What are the limits of newspapers’ local-first news strategy?
Newspapers heard the bell last week and came charging out of their stables like an old fire horse.
The bell was the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Obama health care plan, a genuine shocker that surprised almost everyone. Across the country, newspapers ran banner headlines on their front pages, reflecting the significant news value of the event.
But the episode also illustrates the dilemma faced by traditional media in the Internet era.
The court issued its ruling before noon on Thursday. By the time I picked up the Star Tribune from my front steps on Friday morning, the decision was nearly 24 hours old and had been endlessly tweeted, blogged, broadcast and discussed.
Surely only a tiny minority of the news-buying public had failed to hear about the decision by the time the morning paper was delivered. Yet many papers across the country played the news with a simple declarative headline (“Court Upholds Obamacare”), as if they were conveying information their readers didn’t already know.
As the Internet has undermined newspapers’ claim to their readers’ attention, many have responded by stressing local news – the kind their readers can’t get anywhere else. It’s a smart strategy. But when these big events take place, it’s hard to break old habits.
Many newspapers coupled coverage of the court’s decision with a local story laying out the impact of the decision on residents of their coverage area. That’s a solid news call. But what if editors went even further?
On the day the Star Tribune reported the Obamacare decision, the lead story in the metro news section was a development in the Amy Senser hit-and-run case. What if the Strib had run that story on the front page, and run a prominent banner referring readers to full coverage of the healthcare decision on inside pages?
Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, and there are good reasons why I’m not making the major news decisions at a big newspaper. But it would certainly be interesting to see one of our local news outlets go all in on a local-first strategy, even in the face of major national and international events.
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Comments (7)
Ghost Protocol
By emphasizing local news over everything else, newspapers may have deluded themselves into believing that will save them and hold or increase readership. It won't. Local news is also covered on the Internet by various other bloggers, publications, and Tweets. Putting their faith in local news coverage not only puts them at a disadvantage, it also leaves their readers extremely uninformed when it comes to national and international news.
We all live together on this planet, so whatever affects one country will have an effect on the others; perhaps not immediate, but the effect will be felt eventually. Blindfolding your readers by not reporting this news in-depth is an invitation to disaster. Pretending it doesn't exist or didn't happen doesn't make it so.
At the same time, newspapers and every other so-called media outlet needs to adopt a standard of truth when reporting. The fact that even some referred to the Supreme Court decision as upholding 'Obamacare' reflects how low their standards for journalism have fallen. Referring to the ACA as 'Obamacare' is not only a false description, but it's a derisive term coined by the GOP to attack the President.
It's quite revealing that both Mr. Reinan and the news media have adopted the use of this term as the accurate description for the law, rather than it's true name.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
Actually, back in March, the Obama campaign decided that having the name "Obama" linked with "care" was a pretty good idea after all!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/26/us-usa-campaign-obamacare-idUS...
Back to real journalism
We can access instant superficial news everywhere. If anything, newspapers could provide a much more valuable service than they do. They just don't. If they're getting their news from the AP, which they generally do, they're telling us stuff that we already know (or at least think we know).
Could the newspapers have taken something from the ACA decision and made it news when the paper published the next day? Yeah. Do some REAL journalism. Get in-depth. Tell people how the decision might affect them HERE. No...not just provide "both sides of the story," which is lazy journalism, but analyze.
Newspapers (really, any news source) will die if it can't provide a service that isn't already freely available. Cheap "news" isn't going to save anyone but "news" conglomerates that own the airwaves.
Believe the Truth
As Rachel Kahler said, newspapers could provide a much more valuable public service than they do currently. Now, they get their "news" almost exclusively from the AP which only perpetuates the situation of a low-information, uninformed voters. The AP is lazy and sloppy, and they are notorious for engaging in the "both sides of the story meme". They don't even correct their stories unless you happen to know how to get in touch with their reporters or editors, since they provide no contact method in the the bylines of their stories, nor on their web site. If you do happen to get in touch, most of the time they don't correct their errors anyway, even though they should have (and would have) caught them had they done their job before publishing it.
Broadcast media is just as guilty as print news sources; we can see this locally on every station, including the once-venerable WCCO, where every story dealing with a controversial or political issue is framed in this exact fashion. Apparently, none of the news directors at these stations learned anything in their journalism courses in college. If they had, they'd know that false-equivalency has no place in journalism. Presenting facts and calling out lies and liars for what they are is not something to be avoided at all cost; it should be embraced and relished with gusto.
Precisely because they don't do this, the low-information voter is left to wonder what is and isn't true, and that should never be the case. The leaves the door open for various interest groups to push their particular set of "facts" as the truth, even when they are not. Everything else being equal, we know from research that uninformed voters will believe lies even when the evidence contradicts those lies, and this behavior hews to Republicans in particular. And then they complain about the effects of their own uninformed vote, blaming others instead of themselves for their poor choices.
Consumers of news expect and deserve nothing less than the truth, not half-truths or false-equivalencies. As it stands now, we're left with the classic case of George Costanza: "Jerry, just remember: It's not a lie, if you believe it."
Local shmocal
It's not about local or not local, a good story should always lead. The local news broadcasts have become a complete waste of time because they do almost nothing but local, and frankly, there just isn't enough going on locally to keep it interesting. You can only do so much weather and high school sports. Can you believe that both TV and the Strib ran a story about restaurants in Wayzata wanting to use golf carts to deliver food to the boats? I mean that's right out of the Onion, how can they do that and expect to be taken seriously.
What they can do locally is in depth stories, like the one about mercury poisoning they did last Sunday, but again, it's not that it's local, it's interesting and relevant. And the sports, my god the sports! Most of the time they think local just means sports. The problem is the don't seem to recognize a good or important story when they see one, local is little more than an arbitrary decision.
The Future is Now
The news directors at all the stations and the editors at the newspapers wouldn't know a real news story if it bit them in the ass. You could offer them an exclusive about a cure for cancer (or any other affliction) and they would ignore it because it's either not sensationalistic, or they don't understand the news value.
I know people who have called, written, and even tried emailing people at all the stations and the dailies with a variety of stories. Examples would be the fact that Target tries to avoid liability by shunting all calls to their Guest Relations department, even when the issue has nothing to do with them. You can't ever talk to anyone in a position of authority at Target to tell them, because the executives are walled off in their ivory tower so they don't have to deal with the "little people" who do all the real work that keeps them employed. Want to call in a bomb threat? Good luck; the switchboard will transfer you to Guest Relations; they don't have access to executives, either. Embezzlement, fraud, waste, abuse, conflict of interest, violations of state or federal laws? Again, you'll be sent to Guest Relations. Send them an email? You won't get any response, ever.
What about a "cure" for a certain food allergy? Or the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being negotiated in secret by 600 corporations and foreign governments with the U.S. Never heard about it? You're not alone; the news media won't report on it. Not even Congress knows about it, because the White House refuses to provide the text of the negotiations so far, but if allowed to go forward, it will give total control of our government to corporations. You can read about it here: http://www.tpp2012.com/
The point I'm making is that you can spoon-feed real, important, newsworthy stories to the TV stations and the newspapers, but they're not interested. Unless it fits into their feel-good category, endless fixation on sports, petty political squabbles, or a topic that's personal to one of the anchors, you won't ever hear about it.
If we all just switch off the TV and not watch any of their broadcasts, cancel your newspaper subscriptions and not visit their web sites, that should send a powerful message to them. We can always download the actual TV shows we want to watch from the Internet without commercials, and get our news on the radio.
Done
"If we all just switch off the TV and not watch any of their broadcasts, cancel your newspaper subscriptions and not visit their web sites, that should send a powerful message to them. We can always download the actual TV shows we want to watch from the Internet without commercials, and get our news on the radio."
I no longer subscribe to any television. I get my news online. Unfortunately, most blogs and alternative news sources are so questionable, I have to at least access "news" websites to get a basis for some of the "news" they provide. Beyond that, most of it is easy enough to decipher or research. (As for the TPP2012 site, if it's so secret, how do "they" know about it? Until I can see how those folks found out any information, I will likely view it as an unfounded conspiracy theory. That being said, there's no doubt bigger fish to fry than what makes it to the news.)