We are in an era of ignorance, misinformation, and distrust.
A community newspaper is part of the solution.
Ashland.news has been up and running for three months.
Something ominous is happening all across America. Newspapers are disappearing. They hollow out. They get smaller, with fewer stories. Then they disappear. This happened in Ashland, Oregon.It usually happens slowly enough that customers barely notice at first. A reporter is laid off. Then another. Instead of having a reporter observe a city council or school board meeting and report on it, the reporter telephones an official and asks what happened. Sometimes we get a fair representation of what happened. Sometimes not. We don't hear from people who might have a contrary view of things. Then another reporter is laid off, and there are few if any stories at all on these institutions. It is hard to notice what isn't there. No news? Apparently nothing important is happening.
Sometimes the local newspaper is consolidated with the newspaper of a larger city. Local news becomes photographs of big civic events--an annual parade, the high school football team scores. Readers get a Potemkin Village of news.
Ashland.news is an effort to fill the hole left by the hollowing out and disappearance of the Ashland Daily Tidings. Ashland.news intends to be a new, financially stable institution. Ashland.news addresses the financial realities of local journalism by being on-line only. It maintains a curated website (https://ashland.news) and delivers a newsletter to the email boxes of those who request it. There is no physical paper, no printing press, no delivery cost, no heavy upfront capital cost to amortize. Ashland.news is established as a non-profit community service, so there are no investors to pay or to please. It hopes to get by on a combination of voluntary subscription donations, advertisers, and the continued support of the community benefactors.
This system will sound familiar. It is essentially the system in place for public radio and public television. They provide services not found elsewhere. People donate to keep the programming coming. It is a workable, time-tested formula.
A community newspaper, run by professional reporters and editors, does something very different from social media. Ten or fifteen years ago many of us hoped that the free flow of ideas and opinions through Facebook and other platforms would create a golden age of social cohesion and an informed citizenry. Wrong. It turns out that free, instantaneous communication creates the dystopia feared by our nation's founders. They built a republic, not a democracy. Democracy collapses under the emotional sway of a charismatic demagogue.
Social media platforms have a business model built around spreading provocative speech. Anger engages. Outrage engages. Look what that idiot just said!! The engaged audience is itself the product, sold to customers, the advertisers. In contrast, a community newspaper, run by professional editors, switches the polarity. The readers are the customer. News is the product.
The executive editor of Ashland.news, Bert Etling, sent a letter yesterday on the milestone of its having completed three months of publication.
We've been going out into the Ashland community and bringing back news and information about the people, places and events that shape our day-to-day experiences, and sharing that news about our neighborhood with you.
We believe that information is of value to the community, and are confident it will receive the support of those who find it of value. We believe information about what’s going on around us is essential to creating and maintaining a vibrant, diverse community. We believe that information should be accessible to all, not hidden behind paywalls.
We believe you, the more than 1,200 subscribers to our emailed newsletter, support our vision.
Some version of what happened in Ashland likely has happened to the many readers of this blog who live outside a major metropolitan area. New forms of nonprofit subscription-based journalism are springing up around the country to fill the news hole. You won't discover them by seeing a stack of papers at a store. The new journalism is on line. Watch for these, and support them if you can.
7 comments:
I’ve done the cheap introductory offers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Then I have given one time donations to the Gaurdian twice, npr donations for 40 years. It is possible some form of the fifth estate will continue, but I think it will be vastly reduced from times past. Too bad. Would we have known about Nixon without newspapers? Now we know about Trump but the country doesn’t care. Seems like a major loss for civil society.
Elon Musk wants to take over Twitter and make it transparent. You can listen to him describe his plans at a Ted Talk yesterday.
If Musk succeeds, the algorithms that Twitter uses to boost which tweets become viral will be open sourced so that everyone can see what they promote. Non-algorithmic, arbitrary actions that the people running Twitter take will also be transparent. Shadow banning, in particular, will be visible to everyone if it is implemented, which probably means that it won’t be done anymore.
Social media algorithms, by promoting dysfunctional levels of anger, have had a massively destructive effect on our society.
I hope that the independent journalistic endeavors that Peter is promoting today will succeed.
Thanks Peter for sharing this news. I plan to sign up,donate and visit the advertisers.
The Rogue Valley media landscape has gone down hill.
But the problem with news is long in the making:
Loosening regulations regarding corporate ownership has lead to this. We can thank those who favor less government regulation.
Obliteration of the fairness doctrine, by Reagan, is also to blame.
It's comical to read of those who blame social media for being divisive and full of hate, yet are silent on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the cretin in Portland, Larson.
Musk says he’s an “absolute free speech” guy. Anything can be published on the new Twitter, if he succeeds in buying it.
I never thought of Musk being so unrealistic before. Really? Hate speech? Advanced announcements of riots? Child pornography? More?
I don’t think it’s going to work. Even without the outrageous stuff, imagine the spam, adverts, etc. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I wish he’d use that $43 Billion for a good cause. Or 43,000 good causes, averaging $1,000,000 each!
Maybe he could also drop the mars colonization scam. Sheesh.
Oh, great. If "shadow banning," or blocking users, is itself banned, does that mean all those Russian bots will be given free rein and psychos like Trump can incite their cult followers without restraint?
Social media can never be an adequate substitute for in depth journalism. What a shame that so many people's attention span has been reduced to a tweet.
The problem for local newspapers was that the Internet, represented by craigslist, took classified advertising away from them. Since that was their main source of revenue, they collapsed.
Local newspapers had been the only way to get data to every household, in the form of ink on paper. It turns out that getting data to households in the form of bits on screens is much cheaper and quicker.
All of the other problems (corporate ownership, fairness doctrine, etc) are downstream from that.
Elon Musk built SpaceX (the worlds best orbital launch rocket company) from scratch, introducing the amazing innovation of reusable launchers that come back and land. Given that amazing achievement, along with the creation of Tesla, I would counsel caution about calling his Mars colonization idea “a scam.“
Bidding against Musk has not proven to be a winner so far.
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