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New Deserts and Non-Abridgment: Supporting Informational Democracy by Reviving Local News

-- By JohnClayton - 17 Apr 2021

Introduction

I spent three years out of undergrad working as a reporter in York, Pennsylvania, a small city nonetheless served by not one, but two daily newspapers. I worked at the morning paper; our counterparts published in the afternoon. Given the modest scope of our coverage area—two mostly rural counties—our newsroom was well-stocked. Two dozen-ish reporters, plus desk staff. Plenty to cover city hall and school board meetings and Friday night football games.

Today, less than half that staff remains. A conglomerate bought us and outsourced jobs to a centralized editing hub. Our competitor is not doing much better. It is hard to imagine York will stay a two-newspaper town much longer.

Still, York is lucky. Many community newspapers have vanished altogether, their audiences and ad dollars sucked away by the tech platforms. Roughly a quarter of newspapers and half of local journalism jobs have disappeared in the last 15 years. Researchers now study the phenomenon of “news deserts”—large swaths of the country, particularly rural areas, that have no local news coverage.

For an informational democracy to thrive, we must resurrect local news. The government has a vital interest in creating a sustainable, digital local news infrastructure. Indeed, under the First Amendment’s non-abridgment principle, it may have an obligation to.

The Need for Local News in an Informational Democracy

The Founders knew the importance of a thriving press. James Madison argued that only an informed and engaged public could expose “public characters and measures” to the censorship of public opinion and preserve, through informed voting, a government subservient to the people.

In theory, the ubiquity of the internet should make the circulation of news easier. We no longer need “good roads,” but only good spectrum. But the algorithmic marketplace of attention-consuming ideas is not suited to the bread-and-butter mundanities of local journalism: not only local elections and zoning board updates, but human-interest stories that increase one’s connection to their community.

The priorities of an informational democracy must include a renewed focus on sustainable, community-based news reporting. Accountability journalism discourages and exposes corruption by local officials who otherwise operate without oversight. But robust local news coverage has also been linked to more holistic benefits, like increased voter turnout, greater civic participation, and reduced political polarization. Local media even play a role in alerting public health officials to the spread of disease—a now-salient concern in the time of COVID-19.

The Case for a Non-Abridgment Obligation

The for-profit news media bears much blame for its collapse. Bloated media organizations tied themselves to a for-profit, ad-based business model. Audiences moved online and advertisers migrated to the platforms, with their troves of user data. In one sense, the death of for-profit print media is merely a story of technological disruption.

This is part of the story, but not all of it. The government has long played a central role in structuring the media ecosystem, including local and print media. Newspapers, for example, received special treatment that allowed them to grow—such as insulation from tax and antitrust laws. Indeed, York’s two newspapers take advantage of a federal carve out that allows them to pool management, advertising, printing operations.

Conversely, more recent federal actions have exacerbated the decline in local news. The decision to immunize, via Section 230, the tech platforms from liability for third-party statements is perhaps the most obvious example. This immunity fed the growth of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which freely leveraged news articles while siphoning away the ad dollars that sustained those articles. Meanwhile, the loosening of merger rules by the FCC—including its recent decision to permit increased broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership in markets—has led to even greater media homogeneity. This is particularly true for broadcast news, where cross-packaging of content means that less airtime is devoted to local affairs.

Under a non-abridgment First Amendment, one could argue the government has not just an interest, but an obligation to remedy the news deserts whose growth it helped hasten.

Building Digital Infrastructure for Local News

Once we recognize a role for government (obligatory or not) in remedying the local new crisis, what steps should it take?

One solution, enacted in Australia, would force the platforms to pay news outlets for use of their content. Such an approach is interesting, but I worry it will simply lead Google and Facebook to deemphasize news content. Such a law would also do little to directly solve the news desert problem. Direct funding of existing local news outlets and projects—already enacted in New Jersey—is promising, though it may suffer from trial-and-error inefficiency.

A better approach, I think, is to adapt the public media model to create replicable, digital news ecologies that could be cheaply implemented in local communities. Federal funds could be directed to a nonprofit corporation—similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—which would support the creation of decentralized, Wiki-like news hubs in underserved communities. An initial monetary outlay would be required to train journalists—however, the sites themselves should be designed to be run cheaply and encourage community participation (for example, through moderated forums). Moreover, the hubs should be sustained long-term through diverse funding; while the CPB-like entity may distribute small amounts of funding each year, they would also rely on reader support and hyperlocal advertising. Critically, these sites should, as a requirement of funding, not spy on users or collect any data without permission. This approach cannot alone solve the local news crisis, but it may help fill gaps and provide a model that other localities could replicate.

Ultimately, my argument is more normative than legal. It is hard to glean, even from a non-abridgment reading of the First Amendment, a constitutional obligation for the government to take steps like those outlined above. But perhaps politics and technology can accomplish what law alone cannot. Once one accepts the democratic necessity of local news and the reality of government’s contribution to its current state, an expanded role for publicly funded media seems far less radical.

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