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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.
This article is part of The Week s special section celebrating the magazine s 20 years in print. It originally appeared in the April 16 issue
The Week was born amid a strange stillness. In April 2001, the furor over the contested 2000 election had subsided, and George W. Bush was just 100 days into what one of our early covers called The quiet presidency. The nation was at peace, and the partisan rancor of the Clinton impeachment was, for the moment, in remission. It was so placid that summer, in fact, that newspapers and TV news paid inordinate attention to several shark attacks on the East Coast; there were times we struggled to find the meaty, idea-driven debates that are the heart of the magazine. But in this stretch of historical flatwater, the faint sound of rapids could be heard. In our July 6, 2001, issue, the Briefing in our magazine was headlined Osama bin Laden s war on America.