A lot of recent political changes are blamed on the loss of local news (motivating example), which is in turn blamed on the internet undercutting ad revenue (especially classifieds revenue). But if people never cared about local news enough to ~pay for it, why did papers ever offer it? Why not just sell the classifieds and the national news people were willing to pay for, and save the expense of the local stuff no one wanted?
Some ideas:
Newspapers and tv channels were confused and didn’t realize they could get away without producing local news.
This seems unlikely to me, because if all they cared about was national news why subscribe to the local newspaper at all? People who only wanted national news would subscribe to a national paper.
some sort of preference cascade, such that the price people were willing to pay for local news dropped as others’ willingness dropped.
People lost interest in local news for non-preference-cascade reasons
Mobility meant people felt less invested in their local area
I think the trend at the time was for fewer interstate moves.
More competition for people’s time. In the 90s there were four channels and at 6 and 11 they were all showing local news. What were you gonna do, not watch TV?
People don’t seek out local TV news but can be hooked via ads during prime time programming (“the hot new trend ruining the lives of students at your kids’ high school, specifically”). As people stopped watching prime time tv with ads, channels lost the opportunity to hook people for their local coverage.
Local but not national news was replaced by something else, like Facebook, Citizen, or Nextdoor.
I don’t think the timing or distribution work out for this.
I think it’s something like “for a lot of activities people do, they don’t actually care about the activity per se, or the ostensive goal of the activity, but they do it because it’s the done thing, or because that’s what everyone else is doing, so it’s important for socially connecting.”
eg.
People want to talk about something with their coworkers around the water cooler, or with their buddies in the pub after work. They don’t actually care what they’re talking about very much, but they don’t like being out of the loop, especially if there’s a set of things that “respectable” people are supposed to know. When communities are small and communication technologies weak, the only things that there are to talk about are local events. Over time, other topics became possible as the topic of conversation, and they were more scintillating, so focus shifted from local news to national news.
refinement: people have always moved, but they used to reorient towards a local social circle. Now they can stay in contact with their old friends forever but they’re never going to discuss local politics with them, only national.
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.
I assume 3 and 4 are the main reasons. If you want to know what’s happening locally, join a Facebook group and you’ll know things way faster than your local paper most of the time. Also parts like the classifieds/job information/etc are all replaced by the Internet so a huge function of local newspapers has become obsolete.
National news is also slowly dying too, just not to the same degree. I think the loss is mitigated now by distribution. National news appeals to basically everybody, so something like NYT and WAPO can pick up subscribers from the other side of the country or even across the world (like how I read the BBC sometimes as an American). Meanwhile I don’t care about the local happenings of Raleigh or Wichita or other places I don’t live that much.
I also think there’s another point that news agencies have learned tragedy and controversy sells more, and local papers just can’t generate as much of that as the national news can. There’s just not that much bad and controversial stories going on nearby most of the time.
why did local news ever work?
A lot of recent political changes are blamed on the loss of local news (motivating example), which is in turn blamed on the internet undercutting ad revenue (especially classifieds revenue). But if people never cared about local news enough to ~pay for it, why did papers ever offer it? Why not just sell the classifieds and the national news people were willing to pay for, and save the expense of the local stuff no one wanted?
Some ideas:
Newspapers and tv channels were confused and didn’t realize they could get away without producing local news.
This seems unlikely to me, because if all they cared about was national news why subscribe to the local newspaper at all? People who only wanted national news would subscribe to a national paper.
some sort of preference cascade, such that the price people were willing to pay for local news dropped as others’ willingness dropped.
People lost interest in local news for non-preference-cascade reasons
Mobility meant people felt less invested in their local area
I think the trend at the time was for fewer interstate moves.
More competition for people’s time. In the 90s there were four channels and at 6 and 11 they were all showing local news. What were you gonna do, not watch TV?
People don’t seek out local TV news but can be hooked via ads during prime time programming (“the hot new trend ruining the lives of students at your kids’ high school, specifically”). As people stopped watching prime time tv with ads, channels lost the opportunity to hook people for their local coverage.
Local but not national news was replaced by something else, like Facebook, Citizen, or Nextdoor.
I don’t think the timing or distribution work out for this.
I think it’s something like “for a lot of activities people do, they don’t actually care about the activity per se, or the ostensive goal of the activity, but they do it because it’s the done thing, or because that’s what everyone else is doing, so it’s important for socially connecting.”
eg.
People want to talk about something with their coworkers around the water cooler, or with their buddies in the pub after work. They don’t actually care what they’re talking about very much, but they don’t like being out of the loop, especially if there’s a set of things that “respectable” people are supposed to know. When communities are small and communication technologies weak, the only things that there are to talk about are local events. Over time, other topics became possible as the topic of conversation, and they were more scintillating, so focus shifted from local news to national news.
(Which is an example of your #2, I think.)
refinement: people have always moved, but they used to reorient towards a local social circle. Now they can stay in contact with their old friends forever but they’re never going to discuss local politics with them, only national.
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.
I assume 3 and 4 are the main reasons. If you want to know what’s happening locally, join a Facebook group and you’ll know things way faster than your local paper most of the time. Also parts like the classifieds/job information/etc are all replaced by the Internet so a huge function of local newspapers has become obsolete.
National news is also slowly dying too, just not to the same degree. I think the loss is mitigated now by distribution. National news appeals to basically everybody, so something like NYT and WAPO can pick up subscribers from the other side of the country or even across the world (like how I read the BBC sometimes as an American). Meanwhile I don’t care about the local happenings of Raleigh or Wichita or other places I don’t live that much.
I also think there’s another point that news agencies have learned tragedy and controversy sells more, and local papers just can’t generate as much of that as the national news can. There’s just not that much bad and controversial stories going on nearby most of the time.