Algorithms aren’t editors

Tom Foley

On June 26, I gave a presentation on media literacy at Iowa Boys State. During each of my eight presentations, I asked the audience two questions: Where do you get your news, and do you trust it?

For the first question, responses varied. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard a light sprinkling of young men who said they kept up to date with local news. I was reasonably satisfied with the loose handful of individuals who said they kept up to date with larger, more established news organizations.

I was utterly unsurprised by the vast majority of responses: TikTok, X, Instagram, Truth Social and so on. Such is the nature of today’s audience.

I informed the audience that I did, in fact, work for a print publication. What’s more, the Storm Lake Times Pilot doesn’t yet regularly post short-form videos to the large variety of visual-first platforms where so much of the current audience dwells.

“What are you going to do when all of the old people who read your paper die off?” a highly distracted audience member asked.

What indeed?

I’ve spent the last year thinking about that question. Last spring, I worked as a social media intern at Politico, where my job was to help journalism compete for attention on social media.

At the end of my internship, I sat down with Carrie Budoff Brown, executive editor of Politico Europe. I told her my next stop was the Times Pilot.

“That’s incredible,” she said. “Local news is so important.”

When I told my uncle I was interested in pursuing journalism, he jokingly responded:

“So you’re trying to become a YouTuber?”

The further I get in my career, the less his words feel like a joke.

Before the internet, the paper was a Swiss Army knife. The go-to space for local events, job listings, advertising, and a museum of the ordinary man. Each was its own stream of revenue.

Through my journalism education at the University of Missouri, I’ve learned that many news organizations acknowledge they adapted too slowly to the onset of the internet. They lost those revenue streams.

The aftermath speaks for itself — almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers are dead, the Medill Local News Initiative reports.

As local newspapers lost advertising revenue, many news organizations became increasingly dependent on digital traffic. That reality rewards attention, and attention often favors outrage over nuance.

At Politico, I learned how to distill long-form, research-heavy stories into a mere 280 characters. I learned how to write with a "curiosity gap," leaving out the core information from my promotional posts to encourage readers to click through to the website and hear it from reporters themselves.

Yet even the best social strategy can't reverse a larger trend: Fewer people are arriving at news websites in the first place. Even at reputable organizations, social posts are seldom the full story.

Where then, are people willing to go to inform themselves about what’s going on in their communities? Staying on top of the times is a full-time gig, if there is no one you can trust to curate the news for you.

When my faith in the longevity of news is shaken, I’m reminded of the words of my fellow journalist, Doug Burns of The Iowa Mercury. When I worked with him over my spring break during my junior year in high school, he told me something like this:

When you show up for people’s lives — the sports games, the local businesses, the community events — you develop a tangible credibility. If you can accurately report on the little things, a community can easily verify your accuracy. Then, when the biggest stories of the day come through, your readers know they can trust you to do those stories justice.

The Times Pilot has a similar philosophy: “The best journalism is that which builds communities.”

I believe the presence of a local paper is the greatest defense a community can have against the swarms of reactionary misinformation that assail Americans on a daily basis.

For anyone reading this, I’m likely preaching to the choir. Even still, know that your local newsrooms count on you to make space for the kind of reporting most Americans say they value.

Every time you pay for a subscription, click off social media to read a news story beyond the headline or donate, you ensure your community is thoroughly and responsibly scrutinized.

To my friends and peers who were raised alongside the internet, I believe democracy hinges on all of us making space for local news in our daily lives.

Papers worldwide are chewing on the question of what to do when an aging readership dries up. It’s a good question, but as an early-career journalist, I’d ask the reverse of my fellow young Americans:

“Who do you trust to replace us?”

Tom Foley is a student at the University of Missouri, and summer intern at the Times Pilot.