The attentive public and the collapse of local journalism

A little-spoken issue in the collapse of local journalism is the role of 'attentive public'. In a world of globalized journalism, this small segment of society has in some ways re-oriented itself away from an interest in the locality.

The primary theorist of the 'attentive public' is Robert Dahl.

Dahl's basic argument is that government policy in a democracy - or rather, what appears to be a democracy - is not really a reflection of the will of the majority (which is a good thing, he writes, because the majority tends to be authoritarian).

However, public policy is not entirely the product of the schemes of the elites, either.

Rather, there is a small 'attentive public' that almost religiously follows political developments and is fascinated with policy. They can be described as 'political junkies'. This interest in politics very strongly correlates with the level of educational attainment, and not necessarily with income (i.e., rich people are not as interested in politics as professors are, although the rich are more interested in politics than poor people are because rich people are relatively more educated than the poor).

IIRC, the attentive public supposedly comprises 10 to 20% of society.

(The political scientist Deane Neubauer's Yale dissertation is on the size of the attentive public in various countries. His findings were that the attentive public in the US was quite small, maybe 5 to 10%, IIRC. In contrast, the attentive public in Mexico was something like 30%. (This cross-cultural research was done in the 1960s, i think.) I think that the tacit theoretical assertion of this research is that an interest in politics is a result of political polarization or "consciousness raising" (in the lingo of the 1960s), and is not related to educational attainment. Dahl might counter that those sorts of polarized citizens would exhibit strongly authoritarian traits, whether of the left or the right; also, their interest in politics would wane as revolutionary fervor cooled over time, as it does inevitably.)

Anyway, back to local journalism and its decline.

Once upon a time, most educated people relied on their local newspaper for national and international news. These local newspapers got most of their news from elite news outlets like Reuters and AP. (The local news in any society is basically really underwhelming, and it needs to be mixed with "big picture" items to be palatable to educated readers.)

With the advent of the Internet, at least two things happen. First, the best-educated readers skip over the middleman and go straight to the source (or sources, in the case of Google News). Second, local newspapers can save themselves a pretty penny by not only gutting their own reporting staffs, but eliminating their subscriptions to national and international news sources, so that the local 'newspaper' now resembles a newsletter, littered with sports, recipes, and celebrity gossip. (In technical terms, 'editorially-driven' local 'daily newspapers' no longer exist, they have been quietly morphed into 'advertiser-driven' 'community newspapers', which were typically free weekly items available at the grocery store.)

The funny thing is that the readership, or what remains of the readership at the local level, does not notice this. Most people never really had an interest in The Issues of the Day.

(An eventual problem is that the younger generation of relatively uneducated people will get their sports, entertainment, recipes, coupons, real-estate propaganda and celebrity gossip not from the local rag, but from the Web.)

So the problem is not just Craigslist killing advertising revenues. That kind of analysis is valid, but too limited to the narrow, concrete world of accounting.

The bigger problem is that the smartest locals are much less interested in their locality, although they are immensely more attuned to the world and its issues (e.g., global warming).

The economic parallel with this is the divestment of the top income earners from actual property and production. At one time, the richest people in the US owned private companies; the factory owners were tough, but emotionally attached to the locales of their factories, and they were community leaders. However, they turned those companies public, made a fortune, and the factories moved to Asia. Now all their money is in investments scattered all over, especially in the stock market. (Same is true with Donald Trump, who inherited 29,000 apartments from his father. Today, Trump is not really the real-estate baron he pretends to be. He is now a celebrity who very lucratively licenses his brand to global developers.)