Matthew Yglesias » Is Anyone Reading the News?
I echo the sentiments that local bloggers fill the niche of local reporting pretty well. I pooh-pooh the sentiments that local bloggers mostly have axes to grind and newspapers provide “disinterested” reporting. That’s an overgeneralization — in the cities I’ve lived, the local papers have had axes to grind on most local reporting, sometimes obscured by false disinterest.
I’d also like to echo the value of narrowly read news as providing a record, available for later review when someone realizes they _do_ care about some local issue. Local blogs do this in the short term, but there’s a high risk of blogs eventually dying (due to the interested people moving, for example), and small-scale locally focused blogs are less likely to come up on Google searches, even if they’re most relevant.
People have said the newspapers crib from weeklies — might there not be a business model of collecting/linking/rating local blogs, a sort of “preserving for posterity” spin on the “plagiarizing from the alt-weeklies” concept? You know who might have the skillset and market positioning for something like that? I’m thinking the local newspaper, that’s who.
Lastly, I’d also point out that local reporting from locals (newspapers, blogs, whoever) can raise money from local advertising, which is a more stable revenue model than the world-famous dailies. The new sushi place down the street needs to advertise, but its ad dollar would be wasted on anything more widely distributed than the local paper (or local blog.)
