A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

for Public Broadcasting. NPR plans to introduce a new topic‐based service with a dozen
local stations in the summer of 2010. 13
“To me, local is the big play,” NPR president Vivian Schiller told an interviewer,
“because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are
withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent
ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So
that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage.” 14
Even though it’s difficult to document a causal relationship between independent
media and good government, media historian Paul Starr makes a convincing case for the
linkage. “It is not just a speculative proposition that corruption is more likely to flourish
where those in power have less reason to fear exposure,” he argues in citing research
supporting that view. 15
Think of local news as an inner core of what Alex S. Jones describes in his book,
Losing the News, as “the iron core of news…the total mass of each day’s serious reported
news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy.” 16
“This kind of news is expensive to produce, especially investigative reporting,” he
observes. “And there are indications that a lot of people aren’t really interested.”
Jones points out a classic conundrum of news: the DBIs, the dull but important
coverage of public affairs that journalists believe users need but that users themselves
often don’t actually want to the same degree. The problem carries especially acute
consequences in a user‐first economic framework for news, an environment in which
users simply won’t pay for what they don’t want.
Says Jones: “In the media economy of the future…the size and quality of the iron
core will be a direct reflection of what the audience for it will economically
support…and that may well mean that, as a nation, we will be losing a lot of news.”
In their exhaustive October 2009 report, “The Reconstruction of American
Journalism,” Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson urged government action to head
off that outcome. They argue that, given the market’s failure to replace what it’s taking
away, “American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting
independent news reporting in this new environment.” They recommend policy shifts to
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