David Simon may feel vindicated by the new report from the Federal Communications Commission. The final season of The Wire, set largely in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, made the point that–despite the proliferation of new media sources–cuts at newspapers meant block-by-block, meeting-by-meeting coverage of local events was drying up. (He’s made this point too in comments outside the show that bloggers have taken as dismissive of their work.)
Now, an FCC report 18 months in the making concurs that, as smaller newspapers die or get cut back, the watchdog function they served is going unfilled—not just by blogs but by TV, print or any other medium. “A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little,” says the report.
I’d be curious to know how Tuned Inlanders out side New York City, and outside the biggest cities in general, find that this meshes with their own experience. My guess is that there’s a lot of variance by location. Where I live—not Manhattan but Brooklyn—I find a lot more hyperlocal reporting than I ever had access to in the ’90s, when I moved here after college. There are bigger sites like Brownstoner, a Brooklyn real-estate blog that includes a significant amount of reporting on local development but also issues outside real estate that affect neighborhoods, and there are more micro sites about my neighborhood like this personal favorite with an NSFW name. This is in addition to newer local-news efforts like AOL’s Patch.
Granted, these sites also do a lot of aggregation, sometimes of stories from the smaller local papers that Brooklyn is still lucky enough to have; but they also do original work, and the upshot is a lot of local coverage. But then Brooklyn is a borough of two million-plus, with a lot more media professionals per capita, I imagine, than the town I grew up in in Michigan. So I put it to you: what’s the news where you live? Or is there any?