The problem is not apathetic public, but lazy media

It’s true – people don’t give a hoot about local journalism, even though local journalism is so important it’s protected in the Constitution.

We can’t force people to read the stuff – so it’s up to news organizations to work harder to show why the news they publish is interesting, relevant and important. They have to think harder to find better ways to show readers how new facts relate to things the readers already know and care about. 

Here are some quotes from a new book by Alain de Botton, “The News: A User's Manual”:

“The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them, but that we don't know what to do with the ones we have.

“What should be laudable in a news organization is not a simple capacity to collect facts, but a skill — honed by intelligent bias — at teasing out their relevance.

“Central to modern politics is the majestic and beautiful idea that every citizen is — in a small but highly significant way — the ruler of his or her own nation. The news has a central role to play in the fulfillment of this promise, for it is the conduit through which we meet our leaders, judge their fitness to direct the state, and evolve our positions on the most urgent economic and social challenges of the day. Far from being incidental features of democracies, news organizations are their guarantors.

“But the modern world is teaching us that there are dynamics far more insidious and cynical still than censorship in draining people of political will; these involve confusing, boring,and distracting the majority away from politics by presenting events in such a disorganized, fractured, and intermittent way that a majority of the audience is unable to hold on to the thread of the most important issues for any length of time.

“A contemporary dictator would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: He or she would only have to see to it that news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of the ongoing relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colorful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people's capacity to grasp political reality — as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.

“A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

“But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more ‘serious’ news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences.”