During a pandemic, accurate information can be a matter of life and death. People need reliable reports about the impact of the disease and the threat it poses to their city, community or neighborhood. Most citizens’ immediate concern is not whether their country is on the right macro-trajectory, but whether their local grocery store is practicing proper hygiene and enforcing social-distancing measures.
One of the many tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it comes at a time when local media have been decimated in many countries.
The heart of the problem is that local news, in particular, has been severely disrupted by a broader restructuring of the economy over the past two decades. Historically, advertising sustained serious journalism. As New York University’s Clay Shirky pointed out in a 2009 commentary, Walmart may or may not have had an interest in the news from Iraq, but it was nonetheless subsidizing newspapers’ Baghdad bureaus.