Local News Is Dying, Taking Small Town America With It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-05/local-news-is-dying-and-it-s-taking-small-town-america-with-it <comment><USER2> In my area, local journalism had a sharp decline as soon as the publisher began requiring Facebook authentication for comments on the online stories. Previously there had been at least a dozen comments on any major story and now there are always zero. Apparently throwaway accounts can be most critical when the audience is your closest neighbors, especially when a poster is associated with a local business.

(Admittedly, there had been some abuse of the online comments and the publisher did save money in the short term by dropping any moderator effort from the payroll costs.)

<comment><USER3> It's kind of unfortunate that there's no easy way to scope the internet down to a smaller group of participants, for small time operations like local news sites.

Local news doesn't want to include audience participation from as far away as another time zone, or another state, but even then, geographic exclusions aren't an entirely correct exclusion criteria, since former residents of a local region may wish to participate from afar, because they still tune into home town news, after moving to new territory.

Real world names freeze out lots of participation, because taking ownership of an " _incorrect_ " (contentious) opinion can have permanent consequences to one's reputation.

The real name and/or social credibility fix, is a blunt force trauma solution, to keep out obnoxious people, and isolate discourse to limited subgroups. But another problem is, even without being obnoxious, non-professional participants frequently go off-topic and off-script.

Pseudonyms almost certainly require painstaking, labor intensive moderation, and a skillful attention devoted to selectively ascribing relevance to conversation.

Most local operations just want to know there's an audience with a pulse, but providing that audience with a platform and a voice is another matter entirely.

<comment><USER4> One option is to do what illicit sites have done forever: require an invite, such that the bad deeds of the invitee reflect on the inviter. Doesn't require real names on the site, but the inviter knows who they are inviting.

<comment><USER5> Lobste.rs, for instance

<comment><USER6> I want an invitation to lobste.rs now!

<comment><USER7> message me your email addy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "we need more at the policy level," said Napoli, who believes public funding > could alleviate the local news crisis

Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government. Also, artificially propping up old ways of doing business is a rickety foundation. Newspapers as we know them occupy a narrow slice in world history. It's not like we have always had newspapers from the beginning of time up until now.

Let's investigate natural ways to accomplish the same goal of newspapers, but with our current technology. The internet has obliterated costs to publish. Compare a building full of typesetters, Linotypes, and printing presses, to WordPress and server rental. Now that doesn't address all of a newspaper's old expenses. There is still the staff: reporters spending days and weeks investigating a story, editors organizing and refining. But what does the Press, invented from scratch with our current technology, look like? I think you have to consider the different sections of an old newspaper one at a time:

1\. Product reviews. Seems that there is still plenty of that, between the various specialized websites and bloggers and vloggers.

2\. Lifestyle. Again, we are drowning in such coverage, like on Youtube.

3\. Sports. I don't know, I don't keep up with sports. How is sports news faring?

4\. Business news. Again I don't know and don't care. Someone else comment.

and finally, biggest of all:

5\. The main example and, to many, the raison d'etre for news: keeping government and businesses honest, by sniffing out corruption.

Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak himself.

<comment><USER9> Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved.

Nor is there any conflict of interest between receiving money from the government and covering the government. If you believe the courts can be independent then you can believe that newspapers can be set up as independent entities. If you don't believe that the courts can be independent then you are essentially saying that you don't believe in the existence of liberal regimes, which takes us into a discussion regarding how much purity needs to be achieved by an ideal before one is willing to recognize its existence — an interesting topic but too broad to be discussed in comments on a website.

<comment><USER10> The government should not be funding media that reports on government. No matter how independent the intent, there is an inherent conflict of interest.

I oppose using my tax dollars to fund reporting about my tax dollars. NPR, for example would never report fairly on debates to eliminate subsidies for NPR. Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. To think otherwise is to live in a dream world.

<comment><USER9> We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."

It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing, information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance, and so much more -- all human activity.

Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results. Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.

<comment><USER11> Many would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good argument for why that would be.

<comment><USER9> I read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don't have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at some point and post them to my blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Supporting news with government money is horrible idea. Paying the fox to guard your henhouse and all that.

Better move would be there force more government transparcy. So it doesn't require reporters digging around to find truth. Record sessions post all votes, actions, studies, proceeding etc. On line in easy to machine parse format. There are plenty of people who would analyse and report on that data for fun or out of sense of Civic duty. It happens now.

It's not perfect but a big step.

<comment><USER13> I like to think a fox who's smart enough to handle money is smart enough to know an hour or two of pay could buy plenty of chicken without being hunted down and turned into a scarf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "At the local level, news doesn't stop when the news coverage goes away," > Lanane said. "Somebody has to do this work."

And there's the problem: No, somebody does NOT have to do this work. It is beneficial to society if someone does local journalism, agreed. But if there is no viable economic model for it, then it will disappear. Perhaps the most likely alternative right now, if there's going to be significant local new coverage, is government-subsidized journalism, but that clearly will not be doing any in-depth investigation of those in power in that government. And I don't think that most governments are thinking about doing that anyway. I think the most likely outcome is what is happening: local journalism will, for the most part, completely disappear.

I also recommend Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" : [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and- thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unthinkable/) \- I think he clearly explains _why_ this is happening, not because the newspapers didn't see it coming, but because the fundamental economic forces have proven irresistible.

<comment><USER15> People can live in pretty awful situations, by that definition very few things are necessary.

I disagree with the point made repeatedly in the comments here that government funded media can't work. NPR, PBS, the BBC, and CBC all routinely perform investigative reporting on the very governments that fund them. Additionally, it would take a pretty wild set of circumstances for a federal government official to squash reporting into a corrupt water board member in Utah. If that happens, maybe that stone will go unturned, but if we do nothing nearly every stone will go unturned.

I would love to live in a world where it was possible not to have the conflict of interest that public funding creates, but it is abundantly clear that the options before us right now are publicly funded local news and very much less local news. I think public funding is the right answer.

Maybe we'll get lucky and a plucky Stanford dropout will figure out a way to make local journalism profitable, but I'm not interested in waiting for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You are really dealing with a confluence of events that are affecting local news outlets of all forms:

1\. Increased general interconnected nature of the world. People still care about local events of course, but there is a much greater concern for the big events of the whole world now. Your likelihood of being affected by the big news in some far away place has increased greatly and at an accelerating pace ever since the beginning of the 20th century.

2\. That interconnected nature has become exponentially greater as the internet has rolled out. Before, your source to world events would still be your local newspaper/radio/television but primarily driven through aggregators (AP/UPI/major news TV/radio networks). Now people have the ability to get directly to the original more local sources. The odd secondary effect of this is that it has reduced the size of the local news sources in the first place.

3\. Increased partisanship hasn't helped. People are much more likely to abandon a news source if they feel it is biased, true or not, ans they have other options now.

All of these together mean that news of all varieties has been heavily disrupted, but the long term replacement hasn't become readily apparent. I can't think of a similar system of disruption in other industries.

<comment><USER17> Was there ever a self-sustaining model for local news? Weren't most local news outlets mostly supported by their classified ads section?

<comment><USER18> Yes, craigslist.org accidentally killed local news. Craig Newmark is aware of this and is in engaged in philanthropic counter-efforts.

<comment><USER19> How do you know/Where can I find more information about this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In case you've never encountered Clay Shirky's classic essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", it is a prescient look from 2009.

> It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, > because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, > complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has > stopped being a problem...

> Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding > the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of > attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates > benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of > print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys > to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that > newspapers benefit society as a whole.

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and- thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unthinkable/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Whenever I hear the latest issues with local news and various attempts to solve it, I am reminded of Grisham's book _The Last Juror_. For whatever reason, it dramatized the effect that local news can have on a small community that made me really appreciate its potential as a nice public service, if for nothing else than to keep the community talking about things together.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nextdoor seems like the place where local papers can join up as news pages to reboot their traffic.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone else getting blocked with a Bloomberg ToS violation warning?

      Terms of Service Violation
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<comment><USER24> Nope, and I have ublock running. Do you have javascript disabled?

<comment><USER25> I run Firefox and NoScript and don't allow Javascript from Bloomberg. I've never had a problem viewing their articles.

I'll guess it has more to do with the originating IP address (e.g. perhaps lots of requests from a single IP behind a firewall) or maybe something to do with cookies (I allow all but delete all at least once daily, so I never have old cookies lingering around). I'm in the USA so geolocation might enter into it as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My wife is on nextdoor. I hear all the local news.

<comment><USER25> That works OK for gossip. But how does it solve the problem of keeping government honest? This was noted in the second paragraph of the article:

 _Without journalists digging through property records or attending city council meetings, looking for official wrongdoing and revealing secret deals, local politicians will operate unchecked—with predictable consequences._

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A few months ago Mercury News [I've heard AKA "The Murky News"] purged some journalists, including the one that had the beat of my local city area of Campbell; if Campbell was a rectangle, North and East and West are against San Jose with South being against Los Gatos.

Now, at least it seams, the only coverage we get from Mercury News is the police blotter. That's it. Nothing more. If I want anything about Campbell I have to subscribe to Twitter, Campbell City specific website, Campbell City specific events website, Campbell City specific paper local newspaper [I'm not kidding], and I'll make an educated guess Facebook. I'd mention Reddit, but that's on questionable life support because of one or two users based on aforementioned sources sourced from myself included.

My point is... the point of the article, if at least the Hacker News title, is correct. And I'm not even including stuff like "Patch" or "NextDoor" or other hyper-local internet-based networks there are. Subscriptions mushroom like a nuclear blast horror in the face of alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think I'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I live there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but they're not really self-sufficient; in reality they're all previously far flung places that became tax-dodges for getting around being in the local major city.

I would actually welcome these outlying areas being merged in to the core city and a policy of doing the transit transfer tracking at the ports/roadway edges that connect out to other regions. That should also discourage founding new small fiefdoms as tax-dodges.

I would also finally be able to vote on things in the big city that affect my life, and maybe get those crazy anti-soda anti-cars/proper transit outside of the big city politicians replaced with someone that's looking at the big picture instead of a close-up.

<comment><USER29> > _I think I 'd like a better definition of "small town". At least where I > live there are a LOT of suburbs which are sort of their own towns, but > they're not really self-sufficient_

This is a problem plaguing almost all comparative writing about cities and why the OMB defines MSAs and CSAs for performing meaningful like-like comparisons. (It's also for this reason that most ranked city lists are useless garbage built on the false premise that political borders are a good way to delineate towns for anything beyond politics.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "You have 8 free articles remaining. Subscribe for unlimited access. " \- Seeing this all over the web certainly doesn't help. Several of our local news sites went the same route, which has no doubt cut into their page views. People aren't interested in paying $5.99/week for news websites.

Another reality is that in a lot of areas... well, there's just not much to report on to begin with. Slow news days are quite common. Our local news station will actually call the fire and EMS stations and ask if anything is going on. If there's nothing going on, you'll know because the Facebook feed ends up reposting momsdaily or simplemost blog articles.

</comment><comment><USER31> Local news died a long time ago, and in awful ways: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA).

</comment><comment><USER32> This is interesting but it seems like it is just a baseline. I didn't see how the amount of local news now compares to the amount in the past?

</comment><comment><USER33> IMO local radio has the most potential to augment local news services. It's a more natural fit.

</comment><comment><USER34> You should make the header start in helvetica and just imperceptibly slowly have the letters animate to drift apart

</comment><comment><USER35> It's a symptom of the fact that people on the whole do not want to pay for news.

It's a failure of capitalism that the positive externalities of local news are not captured by the people who generate it (just like a failure of capitalism that the negative externalities of so many things aren't borne by those that generate it)

<comment><USER36> Personally I feel like I would happily pay small amounts for news, but nobody has figured out how to frictionlessly pay $0.00004 to read a news article I'm interested in.

We're stuck right now with only two models, $15-30/mo subscriptions subsidizing hordes of non-payers, or ads.

<comment><USER35> Agate ([http://agate.one](http://agate.one)) seems a reasonable way, but unless it builds a following I don't see it lasting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Maybe small town America has to go?

Not saying it should. But it may be a valid question.

<comment><USER38> It has to stay. Farms, mines, and factories (usually in small towns, anyway) aren't going to run themselves and cannot all be outsourced.

<comment><USER39> These seem like problems that could be solved with applications of proper mass transit.

<comment><USER40> Your solution to small town newspapers dying off is to make people ride hundreds of miles a day on buses?

<comment><USER41> Where did he mention buses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think going non-profit is the best option for local news.

<comment><USER10> Most of them already are non-profit, involuntary as that may be.

<comment><USER43> I'm assuming this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about what a non profit setup would look like, it would basically be a subscription model, which people have shown they don't really care to support, or businesses "sponsoring" the newspaper by basically paying for ads that aren't a great investment, which is also already happening. And none of it is enough to keep these papers afloat.</comment></comment></comment>


For the first time, a board game gets a simultaneous physical and digital launch - <AUTHOR> http://pockettactics.com/2012/10/16/qin-for-a-day-new-renier-knizia-title-launches-in-the-app-store-and-on-the-high-street/

<comment><AUTHOR> The tv business could do with a little of this kind of thinking.</comment>


Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5) - <AUTHOR> http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html <comment><USER2> I'm not a Magic player personally, but I learnt about it through the project I did on this game. Learnt how complex it is and really good for doing different analysis. We created a Deck Builder Toolkit, which should help inexperienced players to build their card deck in order to improve card synergies and overall success ratio. Fortunately my team mate was experienced player while we were building this. If anyone interested, you can check project info here: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/hojm1rfqgkz5dn4/Poster.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/hojm1rfqgkz5dn4/Poster.pdf?dl=0) And Git repo here: [https://github.com/dzeno/deck-builder- toolkit](https://github.com/dzeno/deck-builder-toolkit)

</comment><comment><USER3> The procedure mentions that you need 43 Rotlung Reanimators. A magic deck can only have at most 4 copies of the same card. :-) How are the copies created? Shouldn't be too hard to create infinite copies of a card, but I didn't see this mentioned anywhere.

<comment><USER4> Its funny how the rules were at most 4 copies, yet I had a red/white deck that had different versions of essentially the same spell (1 red + n colorless damage to target player or creature), and used it frequently against people who didn't understand how to properly defend against it. Had something like 12 cards in that deck that just did that.

<comment><USER5> Originally, the 4 copy maximum didn't exist. However, there were two early decks that broke the game:

      20x Black Lotus
      20x Channel
      20x Fireball

Gatherer links: [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382866) [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382882) [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=393831)

As long as you get 2x Lotus, 1x other two in your opening 7 cards, first turn kill. Play two lotus, sacrifice one for green, one for red. Play channel with green. Give up 19 life. Do 22 damage with Fireball.

Black Lotus is worth five figures these days, so building that deck would be very expensive. Replacing them with Mountains and Forests gives you a deck for less than ten dollars that can routinely kill on the fourthish turn every time, though.

The second one is even sillier: (see edits and citations below, I slightly mis-remembered this one, but the concept is the same)

      60x Shahrazad

[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=980)

This was Richard Garfield's favorite card. But due to the way the rules work, a subgame within a subgame within a subgame within.... means that you win, due to the way that rounding works.

<comment><USER6> Even better is:

      31 Ancestral Recall
      25 Black Lotus
      3 Timetwister
      1 Braingeyser

You don't need 2x of any one thing to get started, you only need 1 Lotus and 1 Timetwister or Ancestral Recall.

If anything gets countered, you are very, very likely to be able to keep going and win the same turn.

Timetwister lets you recycle, so you can generate infinite mana.

Braingeyser kills the opponent, and doubles as card draw itself, in the unlikely event that you stall out.

You also don't lose to a turn 1 Lightning Bolt, like you do with Channel.

A mulligan to two still has a fairly high likelihood of winning on the first turn.

<comment><USER5> Ah nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm generally all for esoteric programming stuff, but trying to understand this really hurt my head.

Kudos to these guys to figuring this out.

<comment><USER8> Yes. AlexTFish (HN name) / Hologram (elsewhere) is brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Time for somebody to play Magic inside Magic!</comment>


Ask HN: Registrar won't honor premium status domain incorrectly listed - <AUTHOR> I purchased a domain through a reseller. The domain was listed as non-premium in the WHOIS DB. The registrar is now saying that they listed a premium domain by mistake, and do not want to honor the sale. The reseller is in negotiations with them. The registrar is stalling as its been almost a month now.<p>Does anyone know what the rules/law is surrounding this situation? How can I ensure I get the domain I purchased? <comment><USER2> Most of the time sellers aren't required to honor sales of incorrectly listed items. You would have to check the jurisdiction that this falls under to know for sure. A lawyer could assist with this.

If they notified you of the error, refunded your money then most likely there's nothing you can do. The sale wasn't completed if you never took ownership of the domain. You have no actual loss you just didn't get what you wanted.

If you happen to be able to show that they backed out of the deal because they gained knowledge of what your intended use was then perhaps you have standing, but that's still unlikely.

<comment><USER3> "To have standing" does not mean "a chance to win". Either he has standing to sue, or he doesn't. The details of the transaction don't matter.

And yes, he has standing, and no, he should probably simply forget about it.

<comment><USER2> No, he might have standing. If there jurisdiction requires that incorrectly priced items be sold at the marked price then he will. If they are like most places where the seller cannot be held to sell at an incorrect price then he does not.

Since we don't know which is the case saying for sure the he has standing is misleading. The information we have now is, "but I want to more sir". Compelling items to be sold isn't a common thing. Sellers can choose to decline sales.

He would have a far better case if the situation was that the offer to sell was withdrawn after they found out it's intended use. That does not seem to be what happened here. It was a simple pricing mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have probably have standing both legally, or through bureaucratic labyrinth that is ICANN. (If I recall a registrar can't do what you describe) However, it probably would cost more than domain is worth. Especially since you mention "premium" domain. That probably means it's from one of the newer gTLDs. They for most part don't have much value.</comment>