Who Provides the Nutrients in the New Local News Food Chain?

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The discussion about where people get their news has advanced. We no longer assume that traditional media is the be-all and end-all. We now understand that folks also get their information from social media, influencers, friends, search, and more, and that the generation gap in how we consume that information is is approaching All in the Family levels—a reference that, itself, betrays my generation, as does, come to think of it, the phrase “generation gap.”

But understanding that more people rely on new sources doesn’t actually tell us much, especially when it comes to local news. Is the material Americans are reading on the Facebook local group based on reporting from a professional journalist or a friend of a friend of a friend?

Remember that the false story about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, began with a Facebook user who reported: “My neighbor informed me that her daughter’s friend had lost her cat.” Literally fourth-hand.

Is the TikTok influencer interpreting material they read in a newspaper? Or rumors they heard from another influencer? Or Alex Jones? Does the material have a partisan bias? Is it, well, true?

Really, we still know shockingly little about what kinds of local news people get—and how all these pieces interact with one another.

It might be helpful to return to the old concept of the local news “ecosystem,” with its distinctive “food chain.” In the olden days, it had a few dominant players—a local newspaper and, in many places, local TV and radio. Each played a different role and fed the other. To oversimplify, the local newspaper provided a disproportionate amount of the original reporting on civic affairs, and a greater level of detail—about everything from things to do to voting locations—than was practical for on-air broadcasts.

Although broadcast TV and radio leaned heavily on the papers for enterprise journalism (in part because TV reporters rarely had beats), the local stations had many strengths too—the most obvious being the use of moving images and sound, but also speed. Long before the internet embarrassed print newspapers with its freshness, local TV stations demonstrated that it was better to find out who won the game an hour after it ended than the next morning. 

The different local players all had their roles; each made money at it; and, in ways none of the players particularly wanted to admit, they nourished each other.

Note that the influence of newspaper reporters was not only or even primarily through people reading their words. It was also the impact they had in setting the agenda and providing the information for the other local news outlets.

Just as important (again, to an extent we never wanted to admit), the newspaper’s influence came via elites—the people on the city council who read the investigative series, the prosecutors who clipped the story about a company’s malfeasance, the school board members whole learned about an abusive teacher, and even the investor in the local theater production who was stung by the bad review. Stories with low readership could still have a large impact.

The modern local news ecosystem includes more players, and the roles have shifted dramatically. The ones assessed in the excellent new survey by the Civic News Company include search, local TV, friends and family, local digital news, online communities, government agencies, “content creators on social media,” local print newspapers, email newsletters, libraries, religious leaders, and local podcasts.

When we think about the new dynamics among these players, a few patterns emerge about how they interact in the new ecosystem:

Reporters at text-focused digital outlets are still a central part of the system. The folks who provide vetted information—and especially those who cover civic functions—still inform the rest of the system. This is why we tend to focus so much on the decline of newspapers and, to be even more precise, the decline in the number of reporters. It’s not that print papers are the most consumed of the media types; it’s because when they field fewer reporters, every other player in the system does its job worse.

Image-based media and word-based media could complement each other more than ever, but so far it’s not happening much. In the abstract, TV and radio ought to be working closely with the digital local news sites and newspapers—both of which provide tremendous local reporting but often lack reach. Meanwhile, the TV and radio stations have reach but often lack the depth of reporting. There have been some encouraging collaborations: the nonprofit newsroom SpotlightPA has a partnership in which it produces investigative reports that are aired on five local TV stations owned by Nexstar.

But each has a different business model and culture. Although these cooperative agreements have been encouraging, they are rare.

Broadcast media could step into the breach (but so far they mostly have not). TV and radio now have a tremendous opportunity. They can use their websites to provide granular information that the broadcast format won’t allow. For instance, they could do a general story about the schools on air and then put detailed information about each school on their website. They could create hyperlocal newsletters by neighborhood or town.

Few are doing this ambitiously. The bulk of their digital operations are geared toward turning TV content into online content, not filling the reporting gaps created by the decline of the newspaper newsrooms. This is true for most public radio stations, too. Their editorial focus is primarily creating great audio.

Reporters don’t hang out enough where the readers are. It’s a myth that there’s not much interest in local content. When you include NextDoor, local Facebook pages, LISTSERVs, etc., there’s a tremendous amount of discussion about local matters. But the searching and conversing is not mostly happening on the websites of the traditional media (how local news sites let that happen is a story for another day). Most view these external communities as marketing platforms—i.e., get a link to the story posted over there—rather than ways of engaging readers directly. Local reporters need to think of these communities as a place to interact with their readers, answer questions, and get story ideas.

“Personality driven” doesn’t have to mean “untrue.” Influencers have reminded us that people want information from someone they’ve come to trust, often with a bit more interpretation and personality. This is not quite as revolutionary as it seems. Edward R. Murrow was quite opinionated. The question shouldn’t be whether the news will be delivered by influencers, but what is the quality of their work? Are the influencers (or “citizen journalists”) becoming good reporters or making use of high-quality journalism? Or are they devaluing the importance of vetted information?

Business models are not sustaining the full ecosystem in a healthy way. It’s not hard to see how the different players in the new local news ecosystem could complement each other. Local news reporters can put validated, vetted information into the system, where it can be mass-disseminated in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences—as part of AI-driven search engines, by an influencer, as a new thread in Next Door, as a piece on public radio, or as a block on TV.

Unfortunately, that all assumes a baseline of original reporting—and the current system most rewards the players that invest the least in journalism. As a pure business matter, it’s almost a sucker’s game to hire reporters. Search engines can deliver the gist of a news article to readers without ever having invested a penny in creating that reporting. Social media communities can invest in the scalable community platform where people compare notes without ever investing in trying to separate fact from fiction.

Opinion, interpretation, search, social media—they all have a much better return on investment than reporting. And yet the whole system falls apart if someone isn’t underwriting the journalism. 

So we’re left with a situation where the core element for the whole ecosystem is the part that the business models least favor. That is why public policy and philanthropy have to play bigger roles than we might prefer—and we can never take our eye off the key metric in any community: whether there are enough local reporters.

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Steven Waldman is president of Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit that advances public policies to help strengthen local news, and a cofounder of Report for America.