Local News Is Dying, Taking Small Town America With It
&gt; &quot;we need more at the policy level,” said Napoli, who believes public funding could alleviate the local news crisis<p>Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government. Also, artificially propping up old ways of doing business is a rickety foundation. Newspapers as we know them occupy a narrow slice in world history. It&#x27;s not like we have always had newspapers from the beginning of time up until now.<p>Let&#x27;s investigate natural ways to accomplish the same goal of newspapers, but with our current technology. The internet has obliterated costs to publish. Compare a building full of typesetters, Linotypes, and printing presses, to WordPress and server rental. Now that doesn&#x27;t address all of a newspaper&#x27;s old expenses. There is still the staff: reporters spending days and weeks investigating a story, editors organizing and refining. But what does the Press, invented from scratch with our current technology, look like? I think you have to consider the different sections of an old newspaper one at a time:<p>1. Product reviews. Seems that there is still plenty of that, between the various specialized websites and bloggers and vloggers.<p>2. Lifestyle. Again, we are drowning in such coverage, like on Youtube.<p>3. Sports. I don&#x27;t know, I don&#x27;t keep up with sports. How is sports news faring?<p>4. Business news. Again I don&#x27;t know and don&#x27;t care. Someone else comment.<p>and finally, biggest of all:<p>5. The main example and, to many, the raison d&#x27;etre for news: keeping government and businesses honest, by sniffing out corruption.<p>Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak himself.