Rebuild Local News President Steven Waldman urged Congress in his Senate testimony on February 10 to adopt policies that increase the number of local reporters and ensure tech platforms compensate small and independent outlets.
To watch the video, click here. Below is the transcript:

On average, 2 newspapers close every week in the United States. 3,500 have shut down in the last 20 years. And perhaps most importantly, in the last 20 years, there’s been a 75% drop in the number of local journalists. That’s in print, TV, and digital.

And the consequences for communities are really alarming. Studies show that areas with less local news have higher levels of corruption, greater government waste, lower civic involvement, and lower volunteering.

People know a lot about national controversies but not much about local issues. What the mayor did this year, or even what the mayor’s name was.

And there’s one more thing that’s a bit harder to measure, but so important that the vacuum is being filled by social media and national news, which are leaving communities more divided.

As Senator Moran said last week about the Plainville Times, national journalism has the habit of tearing us apart. Community journalism pulls us together.

Yes, media consolidation is one of the causes. For instance, private equity firms in New York acquired many newspapers, then laid off local reporters across the rest of the country.

But the primary cause is the internet. Advertisers shifted spending toward Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms, then used their market clout to restrict competition and divert revenue from local publishers.
And now comes another body blow, artificial intelligence.

AI will further deplete the revenue of local news outlets. AI companies will suck in local news content to train and ground the AI assistants, which will then provide full answers instead of linking prominently to publisher websites. And those click-throughs are what have generated the traffic and the revenue for the local news outlets.

When the Washington Post announced its cuts, which included a 70% cut in Metro staff, it noted that its search traffic had dropped by half in three years. And by the way, these traffic drops are happening on conservative websites as well.
But here’s the horrible paradox of all this.

As AI erodes local news businesses, that hollowness, in turn, will make AI worse. AI works well with massive amounts of data, but it really struggles when it’s confronted with the condition known as information scarcity. Studies show AI routinely provides inaccurate information on local matters, and when malicious actors produce deepfakes and there are no local watchdogs, it will run rampant.

And to be clear, AI does offer tremendous opportunities to local newsrooms. I mean, these nearly magical tools can help local news outlets do more coverage with less money.

But the tech industry has to go farther than that and help reverse the financial crisis, the revenue crisis that it helped to create.

And I think there are a few ways to think about that.

First, AI companies must compensate local news organizations, including the small and medium-sized ones, for the content they use.

Many of them have made deals with big media chains, but so far have left out thousands of smaller players.
Second, we have the big controversies and energy over the construction of AI data centers.
Well, there’s an opportunity there too.
Here’s an idea.

Have each data center contribute some money, a one-time donation to a community foundation to create an endowment that would help pay for local reporters. And those reporters can do the follow-up. Did the AI companies actually buy from local businesses, as they said they would, or hire locally, or did they pay their way on electricity, as they said?

And finally, AI companies and social media platforms should pay, I believe, a mitigation fee to help finance the revival of community news.

Even a tiny fee could help pay for something like Senator Cantwell’s bill that would provide tax credits for the hiring of local news, or tax credits for small businesses that advertise in local news, which is an idea we’re seeing Republicans push in New Hampshire and Kansas right now on the local TV ownership caps.

Our group has not taken a position on the question of whether or not Congress and the FCC have the authority to impose caps on their own, but I would say this: I actually have some sympathy for both of these arguments.

You know, it really is true that local TV news is incredibly important. In some places, it’s the only thing left. And so we really agree that this ought to be looked at through the prism of whether or not it helps local news.

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that consolidation has gone in the other direction, hollowing out some newsrooms.

So my advice would be to look at that question through the prism of whether it’s good or bad for local news and specifically look at whether it maintains or increases or reduces the number of local reporters and editors, not the number of hours.

Because if you have fewer local reporters and more hours, what you actually have is more superficial local news or more copying. So, really look at the kind of capacity.

And I think time is running out. We need to reverse this before nothing’s left.
We at heart need more human reporters living in the communities, accountable to and listening to their neighbors. And for that revival to happen, the biggest technology companies must quickly step up as well.