How To Save The Local News Business
A well-informed citizenry is the foundation of a functioning democracy. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1787, “I would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.
For the past 35 years, it has been my pleasure and privilege to work with some of the finest and most professional news organizations in the world, including, but not limited to The BBC, The New York Times, CBS News, Spectrum, Time/Warner and many others. But now, the news business is in trouble, and so are the very underpinnings of a democracy dependent upon honest and trustworthy information. In the past decade, more than 2,000 newspapers across the US have closed down. In the shadow of the Internet, old business models no longer work. The Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news. This is admirable, but this is hardly a sustainable model for news and journalism for the future. And sadly, what happened to newspapers a decade ago is now threatening television news as well. In a rather terrifying statistic, more than half the American population now goes to social media as its primary source of news. For those under 16, the number jumps to a terrifying 86%. But social media, being an open platform, is not a good source of information for an ‘informed’ public. Spend some time on TikTok, with its more than 1.6 billion users, and you can quickly learn that the earth is in fact flat; that no one ever went to the moon; that humans and dinosaurs co-existed on this planet a mere 6,000 years ago and a good deal more. The content of TikTok, as well as Instagram with its 1.35 billion users, or Facebook with its 3 billion users covers pretty much every aspect of information and society, from “science” to politics and beyond, much of it plainly wrong, but that seems not to matter.
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