Local news is in shambles, no doubt about that. Hyper-local newspapers are either struggling or no longer exist. In my community, the hyper-local newspaper survives only by running what feels like 90-percent ads and 10-percent news.
Since robots build our cars and electronics, can they build our local news? That’s what Hoodline, a news aggregator, says.
But take a look at this recent view of Hoodline’s Seattle news. Crime is going up and down all at the same time. We’ve entered some kind of alternate reality of separate, often conflicting, worlds:
To be accurate, one story refers to Seattle crime during the week of September 5, 2019 and the other one refers to the previous week. So, technically correct.
But from the human angle, where a human is the one receiving the information, it all feels a bit off-kilter. Words and phrases like “going up,” “dropping,” and especially “trend,” feel larger than they really are. How can such sweeping “trends” happen all at the same time? It doesn’t help that both stories, butted up against each other, use the same hero image and the same boilerplate text, only with time-relevant data changed.
Yes, it’s easy to mock CEO Razmig Hovaghimian and his Mission District crew as being out-of-touch techies, but where else will hyper-local news come from? Yahoo’s Patch looked good for awhile but now appears to have mainly folded or automated. Hoodline pulls together what Hovaghimian likes to call data signals from all sorts of places such as Facebook, Twitter, crime reporting sites, and others to fill in news deserts. It’s not a bad thing entirely. Maybe a little more human intervention?
