For those who've left the biz

They will when a Walmart or a natural gas drilling site pops up next door to them.

 

It is a problem. Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night to sounds of a helicopter circling over your house. A few blocks down, dozens of police cars and an armored vehicle are patrolling. There is a perimeter around a two-block area, and those residents have been told to stay inside while a SWAT team roams the streets*

How do you find out what's happening? Rumors on Facebook?

And without local media, what makes the police say what happened?


* — This happened in my part of town this past weekend. A fugitive was holed up at his ex-wife's house. She escaped without incident, and he eventually shot himself to death inside the house. The local newspaper posted updates online, and nailed the story the next day, talking to neighbors, various police agencies, etc.

 

This is one of the reasons why I still read the local paper on a semi-regular basis. With a downsized staff, it no longer covers the hell out of every municipality in the area, but it is based in the city I live in and still does a reasonable job of covering municipal and regional issues. If my property taxes are going up, or if homeowners insurance rates are soaring (a big issue in my hurricane-prone home state), the paper remains one of the few sources for that news. The local TV stations mainly stick to crime news and celebrity gossip and don't make hyper-local stuff a priority unless there's some angle they can sensationalize.

 

My neighborhood actually has a Facebook page that, for better or worse, does a damn good job of covering the neighborhood. Employees of the sheriff's office or members of the school board or other well-connected residents chime in every once in a while to confirm or deny stuff. The only thing that's missing is the neutral third party to vet those confirming things. No newspaper, 30 years ago nor today, would provide me the depth of information about my neighborhood than this Facebook page. Rumors and falsehoods get debunked fairly quickly, and while the usual bullshit that usually bubbles up when large groups of people communicate (mostly political), it's pretty easy to get back on point. I do wish there was a moderator of some sort, but for raw information (why is that helicopter flying over the neighborhood? what's going on at the town center this weekend? who's in charge of the PTSA at the local middle school?) it's incredibly reliable, generally accurate and almost always real-time.

If I could pick up the newspaper and get more in-depth stories about those occurrences, and good, photo-rich profiles of people who are doing interesting things, then yeah, I'd read the newspaper. I don't, so I don't.

 

Same here. My neighborhood has two lively and informative Facebook groups that talk about anything and everything around the clock. Reliable news alerts and updates are part of them.

 

I like the irony, if not the harsh reality, of newspapers being kept alive in large part by the amount of cell-phone ads they carry. The technology that has taken over their audience is serving as a life-support system for the old stuff. It's like the kids growing up and having mom or dad move in for their twilight years.

 

Thanks for sharing these.

The market adjusts. People see a need, they fill it.