Is Anyone Reading the News?
This remark, from David Simon as reported by Adam Serwer, seems to me to have the correct focus for fretting about the future of journalism: “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I will no longer be worried about journalism.” Serwer comments:
Even if newspapers were to be profitable again, there’s no indication they’d invest in the kind of journalism they’re now using to convince everyone how valuable they are, and it isn’t the choice of the dedicated reporters and editors who staff them. It’s up to the people who own the paper, and they’re worried about the bottom line.
But it’s not just up to owners, it’s also the case that readers seem to have a limited level of interest in this sort of thing. Most people I know are pretty ill-informed about local issues in Washington, DC. And while it’s true that the coverage of local issues in DC offered by The Washington Post is not all it could be, the fact of the matter is that most people don’t even know what you could be learning by reading the Post. Not only is it going to be intrinsically difficult to ever find a viable revenue model for paying a reporter to cover the zoning board if people don’t want to read about the zoning board, I’m not actually sure how much social value is created by unread articles about zoning boards. If an article about proposed modifications to the Purple Line falls in the wilderness and nobody’s there to read it, are we really making a difference?
Meanwhile, on another level I think locally oriented bloggers are already doing an okay job of filling this particular information niche. The author of the MV Triangle blog in my neighborhood is, in fact, going to the Downtown Neighborhood Association meeting and the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association meeting, the local Advisory Neighborhood Committee meeting, etc. This is a lot more fine-grained local coverage than you’re going to find in the post. And he’s not the only good neighborhood blogger you can find in DC. And none of them are making any money off of this—they do it because they like to, or because they think it’s important. And, indeed, they can offer more fine-grained local coverage than the Post precisely because they clearly aren’t going to earn a living by doing so, which frees them to just do the coverage and not worry about the revenue model.
But this still gets back to the fact that good coverage of local issues is of limited value unless people care to read it. And even though I’m pretty optimistic, in general, about the future of coverage of both national and local issues, I have a very hard time seeing what dynamic is going to prevent state government from slipping under an even greater veil of obscurity.
44 Responses to “Is Anyone Reading the News?”
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May 7th, 2009 at 10:54 am
I think you’re missing the point. Of course many zoning board hearing stories (or City Council stories or School Board stories) won’t be read by tons of people.
But if you don’t have boots on the ground, you’re never to going to be able to find the kinds of invesigative stories worth pursuing. You’re never going to develop the sources, learn the innerworkings of the bureacracy, etc.
That’s what Simon is talking about.
And don’t kid yourself: Bloggers will not be able to take over that function because it takes time and money and some level of institutional backing to really do it.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Matt, you may be short-selling the importance of news that few people read. I think even if not many people read it when it is first published news articles still have value because they are added to research databases like Lexis and then exist as a record of what happened. This is valuable for research papers and other sources of information for the people who actually make decisions. Without any record at all, the event may as well not as happened, but with a record, the information is there if it ever becomes especially relevant.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am
I think this is pretty close to right. Reporters I know for the most part genuinely want to cover all the things we think are important in a civics class kind of way, although certainly you see a lot of eye-rolling and boredom with covering town hall. But publishers and owners have gutted news organizations in attempts to maintain ridiculously high profit levels — on the order of 20 percent, historically — and your average citizen really doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
Until the its the strip club going in next to HIM that’s in front of the planning and zoning commission. Then it’s the most goddamn important thing in the world and why isn’t that lousy newspaper covering this???
May 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Framing the issue as if it’s about reporters covering local zoning board hearings is a little misleading. National news outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the TV networks have never done a good job of covering such things, nor should they really. That’s more a task for little local papers, and, today, for blogs and websites, which will be sought out by the local people who want the info.
But the Post and the Times should be investing resources in bigger pieces that delve deeply into related issues–like an examination of how local zoning board decisions have massive national impact in areas like sustainability or economic development. And they have the challenge of figuring out how to make these stories so obviously important and interesting that people will feel they must read them.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I also don’t see local bloggers pulling up the slack yet either. Most are motivated mainly by whatever axe they have to grind, not a burning desire to see the workings of town hall set in constant and objective sunlight.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
The voters of this country don’t need News, they need fucking Complete Information.
And no one’s providing that — although CIA Daily briefs to the President and some high end financial advisors make a good start.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:03 am
The Newspapers don’t give you the Real Story — because they are too fucking stupid to figure out what it is.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Heh, that Purple Line article is something I was actually emailing around to people this morning.
I’d also like to add to David’s comment that even if an article here and there doesn’t get much attention, a reporter on the city hall beat has a decent shot at uncovering corruption and poor government that will put pressure on local leaders to change things before the issue blows up into front-page headlines.
I wonder, how many people were really closely following the first few Watergate stories that the Post was treating as a local crime issue before Woodward and Bernstein realized they’d stumbled onto something big?
May 7th, 2009 at 11:07 am
The local super-boring news about zoning boards, etc., is always way more exciting when it’s delivered by some incensed (but credible) local yokel bitchin-n-moanin on a blog.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Shorter Matt: Nobody cares about local news because my 20 something childless transplant friends with national political jobs don’t!
May 7th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Local bloggers and, in general, online sources of information are the future, and perhaps even the present, of local news coverage. But long before the internet, the best, hardest-core local coverage appeared not in metro dailies but in small, local and neighborhood weeklies. I worked for such papers for years and covered way more than my share of zoning boards, planning commissions, redevelopment boards, sewer committees and everything else. I never thought I would hear words like “frontage,” “easement” and “signage” as many times as I did.
I also noticed during that time, that most of the local coverage that appeared in our respected metro daily was pretty much lifted from my coverage and that of my colleagues at the small weeklies. What I’m wondering, then, is whether there was EVER a time when large daily newspapers devoted significant resources to the quotidian elements of local coverage that David Simon rightly feels are of such importance.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Amen, Rob.
Interest in local news tends to go up when a person settles into a community more or less permanently, buys a home, perhaps starts a family. The more connected one feels to his or her community, the more one wants/needs to know about that boring zoning stuff.
And most of that sort of coverage I’ve seen on local news blogs tends to be by people who have a strong opinion about the topic at hand. What one needs is a disinterested account. And that’s what newspapers supply when they have the resources for it.
One of my concerns — as a person who works in the newspaper biz — is that as papers move fully digital is that the boots on the ground local coverage will be lost. It’s already happening, and I expect it to get worse. My paper’s web site loves photo galleries and links to local entertainment info — actual news is somewhat marginalized. Our web “readers” like to look at photos.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:27 am
What JMcG said. Relying on local bloggers is better than nothing, but the returns are based upon what those local bloggers can put into their work, uncompensated, and perhaps lacking the kind of deep or broad knowledge that translates the fairly superficial aspects of public business into an understanding of what’s really going on.
Karl Weber’s also right: it might romanticise the job (a la State of Play) but a truly great investigative reporter’s skill lies in finding connections across disparate sources. When Josh Marshall sniffed something about the departures of those US Attorneys, he found a bunch of little stories in local papers. The San Diego Union-Tribune got wind of Duke Cunningham’s fraud by checking property records.
scribe9’s also right that the indie weeklies are now the main place to find reports of city/county meetings. And there’s a value in having a kind of mixture of curator and stenographer to get some of this stuff into the public archive. But the most significant city business happens behind closed doors, and you need reporters who aren’t necessarily cultivating sources on their beats, but have the experience to detect the spoors.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I was going to post, but I see that Rob and Bat of Moon have kindly written my post for me.
I’m always surprised at the level of interest my older colleagues have in local stories. And in fact these are the same people who are still subscribing to newspapers. So perhaps the quip should go ““The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day newspapers will be dead forever.”
May 7th, 2009 at 11:35 am
MattY, how could you ignore the fact that the Washington City Paper has passable coverage of these issues? It’s not the best, but their “Loose Lips” feature is well-regarded.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:39 am
The nut of it is that reporting is expensive and only sporadically valuable, and investigative reporting moreso.
The problem, from my eyes, isn’t that bloggers won’t do it, it’s that news outlets (and anyone else) can’t figure out how to make a profit off it. Even on the rare occasions when all that zoning coverage pays off by revealing a major scandal, that scandal gets picked up on radio, tv, cable, and national news. Just because WaPo’s beat journalists uncovered it doesn’t mean I’m going to pick up a copy of WaPo to read about it. (And even if I did, without print ads and classifieds they wouldn’t make money.)
May 7th, 2009 at 11:44 am
The alt-weeklies are still much better at covering these local issues then blogs (and much more interesting than traditional news). At least the ones that bother devote some space to news in between the cultural events coverage.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Two ways Matt is wrong —
1) It doesn’t matter tremendously if not that many people read the daily coverage. The fact that someone is watching closely acts as a check against officials doing the really egregious things they could if they were acting effectively in private. The stories on page B4 that hardly anyone reads help prevent more front page worthy scandals.
2) It has to be able to be someone’s full-time job because just showing up at the public meetings isn’t enough. Being a real watchdog is a full-time job — reviewing tedious documents, getting to know cops, teachers, bureacrats etc. so you can find out what’s really going on, running down rumors that sometimes turn out to be true. It’s hard work, that takes a certain amount of professional skill (or tradesmanship, if you prefer), and even the smartest and most dedicated blogger is going to have a hard time if he’s also got a full time job doing something else, a family, other interests, etc.
One place Matt is dead on right:
1) State governments are sewers — all of them, as best I can tell. And hardly anyone’s paying any attention anywhere.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Like Neff, I actually did read that Purple Line story. Though mostly I just scan the front page of Metro for Purple Line stories and for other headlines of interest. After said scan, it normally goes straight to the recycle bin.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
from James M. Snyder,Jr.’s and David Stromberg’s “Press Coverage and Political Accountability” (March 2008)
http://antidismal.blogspot.com/2008/04/incentives-matter-press-coverage-and.html
May 7th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Since pseudonymous listed several commenter who got it right, let me call out Clifton, Bat and especially Rob for sanctimonious prickery. Really, if you think Matt’s blogging is so insular, and isn’t relevant to your concerns, why do you read it at all, let alone spend the time to get upset enough to insult him personally with your comments?
Second, to the argument that a lot of your “older colleagues” read local coverage closely: well, that explains why local governments are so beholden to the average citizen, and not the local developers and cronies pf the mayor, etc. LOL.
Finally, to those making the case for the coverage in the alt-weeklies: yes, their coverage is the best you’ll find (Ben Joravsky from the Reader is a Chicago treasure). But they too are facing the same money troubles as the regional and national behemoths, and seem to be heading towards the same oblivion. I have no idea what will replace them, but they seemed destined for the dustbin of history as surely as the Tribune and the Globe.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
So we know newspapers can’t make enough money off of zoning boards and the police blotter to continue providing it reliably. We also know that bloggers are unlikely to take up all of that slack (particularly in smaller markets).
What I don’t understand is what possible solution there is. Really. I don’t care if you love newspapers or hate them. Love bloggers or hate them. It doesn’t change the fact that reporting isn’t free and no one wants to pay the bill.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
+1 on the alt weeklies. In all the discussion of the future of journalism and the demise of newspapers, they are always left out of. Our local (Baltimore) City Paper does a lot of the digging that Simon is so fond of (in addition to featuring him on the cover more than once.) And it seems to be doing fine other than being physically so small it’s almost illegible. While the Sun is laying off a huge chunk of it’s workforce, the free City Paper seems to be surviving just fine. And as others have pointed out, there are many stories the Sun lifted or at least ran with after being first covered in the CP. Usually with no attribution.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
People who are interested in this stuff tend to be really interested, to the point where they’ll pay for it in a community weekly. The daily newspaper was always an inefficient medium for local stuff, kind of like spam in terms of the negligible percentage of people who cared. “Better fewer but better,” as Lenin said, is probably the way of the future for local news.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Well, Brewmn,
I like Matt’s blog a lot. I learn stuff from him. I think he has a bit of a blind spot in this area, most of which comes from his age, circumstances and where he happens to live.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I’ve always kind of wondered about this – right now it’s kind of upside down and backwards. Every time the President opens his mouth, there are thirty some odd reports from thirty some odd different news organizations covering the “story”. But I can just go to Whitehouse.gov and read the full transcript for myself – why would I rely on reporters to excerpt what I can get for myself, and what justifies thirty of them?
It’s a big waste of resources – the White House press corps would be much more useful covering almost anything else. Certainly there’s nothing that they do that bloggers couldn’t do from home in their spare time. There’s no reason Robert Gibbs can’t field questions via email – I’m not sure it takes a professional reporter to ask something obvious, and he can dodge those questions just as well if they come from an average citizen.
Meanwhile, local government suffers from the opposite problem. The transcripts and data don’t make their way online, and local reporters just aren’t doing a thorough job of covering it.
But I suspect that when this changes, and every mayoral address, school board meeting, and local hearing is automatically transcribed and archived online, bloggers can pick it up from there. The same logic applies. I don’t need a journalist sitting in on a zoning board meeting if I can pull up a transcript from the city’s web site.
If I want to look up property records right now, it requires trudging down to city hall, navigating their archaic filing system, and combing through lots of dead trees. Currently, only reporters have the time and energy to do this, because they’re being paid to. If these records were online and searchable though, I could do it during my downtime at work.
The other thing I think about is crowdsourcing the news. There’s an excellent hyperlocal blog that covers my town and a few others. It’s run by two or three people, but most of the content comes from reader submissions. It’s local news by and for the locals. And as long as there’s an interest in zone board meetings, someone will be there and someone will share what happened. Over the long term, that’s probably the model that will thrive.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Eric, if you want to get your news by going to whitehouse.gov and reading the text of every word the President says in public, more power to you.
For reasons of practicality, however, the vast majority of Americans require some third-party source to summarize and report what was said. I do not think this condition is likely to change in the foreseeable future.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
We’ve had a really great response to our weekly since we started it two years ago.
In addition to trying to connect with the interests of our community (we run a lot of food and farm stories and a native plant column starting above the fold each week) we run a lot of “dull” zoning, local gov’t budget or planning stories.
There’s no secret to this. It might seem dull to 90 percent of the readers, but the 10 percent living near a proposed development, dump or whathaveyou think it’s the most important story ever.
You do that week in and week out and eventually you connect with the whole town.
Kirk Ross
Editor, The Carrboro Citizen
May 7th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Yes, but do they need the absolutely huge number of third-party sources they currently have?
When the President speaks it’s covered by, among others:
* The New York Times
* The Washington Post
* The Wall Street Journal
* ABC News
* NBC News
* CBS News
* Fox News
* Associated Press
* Reuters
* etc. etc. etc.
… all of whom end up writing pretty much the same story. Read one and you’ve instantly made all the others completely redundant. (With the exception of Fox, whose mixing of editorial viewpoint with reporting gives their product some uniqueness.)
The existence of all these outlets publishing the same story independent of each other is an artifact of distribution being limited by geography — a limitation that the Internet has completely destroyed.
The logical result will be a collapse in the number of outlets, with the survivors being a couple top-tier brands who become the outlets of record, some others who follow the Fox model of providing the story from an alternate viewpoint, and everyone else basically sending their readers to the top-tier outlets for this stuff, rather than rewriting it themselves.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Eric is right. There is too much devoted to “celebrity” coverage of what the President says on a given day. Walter Pincus’ piece in CJR correctly diagnoses the problem as the incentives being against actual journalism and enterprise reporting, and more in favor of exposure, celebrity for the journalists, among other factors.
Now, as for local stories — Matt, don’t forget that Watergate was a local story – a short crime story about a break-in. The difference between then and now is that there were enough reporters to be allowed to find out whether there was a second-day story. And was there! Really good local coverage (instead of the pitifully thin B section of the Washington Post — 2/3 of which is obituaries) will indeed sell newspapers, prompt letters to the editor, and increase interest in issues. Moreover, the advertising model should work better with an emphasis on local stories — ad buyers know that those interested in local stories are the ones who might actually drive to their carpet shop, drop off their dry cleaning, or buy home improvement products.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
A lot of that “zoning board” coverage *is* useful simply because it exists, even if people don’t read it so much. Public officials know there’s a reporter in the room, so they keep it clean. If there wasn’t someone keeping an eye on them, bad things would happen.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I’m confused: Why would Huffington Post be covering local zoning issues? And why would that make David Simon feel better about the state of journalism?
Don’t kid yourself: Bloggers will not be able to take over that function because it takes time and money and some level of institutional backing to really do it.
You are, of course, correct that bloggers will never, ever take over the function of covering local zoning issues. It’s simply too expensive, and the level of expertise is not there.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Although the comment he left was crude and brief, I actually think Don Williams is onto something, above: “The voters of this country don’t need News, they need fucking Complete Information.”
One of the issues that I suspect keeps people from paying attention to this kind of nitty-gritty local news is the fact that right now, you have to do a lot of work to figure out what’s going on, why it’s important, and how it affects your life. You can only find those little metro news briefs interesting if you know some background on the topic at hand, and it’s almost impossible to get that background from a news site. You almost have to become an activist to determine why these municipal issues matter and what they connect to.
Google’s Marissa Mayer has been talking a lot recently about a concept she calls “the living story.” She mentioned it in yesterday’s US Senate hearing, in fact. The idea is that a news story online should be a permanent, evolving record of an issue — like a Wikipedia article. A single news story page should give the history and context of an issue, as well as giving the new developments on that issue, and providing a place for interested citizens to discuss it.
I’ve spent a year in a fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute exploring this idea. I partnered with the University of Missouri’s journalism school to create a website built on this notion of the living story, intended to make each topic we cover a destination that’s useful for newcomers and experts alike. I’ve also been arguing in favor of the broader idea — which I think applies to much more than local news — at a blog called Newsless.org.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Another point about the local beat is that, just as DC has its permanent ruling class, large and small cities alike have their unelected powerbrokers whose influence persists while elected officials change.
Now, there can be problems for local newspapers in confronting those people, as they’re often in positions of influence, either as advertisers themselves or people with the capacity to lean on advertisers. In my part of the world, there’s the perception that the local daily goes easy on property developers who cut backroom deals or defy preservation/building ordinances, because of the money generated by advertising the latest hilltop gated community. That’s where the alt-weeklies have an advantage — though they can also have their own set of vested interests, and that’s where bloggers can be useful.
In the UK, most local papers are evening dailies, and have perhaps half a page of national/international coverage, and a few bits of syndicated lifestyle fluff. (There’s no real equivalent to the alt-weekly; apart from Time Out, the old ‘listings magazine’ has gravitated to the web.) This isn’t to say that they’re always running hard-hitting investigative journalism, but since there’s no need to compete with the morning national dailies, there’s more room to concentrate on local beats.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
State government gets a severely disproportionately LOW amount of coverage (including on this blog) compared to the scope of law and policy that it influences. Transit. Education. Crime. Courts and judicial rules. Unemployment and welfare programs. And on and on. Is this because people are too dumb to demand more coverage, or because local reporters are lazy/incompetent?
May 7th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Is this because people are too dumb to demand more coverage, or because local reporters are lazy/incompetent?
I’d say it’s because state legislatures are the bastard children of American democracy.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Why would huffington post go there?
If you check out my blog
http://seattletransitblog.com, it’s much more in depth on public transit issues in the Seattle area than any newspaper could be. Other websites cover other issues in depth as well.
So why would huffington post go there? That’s been the problem with newspapers, hasn’t it? They are too much something-for-everyone and thus don’t have a comparitive advantage in a world were people want REALLY a lot of informtation on the topics they really like.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias cites David Simon’s sneer, “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I will no longer be worried about journalism.” Matt rightly notes that very few people are interested in reading the resulting reportage: Most people I know are pretty ill-informed about local issues in Washington, DC. And while it’s true that the coverage of local issues in DC offered by The Washington Post is not all it could be, the fact of the matter is that most people don’t even know what you could be learning by reading the Post. Not only is it going to be intrinsically difficult to ever find a viable revenue model for paying a reporter to cover the zoning board if people don’t want to read about the zoning board, I’m not actually sure how much social value is created by unread articles about zoning boards. [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I echo the sentiments that local bloggers fill the niche of local reporting pretty well. I pooh-pooh the sentiments that local bloggers mostly have axes to grind and newspapers provide “disinterested” reporting. That’s an overgeneralization — in the cities I’ve lived, the local papers have had axes to grind on most local reporting, sometimes obscured by false disinterest.
I’d also like to echo the value of narrowly read news as providing a record, available for later review when someone realizes they _do_ care about some local issue. Local blogs do this in the short term, but there’s a high risk of blogs eventually dying (due to the interested people moving, for example), and small-scale locally focused blogs are less likely to come up on Google searches, even if they’re most relevant.
People have said the newspapers crib from weeklies — might there not be a business model of collecting/linking/rating local blogs, a sort of “preserving for posterity” spin on the “plagiarizing from the alt-weeklies” concept? You know who might have the skillset and market positioning for something like that? I’m thinking the local newspaper, that’s who.
Lastly, I’d also point out that local reporting from locals (newspapers, blogs, whoever) can raise money from local advertising, which is a more stable revenue model than the world-famous dailies. The new sushi place down the street needs to advertise, but its ad dollar would be wasted on anything more widely distributed than the local paper (or local blog.)
May 7th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Our local weekly newspaper is part of a group of 9 papers covering about a dozen or so towns in upstate NY. There is a lot of actual, useful local reportage of zoning boards, etc., plus boatloads of ads from shops and tradesmen who have no other outlet. The publishers are making money hand-over-fist — more and more every passing year — and the communities profit weel from the news and information. They don’t see this biz model going away very soon.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I spent years covering local government in a big city for a paper that had national and international bureaus. No one wanted my job; I wrote a lot of stories buried inside the paper that few people read. Here’s the thing: Those stories that no one read allowed me to build sources to write some big stories that everyone wanted to read. That’s generally how beat reporting works and is the tradeoff newsrooms have made for decades with local reporting.
Now there are local bloggers who can cover some of the hyper-local issues that newspapers staff (though there is no one blogging on my old beat atm and there are going to be many gaps) but those bloggers are going to lack the platform and institutional backing to elevate what happens at the zoning board to a huge citywide or national story. Be it a newspaper or some other organization (I’ve long been sympathetic to Matt’s point that newspapers are not optimally organized for 21st century information distribution), something needs to fill the gap. Monopoly newspapers were such cash cows that they basically became foundations, ploughing subscribers and advertisers’ cash into financing loss leaders like local reporting with the expectation that those dribbles would pay off in big stories. If nothing replaces that institutional support we will all be poorer for it.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
@41
That’s not true. There was some minor detail in a state budget here in Washington that would have had a big impact on a subway line construction and our transit blog broke the news, brought it to everyone’s attention and got that damned budget changed.
None of our local newspapers picked it up until after we had made a huge noise about it.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
@33 Matt: “The idea is that a news story online should be a permanent, evolving record of an issue — like a Wikipedia article.”
Wow. Explosive ideas. Just when I was beginning to accept the possibility of total darkness a light appears at the end of the tunnel, and it is conceivable things could even be brighter on the other side once we navigate our way through.
Great post MY. Great comment Matt.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
In my experience, a significant portion of the newspaper reporting about local issues, particularly development/zoning matters, misunderstands the issues, misstates the facts, or otherwise gets crucial elements of the story wrong. I’m not sure which is worse: no reporting at all or misleading reporting.