Demise in Local Media Means Demise in Trust

You say you don't trust the media anymore? The decline of local media may be a reason why.

These days, you hear a lot about a lack of trust in the media. Polls show that a significant portion of Americans don't trust mainstream media outlets, and there seems to be a response from media members that indicates they don't trust a lot of Americans themselves.

There have been multiple explanations as to why there's less trust in the media these days -- particularly why that trust often aligns with partisan thinking -- but I think a major reason why is the demise of local newspapers and media outlets.

There's a misconception that newspapers declined simply because younger people weren't interested in them. However, I can remember my time in college and noticing that not a lot of students then were reading newspapers, save for the college paper -- and this was back in the early 1990s, before the Internet became more accessible to the general public.

Other myths that get repeated are that newspapers gave away their stories for free or that Craiglist ate into the classified advertising revenue. In reality, newspapers declined for multiple reasons, but not the ones people think of first.

Newspapers are local businesses that have traditionally been built on a model of collecting revenue from local advertising as the main source of revenue, with subscribers coming in second. Thus, when younger people weren't subscribing to papers back in the 1980s and early 1990s, few noticed the impact on revenue.

Younger people weren't buying newspapers because, most likely, they didn't have a strong tie to the places they first moved. If they had no idea how long they would stay, or they always sought to keep moving to advance their careers, why would they do too much that is tied to putting down roots? Buying a local newspaper subscription is part of that equation.

More importantly, local newspapers were, in years past, mostly owned by families who had an interest in the business. That is, until a generation of those families decided not to stay in the business. The result was the papers getting sold to large corporations, who saw the high profit margins as a great investment. As of 2018, 25 large corporations owned a third of local newspapers.

What the larger firms didn't do, though, was figure out how to get the newspapers to evolve with a changing world. One of them was how newspapers lost their monopoly on local advertising. The rise of the Internet didn't just mean people could get news for free elsewhere -- they could now sell what they had to offer to a larger audience. The result was newspapers losing advertising dollars and, thus, their primary source of income.

When that happened, newspaper staffs were cut and there were fewer people available to focus on items of local interest. While newspaper readership was already declining, it got worse when people saw less of local interest being covered while the bulk of the product was state and national news they could get elsewhere.

So how did all of this lead to a decline in media trust?

Matt Taibbi, in his book Hate Inc., examined how the current news model is designed to make people dislike those who don't follow their preferred politics or viewpoints. Among his points are the demise of local outlets, the rise of 24-7 news media and its need to fill air time, and the rise of social media which drives a "clickbait" model that's about targeting an audience.

The rise of both 24-7 news media and social media has led to the rise of more opinion and analysis, the desire to fill time with "embrace debate" programming and the push for media CEOs to focus less on investigative reporting (which consumes a lot of time and resources) and more on providing their viewers with comfort.

Additionally, with local outlets declining and larger conglomerates taking over, there are fewer opportunities for younger people to break into the business by taking on a local beat and learning about issues that impact communities.

Instead, the younger generation is now seeing everything through a national level, plus those who are getting into journalism are more likely to attend expensive, private preparatory schools, then attend an elite university, and seldom, if ever, interact with anybody outside of their economic class.

Add to this the fact that opinion and analysis are dominating the landscape, and younger people are more likely to see that as their means to break into the business. And because they don't get the time to learn their craft on a local scale, and thus interact with more types of individuals from different backgrounds, they don't get the perspective needed to do their jobs better.

Thus, when media runs its business model based on targeting a particular audience, it becomes less about "tell people what they need to hear, even if they may not like it," and more about "tell people what they want to hear." In other words, identify who are the good guys (comfort) and the bad guys (outrage) and don't consider complexity, lest it challenge what a person might be thinking.

Local news hasn't been perfect (believe me, I know from my own experiences), but it does serve as a good place for younger people to learn the ins and outs of journalism. And it also gives them an opportunity to understand what it means to build trust with the public, and not simply look for an audience that only wants to get comfort.

And while it's easy to blame the new generation of journalists, the truth is that journalists, young and old, don't get compensated with six-figure salaries, unless they are one of the lucky ones who has a huge influence in the industry. The rest are trying to get by and may very well not like the direction the business has taken -- but if they speak up, they worry they will lose a job and, in some cases, prestige.

I don't have easy answers for how to solve the problem, but a good place to start might be for local entrepreneurs to figure out a business model that allows for a subscriber-based model to support local news that isn't simply people sending stuff in.

But another place to look might be for journalists in general to remember this: Be prepared to acknowledge your mistakes — and not just when it’s about appeasing your audience, but when it’s acknowledging that something your audience wants to hear was, in fact, wrong.

No human has gotten it right, every single time, but when you double down on a mistaken assumption, you're only going to lose the public’s trust.