Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "How Facebook, Google and Amazon Destroyed Local News" video.

@rusticfightr A large article can take weeks or even months of investigation to reveal. The Watergate Scandal would never have taken Nixon down, if Woodward and Bernstein weren't professional journalists that had sources to leak the information to tell them to keep digging or to have people to ask for information from. A rando with a camera and a laptop just isn't going to be able to do that with enough regularity to make any difference. Journalism tends to be pretty boring most of the time, they'll sit in on press briefings all year in case something happens. And normally, nothing much happens, but if they're not there that one day that something does happen, then they've wasted all that time. And, there is no way of handing out press credentials for such small briefing rooms to replicate that if media outlets aren't pooling their resources to choose which correspondents to send.
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Around here, we're down to one citywide paper, a couple smaller neighborhood ones and the local TV stations to cover the local news. If something isn't big enough to warrant the national press to take interest, it doesn't get covered without those local outlets. And, I'm fortunate that there's even that many options. Many other areas are down to one or no options. There used to be a second citywide paper and when it converted to an online only outlet the remaining paper made a significant shift to the right.
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20 years ago, they were already being merged into a handful of media outlets. Even if they had embraced the internet, having all the news coming from a handful of corporations with more interest in cutting costs than exposing their own misdeeds would have been a massive problem.
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@Nicksonian Yep, that's not to say that they don't ever get a scoop, but the system depended upon there being many reporters at many different outlets competing to get their story out first. They didn't have the option of just waiting for somebody else to publish an article on before commenting on it or drawing conclusions from multiple news sources.
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