After a long year, local news looks back and thinks forward
The local news crisis can be tough to describe in national terms, because no two places are exactly the same. Though it’s been a difficult year for regional journalism, following a difficult decade, it’s a diverse media ecosystem, and though industry-wide challenges are rooted in similar trends, every outlet has faced battles of its own. “Local news” comprises many things: newspapers, public radio, television, blogs, newsletters, and as CJR’s newest digital magazine highlights pirate radio stations, text message chains, internet forums. Different outlets had different fates this year. Radio and television stations fared better than newspapers. Nonprofit publications of all mediums soared while many for-profit outlets foundered. Many communities lost a trusted source of information; others lost outlets that were already on the way out; and, as bears mentioning, some communities haven’t had a local news source for
Platforming Big Liars four months on from the insurrection
Yesterday, the
Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Josh Hawley, the Republican senator for Missouri. The interview was billed as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech,” but before discussing that, Cat Zakrzewski, a tech-policy reporter, asked Hawley about tyranny of a different type the coup attempt at the Capitol, which took place four months ago tomorrow, and Hawley’s responsibility for it. (He refused, both before and after the insurrection, to certify Joe Biden’s election victory, and made a fist-pump gesture toward protesters.) In response, Hawley offered bluster about “election integrity,” whataboutism targeting Democrats, and technicalities about supposed legal irregularities in Pennsylvania; Zakrzewski tried to intercede on a factual point, but Hawley pressed on. “Don’t try to censor, cancel, and silence me here,” he said. “Senator,” Zakrzewski replied, “we’
A year to turn the page
The year 2020 has been humbling in the face of nature. The coronavirus pandemic rattled the earth and revealed just how unstable the ground beneath us was. For journalists, the avalanche of life-or-death news crashed into an industry already beset by acute financial strain, the warping effects of disinformation, and long-standing inequity. In the print pages of the
Columbia Journalism Review, we’ve looked at a media ecosystem confronting the realities of our distressed planet and the people who inhabit it.
First, in the spring, was the climate issue. E. Tammy Kim turned her attention to the