Reviving Local News from the Bottom Up?
Local news is a fundamental part of vibrant democracy. By keeping people informed about what’s happening in their community—boring stuff like city council meetings and fun stuff like sports events—local news connects citizens to each other by building a common base of knowledge and mutual understanding.
Way back in the 1830s, in the book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that newspapers essentially are community. He wrote:
“A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought, but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs…. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization…. if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure.”
Local news is, at its heart, a service. A service to democracy, a service to community, and a service to citizens.
It is also, ideally, funded profitably by advertising and subscriptions. But those economics no longer work at a corporate level for local news. Since the 1990s, local news has been gutted. Internet economics has maimed it, as Matt Stoller wrote in this excellent article, leaving many communities with only social media to fall back on.
This is, I believe we can say, sub-optimal. If we accept the decline of local news, we implicitly accept the risk of no longer understanding each other. That’s a huge risk to a civil society founded on the principle of building better futures together.
Stoller advocates an Australian model in which newspapers can band together to bargain against tech companies. That’s an interesting approach that could help publications that are still functioning.
But what about the towns that have already become news deserts?
Hypothesis now?
Yeah. Here it is: Substack is well positioned to support independent local journalists, not just opinion writers and essayists like me, but people who are serving their local community, digging deep into town council meetings and small business happenings and ordinances and fairs. Its economics are far different than an old-school local newspaper with property, plant, and equipment (i.e., significant overhead)—and that makes it viable on a wide scale.
It’s also a different model than Patreon, which seems generally geared toward supporting an individual, whatever their output. Substack seems more geared toward supporting a specific and tailored output, produced by a single individual or team on at least a semi-regular cadence.
Yes, discovery remains a problem—it’s one of the great unsolved problems of the internet as information availability continues to skyrocket—but it’s less of a problem for a local news Substack. The reporter lives in the community and can, literally, spread the news. Getting the word out with postcards at local coffeeshops and grocery stores and real estate offices and libraries and communal bulletin boards. Asking residents to tune in to news created for them by one of their own. Letting people know, just by showing up at local events to report on them, that there’s a news outlet operating in town again.
This is the heart of journalism, how it started and where it does the most good, by valuing communities and bringing them closer together through understanding.
There’s already local TV news.
Sometimes, but regional TV news tends to gravitate toward stories that can be encapsulated in short segments. And town council meetings aren’t visually appealing, while disasters are more eye-catching with all those flashing lights. The latest car accident news doesn’t build community much, though, while the boring minutiae of council meetings can turn out to be vitally important over time.
And big national outlets mostly cover big national and international stories. I know more about what’s happening in Ukraine than I do about what’s happening in my hometown. That’s partly my fault, but it’s partly the decline of local news.
Plenty of people are spinning up local news sites now. To list a few in the US:
The Addison Times (Indiana)
Bar Harbor Story (Maine) - by Carrie Jones
The Bradenton Journal (Florida) - by Marc R. Masferrer
Brevard Newsbeat (Florida) - by Dan DeWitt
Burlington Buzz (Massachusetts) - by Nicci Kadilak
Charlottesville Community Engagement (Virginia) - by Sean Tubbs
The Charlotte Ledger (North Carolina) - by Tony Mecia
The Copper Beacon (Michigan) - by Joshua Vissers
FingerLakes1 (New York) - by Josh Durso
The Laramie Reporter (Wyoming) - by Jeff Victor
Menomonie Matters (Wisconsin) - by Joyce Uhlir
New Castle City Topics (Delaware)
Richard Free Press (Illinois) - by Jon DePaolis
The Sebastopol Times (California) - by Dale Dougherty
The Village Gazette (Ohio) - by Libby T.
The Wausau Sentinel (Wisconsin) - by Evan J. Pretzer
The Wausonian (Wisconsin) - by B.C. Kowalski
The Wauwastoa (Wisconsin) - by Ben
This is just a sampling of the journalism happening at a grassroots level—but I believe this model could work in many more places, providing roles for independent journalists funded by subscriptions from local citizens who also have an interest in a news source that truly serves them and their communities.
Is it perfect? No. But it’s an intriguing start, and in media, beginnings are inspiring after so many endings.
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Extra, Extra!
Tangential extras for curious readers:
1. What We Lost When Gannett Came to Town - by Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic - focuses on The Hawk Eye in Burlington, Iowa as a view into local news deterioration.
2. News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive? - by Penelope Muse Abernathy at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill - a study offering detailed insight into the decline of local news and a path forward.