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The foundations of local journalism are crumbling, as this newsletter seeks to explain each week; over the past few years, as the US has faced voter suppression, foreign meddling, and executive overreach—and as political polarization charges the atmosphere around the world—the foundations of a democratic government can also seem precarious.
In April 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that more than half of survey respondents were dissatisfied with the way democracy was working in their country (among US respondents, 58 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the state of democracy in America). This concern—that our democracy is falling short—echoes throughout news headlines, ominous opinion pieces, and social media screeds—and it has only been heightened and complicated by the upheaval of a global pandemic in a significant election year, with the loss of 194,000 American lives to covid-19 and the ongoing protests against systemic racism. Conversations about reviving democracy are complicated, as are efforts to revive local news, but the two are inextricably linked and ought to be treated as such.
The loss of local newsrooms has hurt civic engagement. The Knight Foundation’s new report on the relationship between media habits and voter participation found that people are more engaged with national news than local news. “Non-voters and voters are both more likely to feel more knowledgeable about national affairs than about what’s happening in their local communities,” the report states. Considering that the newsrooms at US newspapers are half the size they were in 2008, this dynamic is hardly surprising.
Read more here: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/reviving-democracy-requires-reviving-local-journalism.php