03-20-2021, 12:17 PM
(03-20-2021, 01:03 AM)nms Wrote: Looping back to the comments about the Record (and I don't know if this merits a full topic elsewhere), it has been shrinking its labour pool for a long time. If you count the number of unique names for reporters in the daily paper, you would likely be hard pressed to fill a minibus. Local journalism relies on "boots on the ground" to tell our stories. Good journalism is expensive to maintain but important to the functioning of our society. Without it, we risk living blind in our own community.
Social Media platforms are not good at presenting heterogenous community narratives. Nor are they interested in your local stories. They are also prone to printing non-fact checked stories that destabilize communities.
Refusing to pay for local news is not good community stewardship. Holding out for a local version of the New York Times, the Washington Post etc is just not going to work. You can subscribe to the Record for $60/year and demonstrate that local news is important to you. (that's only $10 less and than an Elite WRConnected membership)
Things that we'll lose when we lose local journalism:
- a local "paper of record" that provides the first draft of history in this area
- local human interest stories about who lives here
- local amateur sports (either leagues or school competitions)
- local politics (not everyone reads WRConnected like we do)
- local arts (either visiting artists or up and coming local artists in any medium visual, singing etc)
- local community support (The Record supports the Kids to Camp Fund, and two literacy funds as well as raising the profile of other worthy causes in the Region)
- local obituaries (relying on social networks to spread this news misses large portion of the connections that may have faded over time but that are none-the-less important for creating community)
It's a tough situation, and refusing to pay for The Record doesn't demonstrate that I think local new is unimportant. All it means is that I don't think what The Record provides today is worth paying for, nor do I think that a better financial situation would improve their quality to the point of being worth paying for tomorrow. I do agree that high quality journalism is fundamental to our society, I just don't think The Record is that path forward.
I've gone years reading The Record every day, then a decade without reading it once, and now I read online articles from time to time. I don't feel that amount I was informed about local issues really changed during any of those periods. But I also don't care about anything that papers publish unless they are the primary source.
I've also seen writers from The Record outright lie (borderline slander) about topics I had "insider information" on, and that I cared about personally. It's hard to convince me to pay for that.