Social media ate local news

Probably on a bagel.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Bring back local news! Specifically, the Lindsay Family Newspaper I wrote and distributed at the breakfast table when I was seven. —Kate

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I was walking home with a friend a few weeks ago when our path was interrupted by approximately 15-20 police cars and fire engines. They had swarmed a housing complex, a man was pointing and running, and it smelled faintly of smoke. The experience was so jarring that, when I got home, I downloaded Citizen (an app I tend to avoid due to its Big Cop Energy), but nothing had been reported. I then tried Twitter, an app that had been useful in the past for questions like, “Why is the building next to my office on fire?” Nada. I searched the cross streets on Nextdoor. Zilch. 

I figured that by the next morning a local news outlet would report what went down, but not a single combination of search terms I tried yielded anything from after 2022—probably because, in that time, a number of those publications had shut down or laid off a majority of their staff. I closed my laptop, slowly accepting that I was just never going to know why a calling-all-units event had happened a few blocks from my home.

A new study shared by The Columbia Journalism Review found that when over 2,500 people were offered free subscriptions to two local news outlets—the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer—less than two percent accepted. It’s a bleak suggestion that our current local news crisis isn’t just the fault of corporations. There’s blood—ink?—on our hands, too. 

It all comes back to social media. Last week, I wrote about how general-interest news was shifting into the hands of digital creators. In a similar way, it seems, local news is falling into the hands of its citizens.