NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press says it is setting up a sister organization that will seek to raise money in support of state and local news reporting, as the crisis in that sector shows little sign of abating.
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AP in particular can play an important role in bolstering coverage of government and political news in the states, said Tim Franklin, who leads the local news initiative at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school. The Pew Research Center has detailed that there are fewer full-time reporters working in statehouses than there were a decade ago.
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Besides philanthropy, the AP has been more aggressively marketing its own news website and asking for reader donations. “We believe there is a gap in the U.S. market, in the consumer arena, for people who want independent, fact-based, non-partisan news, and that’s the role that the AP plays in the ecosystem,” Veerasingham said.
I was visiting my mom today and she told me the newspaper in her town had been bought out and the building was shuttered and sold. They are doing the whole operation remotely. She doesn’t even know how they are getting local stories. I do know that after the recent devastating storm that hit both of our towns, she had to rely on social media to get any sort of good information. Including finding out that a disaster had been officially declared and people were requested not to travel.
They outsourced the writing to people making literal pennies, and are writing on a couple of facts provided by someone who is more local.
It’s not QUITE as bad as having ChatGPT just make shit up, but it’s not too far from it.
Why pay for your own journalists when you can just write about what people say on Twitter?
Yeah, no shit. Even my local news which is a top-10 market and has actual money to spend has half of it’s shit sourced from fucking Facebook and Twitter. The amount of ‘a thing happened today!’ that’s fucking instagram video is just amazing.
Can’t even afford to send someone out with a camera to take a picture anymore.
It’s crazy that the town she lives in, which is bigger than ours, has no outlet at all for this stuff. The only TV station is a local PBS station that just plays through storms without interruption (same with the NPR station, they were playing classical music while trees were being uprooted by the 80 mph+ winds.
We have two local TV stations and a local newspaper. They weren’t as informative as they certainly could have been, but I looked at the media outlets in her town the day after the storm and there was nothing.