Princeton, New Jersey ¨C 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.
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