Local News & Information

The death of the obituary matters because local features can be an antidote to the trends of polarization and demonization. Cable news dehumanizes. Community news can rehumanize.

What I have learned in my years studying the role of journalism in civic discussion is that democracies are best served when media coverage focuses on issues that affect society and people’s everyday lives and minimizes “horse race” reporting that obsesses over who is ahead in opinion surveys or fundraising.

Note that I’m casting the goal in terms of the number of local reporters, not the number of local news outlets, hours of coverage or number of articles. We shouldn’t care about “saving newspapers,” or any particular delivery system. New models of news distribution will continue to be invented — along with compelling new storytelling techniques —... See more

James Madison — a.k.a. Guy Who Wrote the First Amendment — argued that newspapers should have a massive subsidy from the federal government to encourage the distribution of newspapers. The “postal subsidy,” which provided discounted mail, would be about $46 billion in today’s dollars — bigger than the NASA budget.

Let’s remind ourselves: Journalism isn’t just writing articles.

Let’s put humans front and center — the readers we serve, engaging them more deeply, inviting them closer. We need strong bonds, community, events. We need to do what AI platforms aren’t interested in, because it doesn’t scale, it’s not safe, it’s not predictable.