This week, the Pew Research Center issued is 10th annual State of the News report, noting that local television news operations are following local newspapers down the path of shrinking staffs and less investigative reporting.
Dan Schwarz, a professor of English at Cornell University, author of “Endtimes: Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times, 1999-2009” and a regular blogger on the media for the Huffington Post, says the surrender of news gathering to advertisers and the self-interested has been a top-down economic shift in the news industry that has been accelerated by the social media focus on “I”.
Schwarz says:
“Any comments on what is happening in the world of local TV news must be put in the context of the larger news industry. Put another way, when the larger more capitalized and more experienced national newsgathering industry sneezes, the local news catches cold if not pneumonia.
“Once the news media – and not only the elite media like the New York Times and the major networks but local radio and TV – provided what they thought the readers needed to know. In other words, they were gatekeepers. But now the local media, following the major media, provides what they think their readers want and what is necessary to draw viewers and – ultimately, depending on their success at doing that – draw advertisers.
“‘Local’ means something different in New York and other major-city markets from what it means in Troy or Ithaca or Elmira where reporters may be on their first job and work on a tiny news staff of one – if that. Allowing – especially in small markets – politicians, corporations and self-interested citizens to tell their own stories without probing reporters asking questions is not only inexpensive, but also means that fewer people will be offended. In small markets and micro-small markets, people like to hear what their neighbors are doing.
“Thus the local TV and print, too, are a reflection of what viewers want. And what they want is ‘news lite’ rather than substantive analyses. Local news, then, not only follows the models of national news but even more directly reflects the culture on which it reports, and that culture foregrounds social media, with the briefest of messages focusing often on the vertical pronoun, ‘I’.”
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