AI Fellows on the Hill

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy. 

Brendan Bordelon at Politico:

Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation.

The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The six rapid response fellows, including five with PhDs and two who held prior positions at big tech firms, operate from the offices of two of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top three lieutenants on AI legislation — Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — as well as the Senate Banking Committee and the offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the industry.

The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.

DEI Backlash

Many posts have dealt with racial issues.

 Emily Peck at Axios:

U.S. companies' diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are losing momentum this year after the Supreme Court's June affirmative action ruling, per a consulting firm's new report.

Why it matters: The slowdown is a reversal from the explosion in corporate DEI after George Floyd's killing pushed companies to act to address racial inequality."

• 2023 has undeniably shifted the DEI landscape for years to come," write the authors of a report out Monday from DEI consulting firm Paradigm.
• "External forces are no longer pushing companies to invest in DEI; instead, in some cases, external forces are pushing back on companies' investment in DEI."

...

Meanwhile: In a letter this summer, 13 Republican state attorneys general urged Fortune 100 companies to take another look at their DEI programs in the wake of the court's decision.The letter takes aim at "explicit racial quotas in hiring, recruiting retention, promotion and advancement."

Between the lines: The lawsuits and letters "will have significant downstream consequences for DEI for years to come," per the Paradigm report.

Losing Newspapers

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

 From the Medill School of Journalism:

The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as “news deserts” and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, researchers at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University have found.

In addition, Medill researchers for the first time used predictive modeling to estimate the number of counties at risk of becoming news deserts. Those models show that another 228 counties are at high risk of losing local news. In creating that “Watch List,” Medill researchers and data scientists applied the characteristics of current news deserts to counties with only one news source.

Medill’s annual “State of Local News Project” report also counts about 550 digital-only local news outlets, 700 ethnic media organizations and 225 public broadcasting stations producing original local news. Most of the digital-only startups are based in metro areas, exacerbating the divide in America between news-haves and have-nots.

Also new this year, the State of Local News Project, in partnership with Microsoft, generated a “Bright Spots” map showing all local news startups in the U.S. as they’ve appeared over the past five years. The map also highlights 17 local news outlets — both startups and legacy organizations — with promising new business models for the future.

“The significant loss of local news outlets in poorer and underserved communities poses a crisis for our democracy,” said Medill visiting professor Penny Abernathy, a co-author of this year’s report who has been studying local news deserts for more than a decade. “So, it is very important that we identify the places most at risk, while simultaneously understanding what is working in other communities.”

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

• There are 204 counties with no local news outlet. Of the 3,143 counties in the U.S., more than half, or 1,766, have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper.
• The loss of local newspapers ticked higher in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, up from two per week last year. There were more than 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers this past year.
• Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. The nation is on pace to lose one-third of all its newspapers by the end of next year. There are about 6,000 newspapers remaining, the vast majority of which are weeklies.
• The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists, or 43,000, during that same time. Most of those journalists were employed by large metro and regional newspapers.
• There are about 550 digital-only local news sites, many of which launched in the past decade, but they are mostly clustered in metro areas. In the past five years, the number of local digital startups has roughly equaled the number that shuttered.
• Based on the demographics and economics of current news desert counties, Medill’s modeling estimates that 228 counties are at an elevated risk of becoming news deserts in the next five years. Most of those “Watch List” counties are located in high-poverty areas in the South and Midwest, and many serve communities with significant African American, Hispanic and Native American populations.

The predictive modeling analysis was conducted by faculty, researchers and staff of the Medill Local News Initiative and the Spiegel Research Center using demographic, economic and local news data from every county in the U.S.

Support for Unions

  

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Labor unions continue to enjoy high support in the U.S., with 67% of Americans approving of them, similar to the elevated level seen in recent years after more than a decade of rising support. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want unions’ influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy.

In contrast to the incremental changes seen in U.S. adults’ support of unions over time, the new poll documents an unprecedented uptick since the prior measure, in 2018, in perceptions that unions in the country will become stronger in the future than they are today. A third of Americans (34%) believe this today, compared with 19% five years ago and no more than 25% at any time in the trend since 1999.

Taylor Giorno at The Hill:

More than two-thirds of Americans support unions, according to new polling data the AFL-CIO released Tuesday.

Union support is particularly high among young Americans: 88 percent of Americans younger than 30, according to AFL-CIO data.

The public opinion research firm GBAO surveyed 1,200 registered voters between Aug. 1-8 on behalf of the AFL-CIO. Demographics were weighted and balanced to match the estimated voter registration population, with young voters, AAPI voters and union members oversampled.

The pollster reported a 2.8 percent margin of error and a 95 percent confidence level in their findings.

“Do you know how hard it is to get two-thirds of Americans to agree on anything? Let me put it another way: More Americans believe in unions than like chocolate ice cream,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told union organizers and members during the organization’s inaugural “State of the Unions” address.

There have been more than 200 strikes so far in 2023, 10 times more than there were two years ago, said Shuler. She attributed the uptick in part to “corporate greed and inequality.”

The average CEO made 272 times what the average worker made in 2022, the AFL-CIO’s “Executive Paywatch” found. CEOs of S&P 500 companies received an average of $16.7 million last year, the second-highest level in history.

 

The Partisan Realignment of Business

 The Partisan Realignment of American Business:Evidence from a Survey of Corporate LeadersEitan Hersh and Sarang Shah*August 1, 2023. Abstract 

For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a majorcoalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how business leaders navigate two forms of organizational conflict: a.) stakeholder cross-pressure, and b.) policy cross-pressure. To measure cross-pressure, we conduct an original survey of elite business leaders. Our evidence suggests a widespread view that companies are increasingly aligned withthe Democrats, including in alignment on core policy priorities. When companies are cross-pressured, leaders perceive the company as leaning toward the Democrats. The decoupling of business from the Republican coalition represents one of the most significant changes in American politics in decades

Craigslist and Local Newspaper Decline

Many posts have discussed the decline of American newspapers.

Milena Djourelova† Ruben Durante‡ Gregory J. Martin§ April 2023 

 The Impact of Online Competition on Local Newspapers: Evidence from the Introduction of Craigslist∗ 

Abstract 

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist — the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising — across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante. We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest. Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections

Bad Signs for Newspapers

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis, the Voice of San Diego

San Diego’s daily paper of record, the Union-Tribune, was sold by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and his family to MediaNews Group, owned by Alden Global Capital – a company that has come to be feared across the ever-dwindling newspaper landscape. Just 10 minutes after U-T staffers learned of the sale, they received an email notifying them of staff reductions to come, one staffer tweeted. Alden would offer buyouts “in an effort for staff reductions to be voluntary,” the email read. Alden was referred to as a ruthless corporate strip-miner “seemingly intent on destroying local journalism,” by one prominent media critic in 2018. But in a struggling local newspaper environment, it’s hard to tell the difference between strip mining and regular mining.

,,,

The veteran courts and criminal justice reporter Greg Moran captured the feeling of many that the paper was an afterthought to the Los Angeles billionaire who owned it. “All we did at the [Union-Tribune] since [Soon-Shiong] bought us is be profitable, executeon a plan to transition to a digital op. Didn’t hemorrhage money like the LAT, didn’t get a boatload of hires. And for that, the richest guy in LA sells us to the biggest chop shop in journalism,” Moran wrote on Twitter.

Outfits such as Alden buy the paper, flip the real estate, and literally sell the hardware for scrap. 

Michael McCarthy at Front Office Sports:

Less than six years ago, the New York Times asked whether the upstart sports site The Athletic would “pillage” newspapers of their best talent.

After today’s stunning announcement that the Times is shuttering its Sports section in favor of The Athletic, some wonder if that divide-and-conquer strategy is still in effect. But now it will be implemented by the august Times – not the money-losing Athletic.

On Monday, the Times announced it would dissolve its storied Sports section in favor of daily coverage from The Athletic, which it purchased for $550 million last year.

...

Sounds nice. Think of one big, national sports section in the future for the Gray Lady of journalism.

But what’s to stop the Times from doing what The Athletic threatened years ago?

Namely, stealing all the good, young sportswriters from around the country and putting their local papers, those are that are left, out of business?

Corporations v. Unions

 Emily Peck at Axios:

Starbucks workers are struggling to clear the biggest hurdle when it comes to union organizing — negotiating their first contract.

Why it matters: Though surveys show that the public is increasingly pro-labor, big employers — even widely recognized brands like Starbucks, Amazon and Tesla — are not shy about aggressively fending off unionization.

Driving the news: It's been a busy week. Tesla was accused of firing 30 employees in Buffalo in retaliation for announcing a union campaign, according to a charge filed at the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday, first reported by Bloomberg.

• The NLRB ruled on Monday that Starbucks unfairly fired two organizers in Philadelphia and ordered that they be reinstated with back pay.
• “We disagree with the decision and are considering all options to obtain a full legal review of the matter,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Axios in an email, adding that the employees violated policies.
• The labor board has lodged 77 complaints against the company since 2019 for unfair practices, like illegally firing workers or threatening and intimidating them. That appears to be the most complaints filed by the board against a company in recent history.

Exxon Scientists Foresaw Global Warming, but Exxon Did Not Admit it

 G. Supran, S. Rahmstorf, N. Oreskes, "Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections," Science, January 14, 2023. 

The abstract:

Climate projections by the fossil fuel industry have never been assessed. On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations. Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models. Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp also correctly rejected the prospect of a coming ice age, accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would first be detected, and reasonably estimated the “carbon budget” for holding warming below 2°C. On each of these points, however, the company’s public statements about climate science contradicted its own scientific data.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

Punishing Companies

Jason Lange at Reuters:

A bipartisan majority of U.S. voters oppose politicians punishing companies over their stances on social issues, a cold reception for campaigns like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' against Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

The two-day poll completed on Thursday showed that 62% of Americans - including 68% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans - said they were less likely to back a candidate who supports going after companies for their views...But even when prompted along the lines of DeSantis' own argument for his action - that laws should remove benefits of government tax breaks from corporations that push a "woke" agenda - 36% of Republicans nationally said they would be less likely to support a candidate with such a view.

The Diploma Divide

Still the Party of Business? How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Have Complicated Republicans’ Alliance with Corporate America Matt Grossmann Michigan State Universitymatt@mattg.org David A. Hopkins Boston College david.hopkins@bc.edu.  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 7–10, 2022

Abstract:

The two major parties have become polarized by educational attainment over the past two decades, with college-educated voters becoming more likely to identify as Democrats and whites without college degrees increasingly supporting the Republican Party. Over the same time, major corporations and other private-sector institutions have increasingly adopted the social norms favored by most well-educated professionals—especially deference to the policy-making authority of credentialed experts and left-of-center positions on cultural subjects like race and gender. The intersection of these trends has complicated corporate America’s relationship with a stylistically populist Republican Party that remains supportive of the economic policies favored by big business but remains firmly on the conservative side of the contemporary culture war, openly criticizing “woke capitalism” and even entertaining its increased legal regulation.  

Giving in Pandemic Times

 Erica Pandey at Axios:

2020 saw a surge in charitable giving, and 2021 could top it.

...
What's happening: Americans donated $2.7 billion on Giving Tuesday this year — a 9% jump from last year.

• Overall, Americans donated $471 billion in 2020, up 5% from 2019. 2021 is still in the middle of its giving season — in fact, Dec. 31st is one of the most popular giving days of the year, says Osili.
• More of the super-wealthy are pledging to give away their billions. Two of 2020's biggest donors were MacKenzie Scott, who was married to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
• And more rich people signed the Giving Pledge in 2021 — including DoorDash founder Tony Xu and Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann — promising to give away the majority of their wealth, the Wall Street Journal reports.

It’s not just individuals. Companies are also joining the giving trend, Yahoo Finance reports.

• Madewell, the clothing retailer, will match and triple any donation made to No Kid Hungry through its platform — up to $100,000 — until the end of the year.
• Our Place, the kitchenware brand, will donate 10 meals to Feeding America for every purchase.
• The home goods company Brooklinen is taking advantage of holiday returns and giving returned products to domestic violence shelters around the country.

Happy Franksgiving!

Many posts have discussed the background of Thanksgiving and other holidays.

Claire Barrett at History.net:

On November 26, 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation naming that Thursday a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin.” In 1883 this date was codified by President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation that Thanksgiving would be commemorated each year on the last Thursday of November.

It would remain so for 56 years until 1939, when the last Thursday fell on the last day of the month. Coupled with the fact that the United States was still in the throes of the Great Depression, business leaders were concerned that Americans wouldn’t want to start shopping for the holidays until after Thanksgiving. (Unless you’re one of those people who start playing Mariah Carey in November. I’m looking at you.) Worried that the shortened shopping season would hurt retail sales, business leaders, including Lew Hahn, the general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, lobbied the president to make the holiday one week earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt listened, and in August 1939 he issued a Presidential Proclamation that moved Thanksgiving to the second to last Thursday of November.

This seemingly innocuous act sent the nation into a tizzy. Alf Landon, the former governor of Kansas, ranted to Time, “Another illustration of the confusion which his impulsiveness has caused so frequently during his administration. If the change has any merit at all, more time should have been taken in working it out…instead of springing it upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.”

When Alden Guts Newspapers

Many posts have described the economic woes of the media industry.

 McKay Coppins at The Atlantic:

The hollowing-out of the Chicago Tribune was noted in the national press, of course. There were sober op-eds and lamentations on Twitter and expressions of disappointment by professors of journalism. But outside the industry, few seemed to notice. Meanwhile, the Tribune’s remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspaper’s most basic functions. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didn’t have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal. And when Chicago suffered a brutal summer crime wave, the paper had no one on the night shift to listen to the police scanner.

...

If you want to know what it’s like when Alden Capital buys your local newspaper, you could look to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where coverage of local elections in more than a dozen communities falls to a single reporter working out of his attic and emailing questionnaires to candidates. You could look to Oakland, California, where the East Bay Times laid off 20 people one week after the paper won a Pulitzer. Or to nearby Monterey, where the former Herald reporter Julie Reynolds says staffers were pushed to stop writing investigative features so they could produce multiple stories a day. Or to Denver, where the Post’s staff was cut by two-thirds, evicted from its newsroom, and relocated to a plant in an area with poor air quality, where some employees developed breathing problems.

OAN Origins

JOHN SHIFFMAN at Reuters:

One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world's largest communications company.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

Goodbye, Columbus Day

Jennifer Kingson at Axios: 

The Columbus Day sale — a longtime ritual for car dealers and department stores — is dead.

The big picture: Retailers are moving away from big sales events in general, and are especially eager to to distance themselves from this particularly disputatious federal holiday, which falls on Monday.

The intrigue: For years, states and municipalities have started renaming "Columbus Day" as "Indigenous Peoples' Day" to protest the legacy of colonialism that hangs over Christopher Columbus' so-called "discovery" of America.

• The last thing retailers want is to get caught in the culture wars.
• "I think this one is an easy one that they can just say, 'Hey, I'm just going to rename the sale or cancel the sale and not worry about it," says Katie Thomas, leader of the Kearney Consumer Institute, a think tank within the management consulting firm Kearney.
• Plus, fewer people get a day off of work for Columbus Day than in the past, so they don't have a long weekend to go shopping.

The Soprano crime family had a different take: 

Dollar Store America v. Whole Foods America

Food deserts, generally defined as urban areas in which the closest grocery store is more than a mile away, tend to concentrate in low-income neighborhoods. https://t.co/4hh0WbOIXH pic.twitter.com/zK0WmNlc8C

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 20, 2021

Abha Bhattarai at WP:

Analysts say the explosive rise of dollar stores is yet another example of how the pandemic has reshaped the economy and widened the gulf between the wealthiest and poorest Americans. Rising grocery prices — inflation is up 5.4 percent from last year — coupled with disproportionately high job losses among low-income workers have left many of the most vulnerable Americans in even worse shape.

“It’s a striking disparity: In this country, there is now dollar-store land and there is Whole Foods land,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit advocacy group. “And if you live in Whole Foods land, it’s very hard for people to understand just how desperate circumstances are for the rest of the country.”

...

“It’s one thing to have a dollar store or a couple of dollar stores in a neighborhood, but when you’ve got them at the density levels we’re seeing, it’s really difficult for grocery stores to open and succeed,” said Mitchell of ILSR. “Dollar stores are the No. 1 driver of ‘food deserts’ at this point.”

Polarization and Confidence in Institutions

 Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Majorities of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, as well as Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, express confidence in the military and small business. Both party groups express similarly low confidence in the Supreme Court, big business, banks and the criminal justice system.

However, partisans' confidence in the remaining 10 institutions diverges. Republicans have far more confidence than Democrats in the police and the church. Meanwhile, Democrats' confidence in the other eight institutions outpaces Republicans' by double digits.

 The largest partisan gap in confidence for any institution is for the presidency, with 49 points separating Democrats' and Republicans' ratings. Confidence in the presidency has become increasingly linked to the party affiliation of the president, with supporters of the president's party much more confident than supporters of the opposition party, consistent with the greater party polarization in presidential job approval ratings. Between 1993 and 2004, the average party gap in confidence in the presidency was 34 points. Since then, it has averaged 50 points.

The Decline of Local News

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Jack Shafer at Politico:

In 2009, just as the apocalypse befell the newspaper industry but while local news was still in relative abundance, many readers gave it an apathetic shrug. A Pew Research Center survey from that year found that an astonishing 42 percent said they would miss their paper “not much” or “not at all” if it vanished. They said this even though 74 percent conceded that civic life would suffer “a lot” or “some” if their local newspaper died. Their apathy ultimately expressed itself in financial terms. Weekday newspaper circulation has dropped from about 55.8 million households to about 28.6 million in the past two decades. More than 2,000 newspapers have vanished since 2004 (most of them weeklies), creating what some call “news deserts.” And revenues have just about halved in the past decade, as has newsroom size, making it harder to report local news. Readers keep shrugging, too. A more recent Pew survey (2018) found that only 14 percent of respondents had paid for local news in the previous year.

'...

The decline of local news has paralleled the decline of the newspaper audience. In 1940, when the population was less than half of today’s, American newspaper circulation was greater. Newspapers lost audience not just to the Internet but to cable, TV and radio, as well as to the non-news functions found on smartphones. The advertising dollars that once helped to support local news fled for the Web, where ads could be better paired to content—sometimes at a lower cost—to sell an advertiser’s wares. As Google economist Hal Varian put it in 2013, pure news had “very high social value to interested readers” but “low commercial value due to the difficulty of showing contextual relevant ads.”

There’s evidence that low-cost, quality national news online from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC and other outlets has siphoned off readers who might otherwise partake of local news. Newspapers also appear to have priced themselves out of the reach of many readers, jacking up the cost of subscriptions to cover the dive in advertising revenue. In 1980, for example, the Washington Post charged $92 a year for weekday and Sunday home delivery ($315 in today’s money). Today, the Post charges $1,160 annually for a lesser product. The Post isn’t alone, of course. Iris Chyi of the University of Texas notes that many regional newspapers have passed the $1,000 a year mark for subscriptions. That’s a lot of money in most family budgets—more than annual subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and HBO Max all together would cost you.