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Legacy Media and Corporate Control: The Failed Promise of the Digital Age |
| | Local journalism is collapsing with disastrous effects on our civil society. As small outlets become unprofitable the information diet of the typical American is more and more dominated by a handful of corporate news organizations which can afford to keep the lights on. |
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< | Rather than ushering in a new era of free access to information the mass adoption of the internet has been fatal to vital information flows. As our society grapples with the consequences of social media, misinformation, and the politics of the internet age it is critical that we reflect on why at a time when the transmission of information is faster, cheaper, and easier than ever we find ourselves in a national news dessert. |
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> | Rather than ushering in a new era of free access to information the mass adoption of the internet has been fatal to vital information flows. As our society grapples with the consequences of social media, misinformation, and the politics of the internet age it is critical that we reflect on why at a time when the transmission of information is faster, cheaper, and easier than ever we find ourselves in a national news desert. |
| | The Value of Local News
Robust local reporting is essential to a well-functioning democracy and civil society. In order for the regulatory functions of democracy to work citizens must be both mobilized to vote and sufficiently well-informed to select between different candidates and policy platforms. |
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< | This is especially true in the United States where many administrative and executive positions, such as attorneys general, comptrollers, and sheriffs, are elected offices. In nations where these are appointed positions. The citizenry can rely on the judgment of elected decision-makers to ensure that those occupying the office carry out their duties faithfully and competently. Here they must be policed by the citizens themselves at the poll booth.
Without local reports willing and able to investigate stories of corruption, incompetence, or simple political dishonesty voters cannot possibly make intelligent choices about who should be staffed in these positions. If voters are forced to either choose randomly or vote the party line the situation becomes ripe for graft and toxic machine politics. |
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> | This is especially true in the United States where many administrative and executive positions, such as attorneys general, comptrollers, and sheriffs, are elected offices. Without local reports willing and able to investigate stories of corruption, incompetence, or simple political dishonesty voters cannot possibly make intelligent choices about who should be staffed in these positions. If voters are forced to either choose randomly or vote the party line the situation becomes ripe for graft and toxic machine politics. |
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The Death of Local News |
| | This process has been worsened by the arrival of private equity into the market. Investment firms have bought up dying local news organizations for the sole purpose of ringing a few last drops of profit for them. These vulture funds have reduced pillars of civic engagement to little more than crude vehicles for advertisements. |
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< | The cause of this decline is a simple case of shifting market dynamics. The demand for print news has shrunk dramatically. As the US was losing nearly 1,800 papers local papers lost almost 50 million readers. The plain reality is that these local outlets cannot compete in the modern world. They are being strangled to make way for new hyper-efficient hyper-profitable media enterprises. |
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> | The cause of this decline is a simple case of shifting market dynamics. Under the logic of the markets the value created by media is defined by the attention it can grab, rather than the information it provides. American consumers have shifted their attention away from local media. As the US was losing nearly 1,800 papers local papers lost almost 50 million readers. The plain reality is that these local outlets cannot compete in the modern world. They are being strangled to make way for new hyper-efficient hyper-profitable media enterprises. |
| | The New Corporate Media |
| | Wikipedia has flourished where news failed because of the larger economic structure they both exist within. Wikipedia exists on the margins, relying largely on hobbyist editors contributing their time and knowledge for free while sustaining themselves with full time work elsewhere. It scraps together its operating costs from donations. It exists on the margins of the economy partially exempted from market forces. |
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< | News organizations cannot do the same. They require full time reporters, editors, graphic artists, and countless other professionals to continuously sort fact from fiction and provide high quality news to their readers. Under our current economic system they are a business which must compete to survive. The internet alerted the structure of the market and allowed the most efficient and profitable papers and stations to explode in size, snuffing out all competition. We cannot solve the problems in the news business with technology. The only solution would be to alter the economic problems facing newspapers.
The lesson we must learn here is that technology alone will not and could never save our society. While technology and the internet influence society they are also constrained by it. When the market demands that information be locked behind paywalls no amount of clever code will change it. |
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> | News organizations cannot do the same. They require full time professional staffs to continuously sort fact from fiction and provide high quality news to their readers. Under our current economic system they are a business which must compete to survive. The internet alerted the structure of the market and allowed the most efficient and profitable papers and stations to explode in size, snuffing out all competition. We cannot solve the problems in the news business with technology. When the market demands that information be locked behind paywalls no amount of clever code will change it. |
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Probably the example you wanted then, wasn't Wikipedia: it was the Guardian. In any event, "the market demands" is an oddly inaccurate statement both at the level of theory (market demand isn't the market demanding) and practice. The existence of public schools, libraries and universities is probably also relevant. |
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> | To solve the crisis in local news we might look to the few islands of informational freedom in our society. Institutions such as libraries, public schools, and universities thrive because they are exempted from the logic of markets through public largesse. Providing public funds to smaller news organizations could provide a solution. However state involvement in media raises the specter of state corruption and censorship like we recently saw in Poland under the PiS. |
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< | But your observations about what happens when local news can't be funded by local advertising but local surveillance capitalism can provide a return to private investors are accurate. So perhaps a slightly longer horizon for the historical narrative, less focused on this turn of the cycle, would yield a more coherent and quite different picture.
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