Last spring, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that half of the newspaper jobs that existed 15 years ago have disappeared. A number of trends have driven the decline in newspaper reporting, particularly at the local level, including consolidation in the media industry, changing consumer habits, and the 2008 financial crisis. But the advent of the internet and the rise of social media are the main culprits. Craigslist helped destroy the newspaper ad business and Google and Facebook, which now effectively control the market for digital advertising, are in the process of finishing the job. So the irony hung thick over the recent news that both Google and Facebook were launching new initiatives to boost local reporting.

Last week, Google debuted Bulletin, a foray into crowdsourced citizen journalism that is launching as a pilot in Oakland, California and Nashville, Tennessee. Bulletin allows users to share text, photos, and videos of events in their neighborhoods and cities on an app. And on Monday, just two weeks after announcing that it would be downplaying stories from national news outlets on its News Feed, Facebook said it would start surfacing more work from local news outlets as it tweaks its algorithm.



These are notable changes. The two most powerful media companies in the country—and despite their protests to the contrary, they are media companies—are emphasizing local news and reporting a decade-plus into decimating news outlets big and small. It comes as big cities around the country are losing locally focused websites like the Gothamist network, and storied, Pulitzer Prize–winning newspapers like the Charleston Gazette-Mail are filing for bankruptcy. But neither Google or Facebook seem interested in doing the real work of local reporting, and their respective initiatives are ripe for abuse of the fake news variety.



Google product manager James Morehead described Bulletin to Vanity Fair as “an experimental app that gives people an easy way to tell stories about what is going on around them—ranging from local bookstore readings to high-school sporting events to information about local street closures.” It’s a hyperlocal social network, a competitor to sites like NextDoor, which has recently surged in popularity (partly due to the decline of local reporting). Google’s other attempts at social networking—notably Google+—have failed, but Bulletin gives it another opportunity to connect its users.



Facebook’s move to embrace local news should be seen as an extension of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s earlier announcement that Facebook was moving away from contentious national political issues and back to its roots as a social network—to person-to-person connections. Facebook described its move thusly: “We identify local publishers as those whose links are clicked on by readers in a tight geographic area. If a story is from a publisher in your area, and you either follow the publisher’s Page or your friend shares a story from that outlet, it might show up higher in News Feed.”

