Times Union Radio Ad – Support Your Local Journalists 🗞️

I guess, go out, buy a paper and support your local journalists if that is your thing. I’m skeptical though, as most local papers grow thinner and thinner, with most of their staffs being college interns and a handful of old timers who hope their company will stay around long enough for them to retire.

Truth is local journalism is a lot like local restaurants in the era of McDonald’s and the interstate highway system. It serves less and less of a purpose, when local and even state government is mostly about implementing the policies set out by science and the federal government. In a complicated, engineered world, where people float freely from community to community, there isn’t a lot of need for the local anymore. Regional, state, and national planning make a lot more sense, whatever is local is quaint and a throwback like that stubborn café that pokes along on the back road, as most people fill up their Joe at Dunkins and Starbucks.

Not only are local papers thin and often just repetitive of national narrative of today, for the most part local news is news like the articles in Playboy make it a series publication. Newspapers are mostly about salecious stories about the latest violent crime and gory traffic crashes, rarely do they provide much of substantive valley. Often they are little more then propaganda for their publisher, giving comfort to ideology of those who read them regularly. News is good, but I’d rather dig into the data myself. Draw my own conclusions. Or read the positions and reports put out by activist groups themselves, reflecting the views put forward by those money interests, rather then hear it second hand in newspaper.

Maybe it’s better people are getting more of their information directly from the government and interest groups. Why read a newspaper article, when you get the original press release or report? Does the news media do that much of a service over what you can find put from the source? Investigative journalism sounds good, but how does it compare to the opposition digging up dirt on questionable institutions? Maybe I’m just skeptical of the lofty position that journalists often write themselves to be in.