Kate's Big Ideas

Last week at the Online News Association conference I caught up with many peers and colleagues about the state of news (not good). Most of the people I talked to are extremely talented and deeply experienced. Many of them are locked into long-term roles at organizations where their careers are unlikely to grow further. Virtually all of them will retire from the industry in the next 15 years.

The laws of physics would suggest that this turnover ought to be an opportunity for the next crop of journalists to leap into these opening roles and change things. But for a generation of rising talent in media, this is a time for reflection on where they can possibly go from here. Salaries are low to nonexistent; news organizations are folding left and right; online harassment is rife. For many, journalism is a labor of love — but no matter how much you’re willing to sacrifice, you still need a place to do the labor. So, what’s a dedicated journalist to do?

For many, the answer seems to be local news. Surprising at first blush. But think about it. The national pubs are fiercely competitive, with people vying for jobs and racing to break stories first. But the local shops have very few limits on what kinds of stories they can run, since they’re providing news to underserved markets. And they can be absolutely excellent venues for local, impactful investigative reporting — just look at the work at the Marion County Record. That all means local news organizations can be uniquely safe and wonderful places for young journalists to learn how to work in storytelling.

If we want a future of journalism, we need there to be nurturing environments for people to cut their teeth. I was lucky to have that kind of environment at the Molokai Times, the local Hawaii newspaper where I learned how to do a million different jobs in the span of a year. That feels like a different era, because it was.

Local news outlets are of course having an even worse time than the national pubs economically — ads don’t really support a media operation, it turns out, and the revenues they do produce are dwindling. That means they tend to pay quite poorly, limiting their talent pool to those who can afford low salaries. Wonderful organizations are shuttering, in part because the tycoons who’ve bought up local blogs and newspapers are free to give up on their investments.

But I’m hopeful that we are coming around to the idea that local news is worth saving. In a landscape where the left reads the Times (attempts at centrism be damned) and the right does Fox, local news is actually a potential meeting ground for people with differing ideologies to care about common things.

In the local news, you might read about the health of your local waterways and what’s being done to keep them thriving and usable. Or about the kinds of work contracts that are issued for public works projects. (Cheers to the exciting crop of local non-profit newsrooms springing up all around.) And when you learn about these things, you’ll be able to engage in debate on these issues with other people nearby who are similarly invested in them — and you’ll come on equal footing, since you’ll all be armed with the same baseline information.

Community values aside, even, this kind of local reporting is so often allegory for matters of national interest, and it’s primed to be cited and syndicated.

Most of the time when you’re faced with an unmanageably massive problem, it helps to start small. We’ve been facing cries for years that the media is dead, and the prestige pubs are beyond saving, beholden as they are to retaining their scale. What if we tried investing in the little guys for once?

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