Local media in all forms are being drained of resources by profit hungry (giant) corporate ownership. It’s slowly eroding accountability in our communities.
No. This is flat wrong.
Local newspapers (which did 90%+ of the socially useful investigative journalism and reporting that you are correctly noting is gone and bemoaning that fact) used to have two sources of revenue --
(1.) Subscriptions for dead trees thrown on people's doorsteps.
(2.) Advertisers paying for spreads and classifieds.
Newspapers were actually one of the more profitable sectors of the economy from roughly 1950 through to 2000 because they were essentially a series of regional/metro monopolies. I know an old newspaper guy who used to be a bigwig at the
Philadelphia Inquirer, and he told me in the 1970s and 1980s
they would hire more newsroom staff to write more content because advertiser demand was so high.
Then something happened around 2000. It's called the Internet.
(1.) People stopped paying for news. "Why pay, I can read it online for free." Newspaper people still joke the obituary section might as well be renamed "former subscribers to this paper."
(2.) Again, the Internet. Programmatic ads presented a cheaper and quicker way to "target" your audience than does a classified in a dead tree. I happen to think the "ad tech stack" is mostly nonsense and way overhyped regarding what it can do, but that ad buyers believe in it was sure good for Google.
To put it in blunt terms, the Internet completely ****** newspapers. Most of them failed.
This trend is the same throughout the world, too, not just because of the rapacity of American capitalism.
The round of corporate buyouts and consolidations
is a result of but not the cause of the destruction of local news. Without outside corporate buyers, even more papers would have failed. This process is what you see in any dying industry -- e.g., outside investors coming in and seeing if they can make it work (they usually cannot) by cutting costs. But the real cause was their revenue sources drying up, which descends from consumer preferences (both of news consumers and the ad buyers) going online and national.
There have been some corners of the media sector that have benefited from this...
-- niche special interest sites, like
Cyclone Fanatic, with a small but incredibly loyal following who either pay for the content or are generally very good about supporting advertisers
-- prestige publications in the East Coast (mostly the
New York Times and the
Washington Post) now able to reach a much larger audience through online subscriptions than they could with paper
Local journalism is dying while the
Times and the
Post thrive. Heck, there are more subscribers to the
New York Times in Toronto -- largest city in Canada -- than there are to the
Toronto Star.
Corporate buyouts don't do that. Consumer preferences do. Culture and politics have nationalized and internationalized, which those prestige publications are in great shape to service.
Some one-horse town's newspaper in rural Iowa? Not so much.
You are right this sucks and leads to worse government accountability. But it ain't "the corporations."
It is consumers -- both of news (wanting it for free) and ad buyers moving online.
As the Rolling Stones said, "After all, it was you and me."
