Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the day s breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons.
Editor's letter theweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Editorâs letter
Who will be left to report on the crisis of local news? Itâs a troubling question. While a few major national outlets have prospered, in much of the country local reporting is disappearing as large papers retrench and small ones shut down. A great part of this is happening under the radar, because after the lights are turned off, there is nobody left to write the story. In this weekâs Last Word, though, journalist Will Oremus reports on whatâs happening in his town as the Nextdoor app steadily takes over as the main outlet for local news. Itâs worth reading in full, but the quick takeaway is that what Facebook has done to the national discourse is even worse in Nextdoorâs local versions of that model. There is no town too small for polarization and misinformation to dominate. Sadly, there is increasingly no alternative source of local news.
Editorâs letter
Thereâs a specific feeling I get whenever I fly into New Yorkâs JFK airport and start to make the drive home. It feels exactly like turbulence. The roads around the nationâs busiest international air hub are littered with moon craterâsize potholes, which make for a juddering and profanity-filled (âOh, my poor bleeping suspensionâ) experience. This isnât a uniquely New York problem: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 43 percent of roads across the U.S. are in poor or mediocre condition. And the decay goes beyond holes in the blacktop. More than 40 percent of the countryâs bridges are at least 50 years old, and about 46,150 have been given the worrying designation âstructurally deficient.â Some 178 million trips are made across these decrepit bridges every day. At the current rate of investment, it will take until 2071 to make all the repairs currently needed to those spansâbut by the
Editor's letter theweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.