Ghosting the News
Ghosting the News
Bibliography
- Author: Margaret Sullivan
- Full_Title: Ghosting the News
- Category: books
- Last Highlighted Date: 2023-01-26 04:56:00+00:00
Highlights
- As a major PEN America study concluded in 2019: “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Democracy, in other words, loses its foundation. The
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- From 2004 to 2015, the U.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets as a result of closures and mergers,
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- fewer than one in six Americans actually pays for local news, which includes having a subscription, print or digital, to the local newspaper.
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- When local news fails, the foundations of democracy weaken. The public, which depends on accurate, factual information in order to make good decisions, suffers. The consequences may not always be obvious, but they are insidious.
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- It’s not just about voting. It’s about tax dollars. When local reporting waned, municipal borrowing costs went up, and government efficiency went down, according to a 2018 Hutchins Center working paper titled “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance.”
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- “Local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money.”
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- There are exceptions. Some metropolitan areas—for example, the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota—have relatively healthy local-journalism ecosystems.
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- “Journalism is what somebody doesn’t want you to know. The rest is advertising.”
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- In short, television journalism can be part of the answer to the crisis in local news, as newspapers struggle for survival and digital upstarts attempt to fill the void. Whether it will reach its potential is far less certain.
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