What is the Point?

I recently noticed that there are a lot of people trying to spread "the news" in Guelph through alternative means. There's Guelph Wire, Guelph Politico, The Fountain Pen, Guelph Today, the Guelph Mercury/Tribune, and probably others I've never heard of. I felt like sticking a couple others on the list---but my browser keeps warning me that That Guelph is insecure and there might be people trying to steal info from me if I link to it. And Gerry Barker over at Guelph Speaks seems to be posting very infrequently now and when he does just rehashes old "greatest hits" from the past. I also recently found out that Councillors Phil Alt and James Gordon have gone into the news biz too---they just started putting out the Breezy Breakfast Radio podcasts. 

I doubt if any of these publications are making any money, but the bigger ones seem to have pretty deep pockets. This has raised a real concern for me in the past, as I thought that news is just becoming a hobby for obsessive individuals like me, an expensive vanity project for the wealthy (think about the guys who just bought the Toronto Star), or, something that politicians use to raise their profile. 

I used to blame this situation on people refusing to spend any money on local news. But recently I've admitted to myself that it isn't a question of wanting something for free, it's more a case of not wanting it at all. I'm still enough of an egomaniac to believe that this isn't because what I produce isn't good, though. Instead, people seem to be content with what they get in social media. If they want to find out about a fire, some sort of criminal activity, etc, they don't go to a news site---they go to the Guelph subreddit, Face Book, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and Dao only knows what other ways there are of communicating. Any old-school news editor will tell you that "if it bleeds, it leads"---and social media is really good at showing people exactly that sort of thing.

There's more to it than that, however. The most important parts of a local newspaper used be "match, hatch, and, dispatch", sports, and classified ads. That is, who got married, who had a baby, who died; how the local hockey or baseball team is doing; and; where to find a job, or, to buy or sell something like a used car. Surveys used to show that it was these things that led the majority of people to subscribe to their local paper---not the actual news. Now no one needs to go to a local news site to find this info. I'm just like everyone else in this regard. I find out who died on Face Book. I follow my flavour of local martial arts from an email list. When I want to buy or sell something, I go to Kijiji. Moreover, I use the Web even when it comes to fast breaking news. For example, last winter I found out that someone had been murdered two blocks from my house on the Guelph subreddit, not from on one of the blogs or news sites I mentioned in the beginning of this story. 

So what exactly is the point of being a journalist anymore?

&&&&

Still from Frank Capra's 1928 film The Power of the Press.
I'm assuming that it is a public domain image.

Well, there is still a need for someone to do investigative reporting. It's easy to find out when someone gets murdered or a house burns down, that's because anyone who finds out is immediately interested and at least some folks will put something up on social media. But what about something that looks really boring unless you know the implications? Or that requires you develop a list of local experts and contacts that could tell you what you need to know to understand something? That was traditionally what "beat reporters" did. Unfortunately, these were generally the first people to get laid off when the news industry got itself into its current mess.

There's also a role for someone who has made a significant investment in only telling the truth instead of just pushing some sort of ideological position. A lot of people say that there's no such thing as "objective truth". It might be the case that ultimately everyone's view of reality is coloured by their own perspective, but that doesn't mean that people should stop trying. People often fall for the fallacy of confusing an abstract ideal like "truth", "democracy", or, "objectivity" with a specific, quantifiable benchmark. That is, they think that unless something can be proved to be absolutely "100%" in any particular case , the very concept is bogus. This is nonsense. These sorts of things are a question of "more or less", not "either/or".

Unfortunately, some folks who hold onto the "relativism" banner are doing so simply because they don't care about the truth and instead want to push their own partisan propaganda. Others naively tend to see whatever bias that they bring to an issue as being "self-evidently true" and don't make any effort to double check it. Unfortunately, you don't find a lot of "fact checking" on social media---.

The third place where I think social media falls totally flat has to do with the depth of information. Some of my most popular articles on this blog are the ones where I go into great detail. Unfortunately, I also find that they are also some of the least popular ones. The paradox comes from the fact that people often don't like to spend a lot of time reading a story---unless they do. The difference between the former and the latter is generally whether or not it directly affects them. If someone has a hard time making their rent or despairs of ever buying a home, they are going to be a lot more interested in a multi-part series that talks about wealth demographics, the relative cost of land versus built housing, how parking influences the cost of both apartments and condos, etc. It will also be of interest to students doing research and people who are interested in municipal politics. But the majority of people who already own their house free-and-clear probably won't care that much and will complain that the articles are far, far too long. 

Here's where the Internet has an advantage over printed news. Once something goes onto the Web, modern search engines make it available to just about everyone until someone chooses to take it down (and longer than that if it gets recorded on  the Wayback Machine.) And I can attest that articles that I've written like this tend to take on a life of their own and are still a significant fraction of my readership years after being published. 

Social media simply doesn't fill either of these functions. First, it is designed to be very brief. You simply cannot write a long article and post it on Twitter. That means that if you want a complex, nuanced explanation of a difficult subject---like the cost of housing---you simply aren't going to get it. Moreover, social media is totally ephemeral. You simply can't find a specific subject on FaceBook or Twitter---even if there was anything worth searching for---with something like Bing, Duck Duck Go, or, Google because all posts almost instantly disappear in the avalanche of new ones. 

The final part of the value that journalism adds over social media is the creation of respected opinion. The key point is that word respected. There is certainly a lot of opinion on the Web, but much of it is bat-shit crazy. And sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between someone who sounds odd because they are diverging from conventional wisdom and someone who sounds odd because they are un-moored from reality. Sometimes someone has to go into some detail to explain why they believe what they do, and if the reader makes the effort they may decide that this view that they originally thought was "nuts" actually makes a lot of sense. If this happens enough with a specific commentator, just the fact that that person says something is enough for some people to pause and rethink once cherished opinions. 

&&&&

Please note that the above is only focusing on local journalism in terms of how to create content that people want to read. If someone is trying to make a living off the process a lot of added complexities come into play. As I mentioned above, most people subscribed to the old dailies for "match, hatch, and, dispatch", sports, and, classified ads. This means that the pool of people who would pay just for news was always very small in any given geographic community. 

Even worse, the old newspapers subsidized their publications with revenue from advertising. Unfortunately, totally new mega corporations have emerged and taken away almost all of that money. It's easy to forget, but almost all the big successful social media companies make their money selling advertising. There are still adverts on some websites, but they only get a fraction of the money that advertisers spend---most of it sticks in the hands of middle-men like Google.

The implication of this is that anyone trying to make money off a news blog is chasing a very small fraction of the public and all the real money is going to have to come from subscriptions instead of advertising.  

What really puts local news behind the eight ball with regard to the Web is the fact that it's local. I may attempt to focus on local news in this blog, but some of the issues I deal with have international appeal. As a result, I have readers all over the world. I know because I have software that keeps track of this, and I get the odd addition to the tip jar from other countries. If I specifically wanted to write about national and international issues, I would have a much larger pool of readers and probably a lot more subscribers sending me money. 

But that misses the point. There is a pretty lively journalist ecosystem still existing for national and international stories. For example, the New York Times is doing quite nicely with almost 6 million paid subscriptions. That's because they are drawing their subscribers from a much, much bigger pool than a local media source based in Guelph ever could. There are no doubt a fair number of subscribers to the Times in Guelph---but no one subscribes to the Back-Grounder in New York. And a basic Times subscription costs about $20/month (it bills by the week). 

I think that if you asked a lot of people about whether it made sense to pay $20/month for the Times and only $1/month---or even less---to the Guelph-Back-Grounder or Guelph Politico they'd be OK with the price differential because there is a lot more to read in the Times. They'd be wrong to think that, though. That's because feature articles with local information are a lot harder to finance---simply because they are of only local interest. That really should mean that people will pay a lot more for them because there will never be an economy of scale to reduce the price per unit.

Moreover, reading about Donald Trump or Bernie Saunders might be more interesting to many Canadians than the local real estate scene or Guelph's attempts to position itself economically during the climate emergency---but they have a lot less direct impact on an individual Guelphite's day-to-day life. Moreover, except for expat Americans, readers in Guelph can't vote in either the American Presidential election or Democratic primary. But they can vote in municipal elections. And, believe it or not, the planning and other decisions that people at City Hall make have enormous impact on people's lives. That means that if you are going to pay for news on the basis of its scarcity and it's intrinsic value, a case could be made that a subscription to a local news blog that puts out a story about once a week should cost more than a news site that is in a totally other country---no matter how many words get churned out every day.  

There are publications aimed at small "communities of interest" that actually use this subscription model. Most subscriptions to scholarly publications, for example, cost thousands of dollars a year because the publishers realize that only a very small number of people would be interested in---or even understand---the articles in their journals. (Unfortunately, many of the subscribers are academic libraries---many of which have terrible problems paying for hundreds of very expensive specialized journals.) 

It is possible that the government could provide a subsidy to local news coverage. Indeed, historically many countries did so by providing free postage or charitable status. The Liberals recently passed legislation that provides government money to prop up journalism. Unfortunately, because the largest "legacy" newspapers invested in intensive lobbying of the federal government, the resulting legislation is heavily weighted towards old newspapers instead of new, on-line start ups. People like Adam Donaldson and myself simply can't apply. 

Another side to this issue is to have a "patron" who is willing to support a writer who puts out something that is of public interest. For years a good friend of mine made a significant fraction of his income this way. An "undisclosed patron" gave him tens of thousands of dollars a year to publish a journal of interest to municipal governments, which he emailed to anyone interested. He could never have gotten enough paid individual subscriptions to pay for the effort, but this way his patron could influence society to the good simply by subsidizing the newsletter.

&&&& 

This raises a point. If you'd like to support the work I do, please consider making a regular Patreon or Pay Pal contribution. Only a dollar a month is enough to make a contribution! But if you have a significant amount of disposable income, I wouldn't be above taking on a patron like the fellow who supported my friend for years. Guelph needs background information if people are going to make informed choices. But researching and writing these articles takes an awful lot of work and really should be paid for.

&&&&

Local news will eventually "shake itself out" and become financially viable again. My gut instinct is that society will eventually realize that there are a lot of things that society really needs that the free market simply isn't prepared to support. At the same time, automation will push so many people out of work that the government will have to develop some sort of redistribution mechanism that keeps people from spending their entire lives on bare-bones welfare. At the same time, if we are ever going to get our handle on climate change, we are going to have to stop encouraging economic growth through consumerism. 

The journalist Paul Mason suggests in his book PostCapitalism that one of the answers to all three of these problems is the guaranteed annual income. This is because:

• it will provide income for people who simply cannot find work because automation has dramatically cut the need for workers in primary production and the service industry
• these people will then have the option of supplementing this government subsidy by offering goods and services that society needs but which late stage capitalism isn't interested in supplying---like local news
• because much of the stuff that people will selling---like local news---needs very few non-human resources, this emerging "maker culture" is a way of keeping people occupied and the economy growing, but it won't add substantially to the Climate Emergency  

Paul Mason from a Guardian review of his book, PostCapitalism.
Used under the Fair Dealing provision of Copyright law.

Until we get a guaranteed annual income (or some other source of revenue comes along) local news is going to have to be provided by people who are willing to put in the long hours because they think it's the right thing to do. They will be "aided and abetted" by other people who are silly enough to support them financially. This isn't that odd a situation---it's how just about everything of value in our society started.