Local news is inherently interesting. Reading about new shops and restaurants in your area, or your friend’s kid whose football team is winning, or the local political drama where you go to the town meetings regularly—I think those all seem arguably more relevant to people in their daily lives than (e.g.) how corrupt, exactly, are the politicians far away from you. I think the “local news” trend tapped into this inherent interest for many years.
So I guess the question is, how did global news manage to gain a monopoly on interestingness? I think it’s because culture wars (and arguably celebrities and a few other global things) are a mindhack that have only managed to start winning and capturing attention in the last few decades, once news websites were able to start iterating faster based on feedback from clicking on social media links; and unfortunately that does seem to have some self-reinforcing effect where the more people are talking about the global things instead of the local things, the more interesting it becomes, to the point where local news now seems inherently uninteresting in comparison.
Local news is inherently interesting. Reading about new shops and restaurants in your area, or your friend’s kid whose football team is winning, or the local political drama where you go to the town meetings regularly—I think those all seem arguably more relevant to people in their daily lives than (e.g.) how corrupt, exactly, are the politicians far away from you. I think the “local news” trend tapped into this inherent interest for many years.
So I guess the question is, how did global news manage to gain a monopoly on interestingness? I think it’s because culture wars (and arguably celebrities and a few other global things) are a mindhack that have only managed to start winning and capturing attention in the last few decades, once news websites were able to start iterating faster based on feedback from clicking on social media links; and unfortunately that does seem to have some self-reinforcing effect where the more people are talking about the global things instead of the local things, the more interesting it becomes, to the point where local news now seems inherently uninteresting in comparison.