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According to Kevin Roderick at LA Observed, the Los Angeles Times is folding its local news section, over the objections of the newspapers editors, and to the certain consternation of many of its readers and subscribers. Obviously, the move is another symptom of the convulsions that have been going on at the LA Times for years. It raises justifiable concerns about how news vital to millions and Angelenos is going to be covered -- especially when it comes to stories that require extensive investigation. But some industry observers seen a partial answer in the clouds.
First, here are some details on the Times' move, according to Roderick:
",,,By getting rid of California, the Times can print the more
profitable Calendar section at night and eliminate the expense of a
second, earlier daily press run. (Times presses can only handle four
sections per run, as this post from last Friday discussed. Note, too, that pressmen are the Times' only unionized workers.)The move will apparently be spun as an enhancement in local
coverage, but Times officials are bracing for howls of protest from
print readers who already have been canceling subscriptions over the
paper becoming thinner and less well edited..."
If you watched the PBS Frontline documentary News War a couple of years back, you may remember that there's been a battle raging within the Times over the balance between its local, national and international coverage.Here's how PBS summarized the conflict then:
One of the pressures facing the paper was to go more local. But can the Times
evolve to significantly expand its local reporting while continuing to
be one of the few U.S. newspapers that cover national and international
stories? Metropolitan Los Angeles, a vast area with a great mix of
cultures, is a challenge to cover. "The paper's circulation area spans
a territory the size of Ohio, over five counties and 88 cities and
through a veritable United Nations of neighborhoods -- Iranians next to
Koreans near Armenians close to Thais across the county from Vietnamese
abutting African Americans near Jews surrounded by Hispanics of all
nationalities and political stripes," writes John Pomfret of The Washington Post's L.A. bureau.
Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene argues the Times' local coverage has been lacking for years, even before the serial layoffs that have gone on for the better part of the last decade:
The newspaper’s most dominant days often underserved the poor
communities of South Los Angeles, where the residents buy newspapers
far less frequently than richer Angelenos, and are far less valuable to
advertisers. Even so, I know of no government watchdog more effective than newspapers...
And yes, that is the big worry -- we depend on newspapers to sort through the Mayor's garbage, as the columnist Leonard Pitts has put it. Those kinds of investigations were never the money makers, they were the kinds of stories newspapers did in pursuit of public service and Pulitzers. Lisa Williams describes how the big news organizations got the capital that funded investigations and other activities in the good old days...:
Investment capital started to flow into US news organizations in the
wake of deregulation of the media and telecommunications industry
during the early 90's. This deregulation, which lifted limits on how
many newspapers, television stations, and radio stations a single
company could own, paved the way for radio chains like Clear Channel
and Infinity. Radio wasn't the only industry transformed by "rollups"
-- efforts by investors to create economies of scale by buying many of
the same type of company and putting them under a single umbrella. ...
The entire post is worth reading for its clear explanation of the downside of that "investment bubble."
So without the resources to do real watchdog local coverage, how will citizens of Los Angeles and the rest of the country know what's going on? One answer might be in emerging non-profit efforts to create publicly-accessible, search document repositorie. One proposed venture, DocumentCloud, would create a space where reporters citizen journalists can share public records, notes and other items that might be useful for investigative reporting. The Online Journalism Review interviewed the men behind the project. One of those men, Aron Pihofer explains how the DocumentCloud will be built if funding is secured:
The repository will be open for anyone to read from, but not to
contribute to. It will be limited to news organizations, bloggers and
watchdog groups whose mission includes publishing source documents as a
means of better informing the public about issues of the day.
DocumentCloud is a project of staffers at the New York Times and the non-profit investigative venture ProPublica. As news organizations such as the LA Times continue
