If they really wanted….

NiemanLab cites a new survey that accurately pins down what people want from local news. We want LOCAL reporting of WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. Crime, troubles, power outages, fires. We do not want “investigative pieces” that always just happen to “investigate” Repooflicans while celebrating Democrats who commit exactly the same crimes. This pattern is constant from Joe McCarthy to Nixon to Trump.

Nieman’s writer doesn’t seem to grasp the point of the survey, calls it “paradoxical”.

The survey, like others on the same topic, highlights the role of local Facebook groups. That’s where I get my local news, and apparently the same is true in other cities.

Facebook’s UI/UX interferes with this purpose by failing to maintain time order. FB gives you the “most important” comment first, and even when you try to pick “newest first” it only puts one new comment on top of the same random list. Time order is crucial for real events!

Facebook also fails to catch obvious scams. One scam type is especially aimed at news sites.. The scammer posts a message saying that he has video of the event. When you click, you see a completely unrelated video of something else.

Latest example. The news item is about rescuing someone who fell into the river. Note the typical scammer using the obvious fake name “Samsul moult”.

The NGOs attempting to improve local news always want more “investigations” and more meth raving about nonsense words like “democracy” and “fascism”. If they really wanted to improve news, they’d pay for a platform that solves the UI/UX problems while maintaining the advantages of low cost and high convenience for the group moderators. The existing alternatives are expensive and require too much individual promotion work. At one point Substack seemed like the best alternative, and several local news providers were using it. But it’s quickly converging to the same self-destructive algorithm as Facebook.

Possibly relevant: Watch Duty is a free-standing nonprofit that does excellent work on one type of important news. They map local wildfires in the three western states, plus some weather info. When a fire is worth noticing, Watch Duty tracks it using local volunteers with fire knowledge. The website works the way it should, always remembering the last location you looked at, and always showing progress in time order. Seems like a pretty good model for other forms of local news.