For common, everyday occurrences, usually they are parroting whatever press releases are made by the authorities. OK, we can share and get that information ourselves these days.
What's left is local investigative journalism. Most local newspapers are pretty gutted to the point they don't provide this. Yet many still do. We want someone to dig into some issues with high journalistic standards, and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another. If that's the gap, how do we achieve this at a local level? How do we fund that work? Are there other mechanisms that do this well?
But reddit doesn't emphasize reputation in that way; karma tracks activity and popularity. Some users can build up a reputation for a specific type of content, but that feels different.
Mastodon (haven't even really used it yet so just going on an outsider's understanding) enables both locality via servers (like the subreddit) as well as emphasizing identity/reputation (a la Twitter) so one could follow or otherwise tag certain users, allowing them to build a tracked and public reputation for quality journalism
I don’t doubt there are exceptions, and in subreddits for large cities, perhaps a few users are willing to do free in-depth journalism for those audiences. But I’ve looked at several other cities’ communities, mostly of small and medium size, and seen similar dynamics.
I think one clear lesson of the last few years should be that every human being has their biases. Trying to provide unbiased and objectively accurate information about things that are in nature often very nuanced and subjective is a foolhardy endeavor. Even with the big technology firms trying to provide "independent fact checkers", there's no way to accurately gauge truth on social media without essentially picking one point-of-view and censoring other perspectives.
Instead, taking into account human bias should be part of the system. Take ProjectVeritas as one example. I think that it's great that they're biased and argue their own point-of-view as long as their bias is known by people. That way you can take that into account when judging how likely something is to be true. I'd love it if there were more organizations like ProjectVeritas with their own biases who worked to expose corruption on issues they care about regardless of political perspective.
IMO, the worst situation to be in for determining truth is the one we're in with the media now where we have journalists who are playacting at being unbiased who clearly have a point of view they push for.
I live in a city that's majority non-white and at least 50% conservative.
The subreddit for my city is 99% white and hyper-leftist.
At least local newspapers attempt to be unbiased.
You have to pay for it. It used to be that advertising space was limited, so it was paid for through that, but that revenue is gone and nobody wants to pay.
https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/
Try using that site for 2 minutes without it crashing or you rage quitting from the constant rearranging of the page as it finally loads content. Even if you can use it, have a look at the quality of the articles. Case in point:
https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/range-c...
The ironic thing is that, whilst the publication is local, it is part of a national group that owns a large part of local media in the UK that all share the same underlying core site just with the names and posts changed to represent the local content. Subsequently a large part of the UK has to deal with this absolute shite for their local news. Hopefully Joshi Herrmann will continue to see success and his model will spread across the country.
[1] https://read.substack.com/p/the-active-voice-8-joshi-herrman...
I beg to differ. As we've seen in the last 3 years, the large majority of them were in bed with the government. Democracy? A better word would be plutocracy. Let them die.
Maybe if they were run more like Non-profits than businesses they could survive.