Local newspapers are in trouble and have been for much of the 21st century. A memo from Lee Enterprises, which owns many outlets across the country, about mandatory furloughs, only adds to the already massive pile of bleak stories about the travails of media.
Blame falls on the internet, for taking away ad revenue, social media, Big Tech and so on. Rarely does it fall on the press barons of yore (meaning the 1990s) who treated papers as cash cows that allowed them to overpay for radio, TV and other media toys.
But rather than weep for the slow motion demise of local news, perhaps what’s replacing it will be far better, more thorough, more immediate, than anything we’ve seen before. As Paul Matzko writes about the news coverage of the train derailment in Ohio. It was, and still is, a big story for the press. But immediate coverage that reached a massive audience came not from a credentialed reporter at a legacy outlet, but from an informed resident posting on TikTok (you know, the platform at the center of the government’s most recent moral panic):
I—and 1 million other people thus far—learned key details about the train derailment: a TikTok video created by an entrepreneur and industrial designer with roots in nearby Pittsburgh. In under three minutes, I learned to appreciate the drastic difference between the release of vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride; how the crash has released a million pounds of a substance for which the safe exposure limit is sub-*one part per million*; and how burning it off ultimately creates hydrochloric acid that’s now wafting around rural Ohio.
As an artifact of news reporting, that TikTok video provides information that is several levels of a higher order than anything you’ll find in print or on the air at the moment. Indeed, the creator even mentions how local news is just gullibly parroting whatever the company and/or government line happens to be.
Social media is not a panacea by any means, either for social interaction or news. But the point about local press simply repeating what officialdom says in response to this, that and the other event or issue is well made. Local media is notorious for parroting law enforcement descriptions of events, even when later revelations utterly discredit the initial coverage. That doesn’t advance the public interest, increase accountability, enhance democracy or any of a dozen other slogans the media uses to justify itself.
Local press will survive in some form. But alongside it will be a host of nimble players using technology and their own desire to share news as it happens – in real-time, to a global audience, without the legacy costs, bureaucracy and arrogance.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Red Chinese SlickTok is an improvement over local papers?
Tik-Tok certainly is not, but sometimes the info on there is far superior to what we’re told officially. The problem is in knowing what’s true vs false and fact vs opinion.
That’s why “critical thinking” is paramount to our free society! Gather an aggregate of information and distill it into something that makes sense (generally based upon what you already know of the subject). Be informed and independently make your judgment calls, otherwise Big Brother’s “Office of Truth” will make that judgment for you!
Your choice: trust your government or trust tic toc. You stand to lose whichever you do!
Apparently in some cases, yes.
Local news papers just buy their news and don’t really have reporters anymore. They have personal selling ad space instead. And if you had information & photos of something they don’t wanna pay anything for it.
I had information & photos for a good local story years ago and was told we don’t pay for it from you because your not an actual reporter. But said if I just gave to them they would use it.!!
So I said no problem I’ll just give it to a real Newspaper company and you can buy it from them then for a whole lot more !
I’ve no longer read newspapers or watch MSM news on television. I get all of my news from the internet or publications by authors I trust, plus television news from selected sources outside the control of the government such as OAN, C-Span, and Newsmax. Still, one has to be careful to ignore the sensationalism of news by articles found on the internet about actual events.