…is examined in this Guardian article.
For me, living in the USA and seeing many of the same things occurring here, the money quote is this:
…All these threads of suspicion and system failure came together in the horror of Grenfell, which brought its own bad news for supporters of traditional media. If Brexit, Trump and Corbyn were failures of national media then this was a failure of local journalism – to investigate municipal mismanagement and prevent such disasters from happening in the first place. “The local press has experienced a devastating collapse over the last decade,” says Ponsford. “There are whole boroughs of London that don’t have any journalists covering them at all. Kensington and Chelsea would have had a dozen journalists based in that borough 25 years ago. There’s no one there now. That can only mean that the councils there are not being scrutinised.”
“The best journalism happens at a local level, there’s no doubt about it,” says Ted Jeory, whose Trial By Jeory blog and column in the East London Advertiser exposed the Tower Hamlets corruption scandal that saw Lutfur Rahman removed as mayor and banned from standing for office. “But morale is very poor and there’s a cultural shift in national papers at news editor level. You used to start on a local paper, learn how to knock on doors and be tenacious. Now, people are being recruited at national level and sometimes becoming news editors without having done any of that local stuff.”
The old system of journalism was that people entered journalism at local level. Some them, over time, moved up from local to regional and then national media. This model is now broken, with the internet, which drives the cost of publication down to almost zero, allowing any person with a passion or animus to set up a YouTube channel or Facebook page and begin posting all manner of information, with a total absence of vetting, editing or fact-checking.
Emily Bell summarizes the problem quite neatly:
Trust in news has also been compromised by a new type of publishing system ( platforms like YouTube/ FB) which incentivizes crap factories
— emily bell (@emilybell) August 6, 2017
