Broadcast Innovation is the Key to Balanced News
When’s the last time you picked up a newspaper?
If your answer is “never,” like mine, then you might not remember a time when local journalism was primarily localized and (at least sometimes) tried to resonate with the people it purported to represent. Every city—not just the big ones, and even most towns—featured at least one paper. Many even had two or three.
However, it is no secret that the rise of Big Tech over the last two decades has led to the utter collapse of this once thriving industry. And be sure, this collapse is not a quiet one. The decimation of local newspapers as a source of independent local news has had (at least) two negative effects.
Media power is more concentrated than ever, and the Big Tech companies and national networks know that. It means that they have an outsized role in determining which stories are worth covering and which are not. Sometimes a human is not even involved in the decision-making: if the algorithm determines a person or topic is not worthy of being seen, it simply gets buried. Consequently, journalists and other creators are stuck in a loop of accommodating a hostile algorithm. It damages the quality of their work in the process, rewarding conformity and squeezing out local particularity.
