What to do to save local news. By Matthew Yglesias

What to do to save local news. By Matthew Yglesias

More money for starters, but also different institutions

Matthew Yglesias

December 23, 2020

SlowBoring.com

I’ve been wanting for a while now to write something about the structural decline of local news coverage. This is probably the single biggest political development of my lifetime, and while it’s widely recognized, it continues to be seriously underrated.

The basic reality is that politics is heavily mediated by media. When you got your news about Congress primarily from the Washington Bureau of a local newspaper, that gave you a view on national events that emphasized the role of your local delegation and the specific localized impact of the decisions being made. The political scientist Richard Fenno had the concept of a member of Congress’ “Home Style,” which is nominally how they behave in their district back home. But to a large extent here we’re still talking about communicating with a local audience through local reporters (when I interned in Chuck Schumer’s office he was always really interested in doing events that would get him on local TV news upstate), not direct interactions between residents and members.

Then we also of course have state and local governments that make their own decisions about a million important things and are monitored (or not) largely by locally based news organizations.

As this withers away, we get both less accountability in local government and a national politics that is much more dominated by national concerns and in particular what politicians stand for. Virtually every American hears more about AOC than they do about their own member of Congress, both because AOC is media-savvy, but also because she symbolizes a lot of different things in American political life, so paying attention to her is a good way to shorthand things. If you’re represented by a Democrat, you’re less likely to hear about what your member does in committee than about what (if anything) your member says about the tensions between the Squad and national leadership.

A good way into this whole issue is a since-deleted tweet that Liz Mair, the veteran political communications strategist, blundered into on Monday — finding a surefire way to make everyone in journalism mad at her by calling local news reporters overpaid and lazy:

This is not true.

But rather than having everyone yell at Liz Mair, I think it’s probably useful to take a big picture look at the economic shocks to the local journalism ecosystem, not just to defend the honor of hardworking reporters, but to help everyone understand the depth of the issue.

Newspapers as a manufacturing business

The right way to start thinking about local news in the United States is that the daily newspaper industry was, on some level, a manufacturing industry.

You need to print up all this paper and then deliver it to people’s houses. And you need to deliver it really fast on a daily basis. That naturally led to two ideas that drove the structure of the industry:

Each newspaper factory should focus on serving a fairly well-defined geographical niche.

Once you have your newspaper factory and delivery infrastructure set up, you might as well put a lot of stuff into the newspaper.

These are both important.

A Philadelphia-based newspaper will naturally have articles on the Pennsylvania state government that are of interest to people who live in Pittsburgh. But making daily newspaper deliveries in Pittsburgh from a Philadelphia-based factory is inconvenient, so trying to annex the Pittsburgh market into your Philadelphia-based newspaper business is hard. By contrast, the logistics of adding a “state politics” section to your Pittsburgh-based newspaper business are relatively easy. Yes, you need to hire some reporters and editors to staff up your Harrisburg Bureau. But you don’t need a new factory or a new fleet of trucks.

The high startup costs also meant there wasn’t a ton of direct competition between newspapers. You didn’t worry so much that people along your trucks’ routes were subscribing to some other paper, you worried more that they weren’t subscribing at all.

So the business model was to take your potentially addressable market as essentially fixed, and then address the hell out of it by tossing in just about any kind of non-libelous content people in your area could conceivably be interested in. If 85% of your readers ignored 85% of the articles, that’s fine. As long as there was something they liked, that was good enough.

Newspapers as an information service

Covering the news is at the heart of the newspaper industry (it’s in the name!) but in retrospect it’s striking that newspapers provided a lot of information services that today we would see as basically non-journalistic in nature.

You’d read the box score of last night’s sports games.

You’d see weather forecasts.

You’d go for listings of which bands were playing at which venues, and which movies were in which theaters.

TV Guide sentence

Lots and lots of stuff that today you’d just Google was in the newspaper. And not in the sense that you can use Google to find articles that give you the answer.

This is the kind of thing you used to “look up” in a newspaper:

This information service function is important because it was a particularly good reason to subscribe. In a pre-internet era, finding out facts was challenging. Today’s paper (and maybe yesterday’s too) lying around somewhere in your house was a good way to make sure you had a useful reference document on hands at all times.

Newspapers as advertising platform

Of course Google doesn’t tell you all that stuff just to be nice. They want people to use Google a lot because it helps sell ads. Newspapers, similarly, offered readers a lot of information at a pretty low price because they were making money off advertising.

As recently as 2000, print advertising was something like 0.6 percent of national GDP. That figure has plummeted and been largely replaced by digital advertising.

And here’s where we get to our problem: because lots and lots of that digital advertising does not go to print media, it goes instead to Google and Facebook.

Google, to its credit, uses its ad revenue firehouse to subsidize the production and dissemination of a ton of genuinely useful information services. The company has done a lot to undermine journalism business models but it has also dramatically improved people’s access to information. Beyond all the normal Google stuff we talk about all the time, I was able to use Google Translate the other day in order to write an email subject line about a PTA meeting in Amharic. It’s genuinely miraculous. Still, the effect is to create a situation in which you have the whole world at your fingertips, but there’s less reporting on the local school board.

Facebook … I dunno, I don’t want to get off-topic.

The point is that from an advertiser standpoint, these digital ads are way better. Instead of buying an ad in the sports section of a Pittsburg newspaper to reach Pittsburg-area men who are interested in sports, you can just literally target that population. Even better, if you want men who are interested in Pittsburg-area sports teams but don’t live in Pittsburgh you can target them too. Or if you want men who live in Pittsburgh and are fans of other cities’ teams, you can target them. Or if you want to sell to women who follow Pittsburgh sports you can directly target them rather than buying print ads that will mostly be seen by men. This is partly undermined by collusion between Google and Facebook, but even without much competition in the targeted ad space, it’s a good deal for marketers. But that good deal is a disaster for local media.

The crisis of oversupply

What makes this all especially bad from the standpoint of local news and statehouse coverage is that for all the problems facing the media industry, readers are better off than ever before. If you say to yourself “I want to spend one hour per day reading good articles about news and public affairs,” you are not going to have trouble finding good things to read.

For example, here’s a thoughtful essay in Democracy by Jenny Yang and Cathy Ventrell-Monsees about how to improve the EEOC’s work and do more to promote racial equity in employment practices.

You probably won’t read it even though I am telling you, right now, that it’s good. You’re busy; you’ve got a dozen tabs open already, and this one isn’t too pressing. We’re all absolutely drowning in a sea of content, ranging from shallow clickbait to really sophisticated analysis of stuff. And of course, there’s also streaming music and Netflix and the wide world of podcasts. There’s plenty to do.

If that weren’t the case, then the other problems facing local news would be manageable. But even though we as a society miss the functions performed by robust local media ecosystems, actual news consumers are not starved for content. They are becoming less informed about one set of things but more informed about another set of things. The problem for society is that there’s a mismatch between these trends and how the government actually works.

The hard problem and the harder problem

The downstream problem here that tends to get the most attention since because investigative reporters are prestigious in the journalism community, is the potential collapse of local accountability journalism. Who is paying attention to whether Jacksonville is making up its crime statistics or whether the director of the state highway agency is stealing money?

But there are at least a few potential good news trends here.

One is that even if blowing the lid off of a huge scandal in the Jacksonville Police Department doesn’t directly impact the lives of most Washington Post readers, scoring a huge scoop is still good for the brand of a national media outlet like the Post or the Times or CNN, even if the scoop takes place outside DC or NYC or LA. We can hope that as local media continues to shrink, nationalized media will see investments in high-impact state/local coverage as worth its while.

ESPN, after all, is a national sports media brand, but they absolutely do cover team-specific stories just because it’s interesting.

The other is that a lot of the same technology and economic trends that have made it less lucrative to run a newspaper have made it a lot cheaper to produce and disseminate content. So it’s true both that philanthropy is needed to fill some of the gap in local accountability journalism, and that local journalism has actually gotten more cost-effective than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

But this still leaves us with the harder problem, which is that the structure of our political system relies on people being locally focused in their political engagement and that’s no longer the case.

Nationalized politics in a federal country

Consider earmarks. These famously went away in the mid-aughts in a fit of good government enthusiasm.

They are now likely to come back in 2021 and sources like The New York Times editorial page approve, arguing that we’ve learned Congress works better with a little pork to grease the wheels of legislation. I’ve been on that exact same intellectual journey myself and agree with it. But New America’s Mark Schmitt has also convinced me that a lot of this confuses cause and effect.

The premise of the case for earmarks is that legislators will be willing to make compromises in order to get their earmarks. And the premise of that is that voters will reward elected officials who bring home the bacon. And the premise of that is that voters are focused on their local community and how national politics impacts that.

Now an In an era when information about national politics was likely to come into your house via a locally-focused newspaper, that was probably true. But today people relate to politics via a national media lens. A locally popular, locally well-known figure like Steve Bullock has trouble winning a Senate race in Montana because everyone has the national implications of the race at the top of their minds. There’s a huge national audience (and tons of national fundraising) for the Georgia Senate races, and by the same token, Georgia voters see the races as local instantiations of national conflict.

Even really good philanthropically-supported investigative journalism isn’t going to change the fact that people today engage with politics through that national lens provided by national media. For that to change, you’d need genuinely local institutions that have the commercial-style motivation to grab market share and attention. An accountability backstop to catch major scandals would be welcome. But it doesn’t fully replace the value of robust, decentralized media institutions that match our political institutions.

Some potential solutions

A lot of recent engagement with this issue has focused on the role of private equity companies in gobbling-up still-profitable newspapers and then bleeding them dry with budget cuts and layoffs rather than new investments. This is part of the story, but fundamentally it mistakes a symptom for a cause. The reason the investors interested in the newspaper industry are vulture funds is that this is an industry whose revenue prospects are shrinking rather than growing. Disciplining the vultures could staunch the bleeding, but what’s really needed are ideas that change the revenue possibilities.

As Rachel Cohen wrote recently in The New Republic, the idea of public support for media is less new than it may seem and was long baked into the mission of the US Postal Service:

The importance of news access to functioning democracies has long been clear, so much so that the Founding Fathers actually viewed the Postal Service for its first few decades as primarily a way to deliver periodicals throughout the country. Federal lawmakers understood that this great democratic experiment could never work if voters were not informed on their communities and leaders. Today we have even more evidence to support the case that local journalism and democracy go hand in hand: Researchers have found the presence of newspapers can make elected officials more responsive and encourage more people to run for office. When newspapers close, studies have found government costs go up, driven by less scrutiny over local deals. 

Unfortunately, today, simply subsidizing media distribution costs won’t get you anywhere.

But there are a bunch of proposals in Congress that get at some of the contemporary issues:

HR 764 would provide tax credits to subsidize subscriptions to local newspapers, to reduce the payroll tax costs of employing newspaper reporters, and to incentivize small business advertising in local media.

Several different bills would create an antitrust “safe harbor” so media companies can collude together and bargain against Google and Facebook for ad money.

Brian Schatz has a bill recommending the creation of a federal commission to study the issue.

A Brookings proposal says we should “encourage more newspapers to operate as nonprofits by treating newspapers’ advertising and subscription revenue as tax-exempt and contributions as tax-deductible.”

These are all good ideas and I’m for doing all of them. On the antitrust front, I’d go further and really urge the Department of Justice to state that it thinks the Obama-era e-book antitrust lawsuit was a mistake and that the analog publishers should feel free to band together to act as a counterweight to digital giants.

I would also just flag for America’s really rich people that this is a promising area for civically-minded capitalism. To me the point of all the stories about private equity groups ruining newspapers isn’t so much that private equity is the source of the problem as it is that you, Mr. Billionaire, could be part of the solution. If you bought a newspaper and then just acted as a steward of the institution rather than dismantling it when it doesn’t hit the high profits you knew it would never reach, you wouldn’t lose money on the venture. And you could wield a lot of influence while being seen as a high-minded and responsible person.

But we should also think about changing politics.

A reality-based political structure

Most of the trajectory of American political reform over the past 250 years has been based on the idea that smaller political institutions are “closer to the people” and thus in some sense they possessed more democratic legitimacy.

That may have been approximately true at some point in time, but simply does not reflect how contemporary society functions. You have a much better-informed opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden than you do about your state senator. Far from being “distant,” significant national figures are virtually present in our lives on a nonstop basis and they are aggressively covered by a large pack of thriving media institutions.

State and local coverage has suffered. But even in their diminished state, local news organizations can still offer robust coverage of a governor — and national news organizations can also dip down into gubernatorial politics.

But with fewer resources going to state/local journalism and less audience attention available for the coverage that does exist, down-ballot statewide officeholders, school board members, state legislatures, etc. are tending to slip into obscurity. Under the circumstances, centralization actually promotes democracy and accountability by giving reporters and readers writers alike a tractable quantity of things to pay attention to.

I don’t have a single sweeping reform, but in general, tend to favor:

Replacing elected school boards with systems of direct control by mayors or county officials.

Consolidating city and county levels of government where practical.

Having strong mayors or county executives rather than diffuse legislature-focused systems.

Unicameral state legislatures (hello Nebraska!) and paring back the number of separately elected statewide executive officers.

Tilting the balance of power between governors and state legislatures in favor of the governor.

Establishing clear lines of control over public sector entities (transit agencies etc.) rather than having diffuse multi-jurisdictional governance structures.

A big part of this vision is recognizing that shifts in the media landscape are only partially remediable by policy changes.

I am really interested in mass transit and housing issues, and thanks to my high level of interest plus the magic of digital technology, I am now much better informed about transit and housing policy issues in Greater Boston than I was 20 years ago when I actually lived in Greater Boston. Today, transit enthusiasts nationwide can read in great detail about the Green Line Extension project or the North-South Rail Link. But the time we spend paying attention to things we are interested in happening in cities we don’t live in necessarily tends to crowd out paying attention to important things in our community that don’t happen to interest us.

A world of more robust local coverage will be a better world, but it will still have those attention-economy issues. And we need to adjust to a world where information dissemination is not limited by truck routes (this is a good thing!) and we are consequently better informed about bigger units rather than “closer” ones.