Columbia Journalism Review special issue on news reporting on the mid-term elections

The Columbia Journalism Review has published a special issue, STATES OF THE UNION: COVERAGE OF THE MIDTERMS, on media coverage of the midterm elections, partly under the pale of media failing to predict the 2016 Presidential Election results.

One of the articles that's particularly interesting is, "Dark money versus a dwindling local news landscape," with a Montana dateline, making the point that local newspapers lack the financial resources to do in-depth reporting on campaigns, candidates, and elected officials in terms of their being funded by national forces.

One way to counteract this is for newspapers across a state to band together and jointly fund and support investigations. It's easier to do this if all the newspapers have the same affiliation, but it has happened here and there with newspapers from different groups.

Of course, when newspapers are owned by hedge funds, they aren't that motivated to do in-depth reporting generally, but especially on "dark money" and the "forces of capital" and weight in the electoral process.

The McClatchy Newspaper chains owns a lot of newspapers in North Carolina, and there across the newspapers, they've been running a series called "The Influencers," linking the major issues to the major movers and shakers in the state.  (Although yes "movers and shakers" is often a synonym for "The Growth Machine" and their agenda is not always so benign.)

The Miami Herald, also a McClatchy Newspaper, has been running a similar series focused on Florida, although the firm doesn't have other papers in Florida.  If McClatchy is successful in acquiring Tribune Newspapers, then they'll be able to add the Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel to this network.  (And to start a similar network in Virginia, with the Tribune's newly acquired Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.)

While back in the day, Gannett Newspapers were criticized for "McPaper" journalism (the company owns USA Today), many of their newspapers do important coverage of local issues.

USA Today, sometimes in conjunction with local Gannett publications, has been publishing a lot of great investigations, such as on trucking issues at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California, testing corruption in school systems in Atlanta and Washington (scooping the Washington Post), on the prevalence of child deaths as failures of maternal health care, on Western water access issues, etc.

For all the talk of the acquisition of newspapers by Berkshire Hathaway, in particular of the Media General firm which was based in Richmond, Virginia, they haven't done much in the way of in-depth enterprise reporting across newspapers in a region or state.

Since the acquisition, BH has offloaded management of the papers to Lee Newspapers, another chain.  According to the CJR article, Lee owns three papers in Montana, has subjected the newspapers to layoffs, downsized to almost nothing the state news bureau serving all the papers, and closed the alternative weekly in Billings, Montana, soon after acquiring it. 

(In Baltimore, the Tribune Newspapers eventually shuttered the City Paper, although not immediately after acquisition.)

And what about the recent expose by the New York Times of the real genesis of President Trump's wealth, and how the way his father distributed money to him from an early age made him a millionaire at the age of eight? What a magisterial job!

-- "11 Takeaways From The Times's Investigation Into Trump's Wealth"
-- "4 Ways Fred Trump Made Donald Trump and His Siblings Rich"

Under the ownership of Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post has pulled back on local coverage and investigations, shifting to national issues and leveraging the global reach of the paper's website.

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This is important because traditionally, civic engagement has been associated with newspaper readership and studies find a decrease in engagement with the decline and closure of newspapers.

Community media, that is weekly newspapers such as DC's Current Newspapers, or papers serving various neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Queens, or other communities throughout metropolitan areas, are in severe decline too, in large part because the chaining up and consolidation of local business (retail, banks, supermarkets, car dealerships) leads to the elimination of "local" advertising as a significant revenue source.*

Television "news" generally is not very in-depth and doesn't substitute.  Neither do blogs and social media, although on occasion, such vehicles can have significant effect.

* An opportunity for a daily newspaper in Brooklyn?  Even though the Village Voice just shut down, spurred by reading The Atlantic article, "Who’s Left Covering Brooklyn With the Big Newspapers in Retreat?," I was wondering if somehow the weekly newspapers in Brooklyn could join up and produce a daily, or at least Monday-Friday newspaper in a tabloid format.

Brooklyn is one "sub-city" market that's large enough to do it.  Combo of a regular newspaper and alternative weekly. Both Queens and Brooklyn have extensive community newspaper networks.

But it's hard to build up the economic base to launch and maintain such a venture.  But it would be cool.