Opinion | 9 hard truths about reviving local news

$500 million in philanthropic funding is a start, but let’s make sure we’re focusing on the right things

Posted Monday, September 18, 2023 11:30 am

Ken Doctor

Ken Doctor | Nieman Reports

Press Forward launch. Alden still buying. Texas Tribune’s reckoning. Invasions of Kansas newsrooms. Beyond news fatigue, active news avoidance. “Prompt engineers,” perhaps replacing journalists.

With just a few months to go until 2024, we enter a potentially perilous presidential election year on edge, uncertain, and hopeful, just like many of our local news readers across the country. The old cautionary tales of 1984 and 2001 reside in our rearview mirrors as we try to get our heads around the real impacts to come of artificial intelligence in societies already bathing in misinformation and disinformation. And then, there’s the stubborn, persistent, sometimes inconvenient fact that despite all the efforts of more than a decade, we’re still losing more local news creation than we are gaining.

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Opinion | 9 hard truths about reviving local news

$500 million in philanthropic funding is a start, but let’s make sure we’re focusing on the right things

Comments

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