I’ve been enjoying this high-quality data visualization of Census data from the New York Times, which plots race, income, education and housing numbers on an interactive map. This morning, looking at our local weekly newspaper, I see that they also have a data visualization project — a map of the best path to see local Christmas lights.
That pretty much sums up the difference between the typical local paper and a real journalistic endeavor. There are exceptions, but generally most local papers are likely to devote a greater percentage of their precious resources to fluffy features than real beat reporting. David Cay Johnston is right to mourn the passing of the beat reporter, but he neglected to mention that the management of local newspapers performed executioner duties. “Tillie turned 100”, or “local man swims all 9 Finger Lakes in a day” are the kinds of things that end up in our local rag, not an in-depth investigation of the millions of dollars spent by school boards and city councils.
Phyllis
not an in-depth investigation of the millions of dollars spent by school boards and city councils.
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And it doesn't even have to be an 'investigation' per se. A simple explanation of the budget, projects in the works, what employee costs actually are (employee share/employer share, etc) would help people understand how public finance works and how those decisions are made.
I ran a non-profit and my board was made up of a lot of smart, well-meaning people who had no understanding of how grants work. They saw XX dollars in the budget and said 'Can we do this with those funds?' and couldn't grasp that no, you can't because your agreement with the grantor says you'll spend it the way they say.
Another example. There was a fellow here who agitated with city council for years about hiring a full-time recreation director. He scoffed/sneered at the notion of it costing the city about $30,000-35,000 for that type of employee. Because in his business, he didn't offer insurance, nor did he have any concept of the required employer share of state retirement benefits, etc.
Having said that, a local paper with a nose for news might well have discovered the city manager in California making 300,000 a year long before it came to light and bankrupted the town.
stuckinred
We have two papers in this college town, one founded by BJ headliner DG. Between them they do a pretty good job of holding feets to the fire but the “comments” are totally insane.
sal
Local, small town anyway, newspapers are tied into the good old boy networks that run the
Villagetowns. (Good thing that doesn’t happen at big papers like the NYT, Wapo, etc.) They go to the same parties, golf together, yada yada. Their interests arre the same. They’re also more vulnerable to business economic pressure. And they don’t have the resources to devote to long, in depth reporting.Another factor is that good reporters/editors/etc move to the higher paying, prestige outlets. They may get that first job at the Podunk Review, but then move on after a couple years.
Mr. Prosser
It all boils down to revenue. When I worked for a small local the editor wouldn’t even allow publication of real estate closings because the agents didn’t want the final sales amounts known, even though the figures were available at the county clerk’s office. The editor was afraid to lose real estate ads. Most small papers don’e make any money on insert ads from groceries, etc because they are printed elsewhere. Pissing off the local businesses who place ads and governments which place legal notices really curtails income.
c u n d gulag
‘Feels good’ is easier than ‘hard work.’
“How’d you swim all 9 lakes in a day?” is easier to ask than “What happened to the $2 million allocated for the rebuilding?”
Now, good feature writing is an art in its own right. But I’ll take good hard reporting any day.
But newspapers don’t want to pay for that anymore. A reporter may have to spend days, weeks, and months in investigating and verifying something before writing about it. It’s easier to assign someone to write about some local person of interest due to some quirk, or some piece of luck or happenstance. And you can see the reporters work every day or two.
And the newspapers in this country dare to wonder why their subscribership is down?
Could it be that I care more about why the roads suck, and the lights still don’t work after millions of bucks were supposed to fix it, than I am in some dumbass who has nothing better to do, and plenty of time to do it, than breaststroke across 9 lakes?
ASSHOLES!!!
Charles
Part of the problem is the intended audience for these papers. Ever read the comments section of your local paper’s website? Idiocracy is us.
Linda Featheringill
The advent of newspapers online was wonderful. A whole new world opened up.
I used to stop off at the library downtown and browse through the papers when I had the chance. It’s much easier to roam around online.
Sometimes progress makes me happy. :-)
djork
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has chosen the local paper path. Their coverage has been of the “Bubba Passes a Stone” variety. I call it that, because I am certain I’ll wake up and read that headline above the fold one day. They’ve even moved their offices out of the perimeter and to the suburbs, which means they should strip the Atlanta right out of the name. (The perimeter is an interstate bypass that circles the city. It is line of demarcation in most people’s minds when talking about Atlanta proper. Those Real Housewife ladies? Most don’t really live in Atlanta.)
It’s a shame, because while the AJC wasn’t necessarily the best paper before, it did take it’s role as the largest paper for the largest Southeastern city seriously. Now, it’s become a thin joke, pandering to the lily-white (and very conservative) suburbs. Their new editorial page focuses on “balance.” Need I say more?
I reckon it isn’t entirely their fault. Revenue is down and you have to go where the money is. Plus, the aleternative weeklies have been doing a better job of holding the City of Atlanta government’s feet to the fire lately. In particular, a paper called “the Sunday Paper” has been doing a pretty good job on local issues. I don’t really like the news editor there when it comes to national politics, but she does a good job on local stuff. Likewise, Creative Loafing has been a mainstay for a while too, but I feel they’re trying to be more of a cultural / music /entertainment magazine as of late.
My, I typed all that? Coffee is kicking in.
Woodrowfan
I’ve spent many, many hours reading old papers, especially New York and Washington DC papers from about 1900-1920. The better papers from this time, such as the New York World, used to have lots and lots of fluff (I can see the “best route to see Christmas lights” story in the Sunday World.) but they also had a LOT of other news including good investigative reporting. But then, they had a hell of a lot more reporters who were expected to dig stuff up. The average copy of the New York World from the 1910s had more news in a day than the current WaPost has in an average work week. And it was surprisingly accurate. A lot of it was local crime stuff, but that brought in readers who might also then read the story on the next page about the ice trust screwing the poor in the tenements, or the local labor union’s efforts to organize a sweatshop.
After a morning of reading the World, or the DC Evening Star, or the New York Times from the early 20th century (on microfilm at the LOC), and then taking a lunch break and reading over that morning’s WaPost is a real jolt.
Jason
This is also the difference between an organization that knows how to pass information through a relatively new form of “reporting” and a gimmicky stunt. Compare NYT’s excellent, early use of data visualization – they don’t compare to Bloomberg, but they have different purposes for their respective audiences – to cnn.com’s iReport and NewsPulse “beta” and holograms and silly little “minority report” touch screens.
Say this, too: though my local paper is the worst piece of shit to disgrace cheap paper, WICU’s televised newscast is consistently excellent, in all areas. I find that hard to wrap my head around, as one of our anchors is an entertainer.
SiubhanDuinne
@djork: Great analysis of what’s happened to the AJC. I almost never read it these days except for weaher updates, movie times, and Luckovich.
But I remember when the morning Atlanta Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal were two distinct papers. They shared some coverage and combined on Sundays, but mostly had separate reporting and editorial staffs, different sports writers and music critics and local columnists with distinctive voices (Celestine Sibley, Lewis Grizzard).
Back in the early days of the civil rights movement, some of Atlanta’s leaders, including the chairman of Rich’s department store and the president of Citizens & Southern Bank, used to have lunch almost every day (so the legend goes; I wasn’t actually there) with the publisher of the Constitution. And if the paper covered or editorialized on something that the businessmen didn’t like, Richard Rich or Mills B. Lane would pick up the phone (again, this is the story) and threaten to pull all their advertising until the paper came around. So the cronyism and “Villager” mentality is hardly new. But they also realized early on that the African American community in Atlanta needed clothes and children’s shoes and checking accounts and it made good business sense to support desegregation. So they also pressured the paper on taking a stand in favor of civil rights. Maybe not for the purest of motives, and certainly it was a slow and messy process, but in the 50s and 60s Atlanta was generally in much better shape racially than most other Southern cities. So the cronyism also contributed to a good outcome in that case.
Today? If I called the AJC by its proper name, it wouldn’t be fair to birdcage liners and fish wrappers. Rich’s is long gone (absorbed finally into Macy’s). And the fine old C&S Bank morphed and merged and is now NationsBank.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Jim
We have two local print papers in a rural area with a relatively small population. One paper is conservative, the other liberal, reflecting the towns they’re published in. The only real investigative reporting comes from a third, web-only publication, which is pretty much a two-person shoestring operation. Unfortunately, because it’s not staring you in the face every morning, it’s easy for the politicians to ignore. Only seldom does one of its stories get picked up by the print papers.
But at least real journalism isn’t dead. Just dormant.
Jack
Re-packaging census data isn’t reporting, it’s the groundwork for reporting.
Dave S.
Did the guy swim the Finger Lakes north to south, or east to west? North to south in one day would be newsworthy, if (probably) physically impossible.
Linda Featheringill
On the topic of reporting:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/a-bayesian-take-on-julian-assange/?scp=2&sq=assange&st=cse
Nate discusses the question of political motivation of charges against Assange.
chopper
hard to say. i’ve seen tons of fluffy crap but every so often i’ve seen some hardcore investigative journalism by local or regional papers. guess it depends on the reporter.
i’d say overall tho, local stuff does tend to stink.
R-Jud
@Woodrowfan:
The shift is apparent within the last 30 years. I have a copy of Time Magazine from mid-December 1980 (John Lennon’s murder was the cover story). When I compare the writing in that issue to a current Time, with its listicles, graphs, and re-warmed press releases, it’s really shocking.
ChrisS
There are 7-10 online news outlets online for the Syracuse area and they all spew the same bullshit on a daily basis. When it comes budgetary stuff they usually concentrate on how much something is and not what or how it’s spent on. Therefore the the average reader thinks that government is overfunded and that they won’t pay anymore taxes (“well, but you can’t close that fish hatchery, or shut down my fire department, or merge my police with the county, or limit which roads are plowed regularly, and we have to rebuild that intersection/bridge/parkway, you know, can you just stop giving money to those people?”).
The Salmon River, despite being overrun with local bubbas and out-of-state bubbas from PA and NJ, is an extraordinary fishery. There’s a well-funded hatchery there that spends a fair amount of money on farming fish for release. They purchased a state of the art tagger to identify salmon released by the hatchery and native-born salmon and they spent a million dollars on this equipment. End of article. What wasn’t included was, of course, their annual budget is in the neighborhood of $200k+, I think and that they bring in an estimated $150 million per year in tourism to the area.
This just pissed the locals off that the state would waste their money on some stupid shit and increase their license fees and give money to poor brown people.
Resident Firebagger
I spent about 10 years working at local newspapers, until the mid 1990s. What you see ever-increasingly in the large corporate dailies today has always been an issue in local rags — skeleton staffs, short of resources, young kids just out of school working long hours for crap pay. I made $9/hour at my last paper, which even in 1996 was zero money. (I worked three other part-time jobs to get by.)
I remember covering city councils and school boards and trying to do budget stories. No Internet back then, and the only people who could begin to explain it to you were the very administrators putting the budgets together. And when I covered this stuff, I mean I’d cover multiple/councils boards, typically four or more. To really do that right would be close to a full-time gig right there, but it was maybe 1/5th of one’s responsibilities.
At small papers, beat reporters aren’t just beat reporters. They’re feature reporters, page designers, copy writers and copy editors. Everything. The last editor I worked for would spend at least an hour a month on the phone with people begging to get their/their kid’s name removed from the police report for that DUI. The police reports had to be the most read thing in that paper.
That there are only a handful of really outstanding small papers is nothing new. It’s pretty much always been the case. Given the many constraints, it takes a group of outstanding, devoted people to really pull that off…
Brachiator
Local papers have always done more fluff than hard news. Hell, until around 1962, the LA Times was the official house organ of the WASP Ascendancy in California.
And at best, the LA Times and NY Times mixes up “real journalism” with their own equivalent of fluff. So, instead of “local man swims all 9 Finger Lakes in a day” you get stuff like coverage of the marital breakup of New York power couple David Barton and Susanne Bartsch.
Real Pulitzer material.
And hard news reporting on a local level can be financially hazardous. You have to worry about lawsuits as well as advertiser pull-outs.
jayackroyd
State capital papers are often good. the Topeka Capital Journal, for example. Bangor Daily News (not a capital) covers in state news pretty well, while the Press Herald covers high school sports with care.
Bill Murray
Aren’t many of the smaller town dailies/weeklies owned by bigger conglomerates that don’t actually care about or even actively stay away from the more controversial issues?