Most items of local news are highly relevant to a small proportion of locals. E.g. roadworks probably just affect a few % of people using that road.
Then there are shock-news stories like violent crime. How is it relevant to know some kid from my street stabbed another kid over a pack of gum? If I want to know how safe my area is I'd look at crime statistics collected over years and compare it to other areas.
Local news is probably more likely to be relevant to peoples' lives. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with information about some politician's trip to Asia. Local stories are more likely to be actionable, in my life anyway. The local paper tells me about local matter that directly pertain to my life, like information about the city bus system changing their routes or rules for covid.
There are so many mundane things that happen in local communities that I'm not sure you need research to show how invaluable it is to local readers. Yet, is noise to everyone else.
I could think of a few, new businesses opening up, or worse, shutting down, or changes to government policies that affect residents. Maybe you're in a farming community and there's a big corporate buyout that's going to make your life more difficult, or something to celebrate. What about new parks opening up, or changes to traffic flow, or even, a new stop light being added at a dangerous intersection.
These are all things people locally care about, and true, they probably wouldn't actively seek them out, but having it on the front page of their news source would definitely be interesting enough to read.
I don't think it's that different from your local news reporting about local crime versus crime in other cities or even states. To get something reported from another state it would have to be notable.
I think that's the same happening here. People can only be concerned about the periphery of their lives so much.
Likewise, those people in far away places likely don't hear much reportage about incidents happening relatively close to them. It's not that they are callous or don't care. They just have more immediate things to think about.
Local news is pretty terrible for being an informed citizen. For example, people who watch it regularly dramatically overestimate the prevalence of crime in their local communities. This alone probably causes immense human suffering through our injustice system and jails
Ya, I mean usually I find out about local news from talking to people, or sometimes from overhearing other people talk about something. I don't have a good source of local news right now other than that, but I agree with you, it is more directly relevant to my life. What's your source for local news?
In small areas, the local news website is much more important usually. I can't imagine much of it would apply if I lived in LA or NY,NY - that or there would just be SO MUCH to follow it wouldn't be worth the time.
In my small community, the local news website applies to things happening in my back-yard sometimes.
The experience of reading a newspaper every day really startled me. When I'm given a set of news items picked by a knowledgeable editor, I hear about things I just never would've sought out on my own.
Local news is how I find out about ballot issues, restaurant closures and openings, new public works projects, etc, as well as more sordid things like failed health inspections or the deep dysfunction at a neighborhood school we might have sent our kid to... The SNR might not be super high but it seems useful.
Why follow local news? In my case it can be summarized to violence and petty politics. The day something important and out of ordinary happens I will probably know about it from family and friends before it became news.
National vs. local news is an important distinction here that many of these "The key to happiness is ignoring the news" posts miss.
The breathless CNN story about the latest missing white woman might not be relevant to your life, but your local newspaper's stories about property taxes, parking fees, local entertainment events and people in your community most certainly are.
People have really bad infodiet. They eat junk information rather than analyzing if their information is wholesome. On local news, you hear about the latest shooting or the latest robbery or the latest bad thing that happen, all of which doesn't mean anything until you aggregate them into statistics and analyze them.
My interpretation is people just care about local news far less than they used to? I’m in a semi-major city and the local news is only a small part of my news consumption.
What's wrong with local news? In my experience, it's the most trustworthy, agenda-free source of info. It's the nature of its scope, but I don't see what you're getting at.
Then there are shock-news stories like violent crime. How is it relevant to know some kid from my street stabbed another kid over a pack of gum? If I want to know how safe my area is I'd look at crime statistics collected over years and compare it to other areas.
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