest is self-evident; good-government types who savor the watchdog function of the press; tech giants like Google and Facebook, which have donated millions to local news to disarm critics who claim they destroyed newspapering (they didn’t, but that’s another column); politicians like Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, who regard the news as “infrastructure”; and academics and foundations that say local coverage is integral to a functional society. The local news movement won’t make much progress until its proponents realize that its primary obstacle is a demand-side one, not a supply-side one. It’s not that nobody wants to read local news; it’s just that not enough people do to make it a viable business. Maybe the surfeit of local news of yesteryear was the product of an economic accident, a moment that cannot be reclaimed. But even if you were to underwrite local news with taxes and philanthropy, and distribute it to citizens via subsidies, you’d still have to find a way to get people to read it. Until some editorial genius cracks that puzzle, the local news quest will remain a charitable, niche project advanced by journalistic, academic and political elites."