Chats help define news value

Conversations have been heavy this past week with targeted people about the value of community journalism.
That spilled over into an innocent debate with my daughter about the ripple effects of Chatbots and AI in general.
My brain hurts.
For some reason this week, I kept hitting people with this analogy. You get up to take a shower and brush your teeth, make coffee, make breakfast if that’s your thing, and go about your day. What happens when you have no water?
“Damnit”.
“What the hell?!”
You come home from work and you have no electricity due to a power outage caused by a squirrel that climbed onto a transformer or something.
“Damnit”.
We take for granted the things that we need to move through our lives efficiently.
But what happens when your news stops? If you think it’s not moving in that direction, look at the transformation of the local journalism business model over the past 15 years.
I know for a fact that many people open the Pen City Current every morning and read through it. We try to keep the news to the top two or three stories each day. Some days that’s about a $700,000 new tennis court facility at FM Jr./Sr. High School. Some days it’s a feature piece on a couple who develops homes because it feels good. But we try to bring to the readership what we feel is a priority of information.
We are dealing with the possibility that news coverage will get more sparse as corporate owners try to hang onto profit margins that are non-existent anymore. Improving finances means increasing revenue or decreasing spending.  And if you can’t increase revenue, guess what.
And AI plays a role here. We’re seeing more and more reporters rely on virtual meeting coverage at all levels. So they get what they hear. But what are they missing?
I’ve written so many stories on what my big ears can eavesdrop on, I can’t count them.
Two councilmen having a conversation before a meeting. I sit in the front row. I can hear and I can start digging or at least approach them after the meeting. How is that done virtually. I’ll bet they find a way.
But until then, I’m going to be where I can, when I can.
It doesn’t end there. What’s the value of that to you as a reader – as a business, as a company?
Is a strong local news outlet part of the community’s quality of life? I think so. Newspapers aren’t a new invention and people have been relying on them forever. But I think we’ve become a little myopic about what our news outlets do for us. My conversations lately have been around advertising and there being so many other options out there.
For sure there are. The days of the uber-rich publishers and media outlets are now confined to the global level. Local news used to be very profitable and it’s just not anymore. The people that are buying them up are scraping what cream is left at the top and stripping them down for parts. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the local papers here sold off individually within the next five years. That grape is a raisin and it’s barely holding on.
So now most people see newspapers as something that comes in their mailbox or the inbox on a daily basis. They consume it and then get rid of it. But what “value” do they place on that consumption? It used to be the value of a subscription. But people are going away from subscriptions because they can get news online or on social media for free. I can tell you this - if the news on social media isn’t coming from a reputable source, as far as quality of information goes, you can live and die on that hill.
I’d just as soon see all those Meta infused outlets banned by legislation without a bonafide news copyright and masthead. It’s too dangerous, but it too is an expression of free speech so that will never happen. But do the people running these gossip sites sit in on city council meetings, county supervisor meetings, talk to officials, file Freedom of Information Act requests, push open meetings over closed meetings, and watch accountability? They do not. Not that I’ve ever seen. So does that mean these folks are bad folks? Absolutely not, and a lot of what they report has substance, but they don’t go the extra step(s) for confirmation. They just throw it out there.
So here’s the million dollar question. What is bonafide, legitimate news gathering worth to you- to your employees – to your customers? And where do you stand on making sure that product is in your community?
This isn’t a guilt trip, far from it. It’s an attempt at re-education. We, as consumers, take a lot of things for granted. My electricity has been out in my home about four times since I bought it in 2003. That’s pretty good and I don’t think, ‘Man, I hope the power’s on when I get home’. I’ve never not had water, and I don’t think, ‘I hope it turns on when I need to fill up my water pitcher’.
I challenge you to think about what it will be like when all your news is either backdoor news outlets, or provided only when it’s more compelling than the news from the other 15 communities your paper covers - or it just doesn’t exist anymore, period.
In 2007, the revenue from display advertising in Americas newspapers was $49.7 billion annually. In 2023 that number was $9.7 billion. That’s a trend not lost on big and small news producers across the country. This isn’t an ask. We don’t charge for subscriptions. It’s just a publisher pointing out that not giving value to news gathering is an ominous proposition and one for which everyone needs to give pause.