About Us

All About Town was created by Joel Lederman, a high school junior from Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he is piloting the platform he developed in his home community.

One of the most frequent questions people ask when they hear about this project is, “Why is this solution necessary?” This page explains the current challenges, and highlights why our approach is both viable and crucial for ensuring accessible and reliable local news coverage.

Source: (Fischer, 2023)

Local Journalism Disappearing in the United States

According to a report developed by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, the United States has lost almost 3,000 newspapers and 43,000 journalists since 2005 (Abernathy, 2023). A November 2021 story in the Washington Post offered similar statistics, stating that over 2000 newspapers shut down between 2005 and the start of the Covid pandemic (Sullivan, 2021).  A Pew Research Center study in 2021 reported that employment in the U.S. newspaper sector has fallen by 26% since 2008 (Walker, 2021). PBS, reporting on a study conducted by the non-profit PEN America, puts the number even higher, suggesting that local news outlets have lost as much as 50% of their staff over the past 15 years (PBS NewsHour, 2019). According to an Axios report from November 2023, one third of the local newspapers in existence in 2005 will be gone by 2025 (Fischer, 2023). Furthermore, according to another study conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost half of adults in the country (47%) report that the news they receive addresses not the local area they are in, but larger cities and towns nearby (Pew Research Center, 2019). In July 2020,  Adam Gabbatt wrote in The Guardian that the COVID-19 pandemic was an “extinction-level” event for the newspaper industry, (Gabbatt, 2020). Currently, the United States is losing newspapers at a rate of 2.5 per week, according to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative Report. Poverty stricken communities are the hardest hit, with 17% of people living in areas without media coverage living below the poverty line, compared to 12% living in poverty overall  (Abernathy, 2023).  Minorities and low-income individuals without high-speed internet are more likely to live in a news desert (an area without any local news coverage) or a place at risk of becoming one (Fischer, 2023). These smaller suburban areas have no alternative news outlet to turn to if they lose theirs, as most major publications are located in larger cities with more readers (Abernathy, 2023). 

No Longer Cost Effective to Produce Local News

Most of the above statistics can be attributed to the fact that reporting on events at a local level is no longer cost effective. The growth of the Internet and the explosion of free or low-cost online news sources have largely eliminated traditional  revenue streams such as print subscriptions and advertising. From 2008 to 2018, there was a 68% drop in advertising revenue for newspapers (Hendrickson, 2019). With the new age of social media advertising, small businesses and larger corporations alike have access to vast numbers of consumers at a low price. Furthermore, advertisements run in local newspapers are far more expensive than alternative online options and are only visible to residents of the local area, whereas online advertising can be specifically targeted. Tech giants like Facebook and Google dominate the digital advertising space, with 58% of the revenue nationally, and 77% of the revenue on the local level (Hendrickson, 2019). PBS reports that local newspapers throughout the country have lost $35 billion in revenue from advertising over the last 15 years (PBS NewsHour, 2019). A Pew Research study found that, even in the short period from 2021 to 2022, advertising revenue available to the newspaper industry dropped by 5% (Newspapers Fact Sheet, 2023). Due to these financial challenges, large news chains like Gannett, Lee Enterprises and Alden Global Capital that previously bought and consolidated a variety of smaller newspapers eventually shut down all local coverage when they inevitably struggled to achieve financial success (Karter, 2022). These large media corporations also eliminated staff, with many employing not even one fifth the number of journalists they did in 2005 (Abernathy, 2023). 

Source: (Abernathy, 2023)

Source: (Hendrickson, 2019) 

Threat to Democracy and Informed Decision Making

This lack of news on a more local basis poses a grave threat to voters who require the knowledge base necessary to make informed decisions in local elections, and may even prevent voters from showing up at all. According to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative Report, research reveals that areas without a significant news outlet suffer from low voter participation and an increase in governmental corruption (Abernathy, 2023). Furthermore, citizens in these areas have lower confidence in the media, and there is more political division (Karter, 2022). Reduced coverage of city halls and state government by journalists results in the general public becoming increasingly uninformed about the activities of their local government officials. Reduction in voter turnout is most likely connected to the decline in the quantity of local news articles featured in daily newspapers over the last twenty years. The 2020 presidential election, for example, featured one of the largest voter turnouts in history, compared to only 10% of voters taking part in some recent local elections. In an interview with PBS, PEN America’s Viktorya Vilk stated that because of a decline in local news, voters “don’t know exactly who’s running for office or what that person’s platform is” (PBS NewsHour, 2019). Gabbett, in his article in The Guardian, stated that when local news diminishes, people become less engaged with their communities. They become more partisan and less likely to vote for a candidate of the opposite party, an already significant problem in American politics (Gabbatt, 2020). Furthermore, Margaret Sullivan highlights this recurring theme in an article for the Washington Post, writing that individuals residing in locations with limited local news access are less likely to engage in voting. When they do vote, they are more inclined to vote solely based on party lines. She concludes that “the demise of local news poses the kind of danger to our democracy that should have alarm sirens screeching across the land” (Sullivan, 2021). 

Source: (Abernathy, 2023)

Using AI to Enhance Government Transparency

The success of this project is dependent on the possibility of accessing recordings of local town meetings. 

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the way local news meetings were communicated to the public. According to an article published by The National League of Cities (NLC) in 2020 at the height of Covid, numerous local governments at that time were adopting video-streaming online participation technologies to offer live coverage of meetings to their citizens. These included Kenmore, Washington, which live streamed a task force meeting on Zoom, then uploaded the meeting to YouTube, and Bloomington, Indiana, which broadcast its council gatherings. Many other locations used similar methods to communicate with citizens during Covid, including Glendale, Arizona; Columbia, South Carolina; Longmont, Colorado; Atlanta, Georgia; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Fort Worth, Texas (Panettieri, 2020). An article published by the publication Government Technology reveals that during Covid virtual meetings became increasingly common, with Jersey City offering a virtual caucus meeting as well as a city council meeting employing the Microsoft Teams software. Meanwhile, Louisville, Kentucky was utilizing the WebEx tool for online meetings even before the widespread effects of social distancing throughout the country due to Covid (Pressgrove, 2020). 

Now that the Covid pandemic has diminished and in-person meetings are once again the norm, cities and towns are considering how and whether to continue some form of online access. According to Route Fifty, a resource for state and local government leaders, there is a desire for “remote meetings to outlast the Covid-19 crisis.” The article claims that the pandemic irreversibly changed the way the citizens of the nation connect with their governments at both the state and local level. Todd Fettig, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, states that “you can probably get a bigger audience if you move legislative sessions or community hearings online.” The article further references bills in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut that introduce online participation into governmental meetings (Altimari, 2022). 

In the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, used as the test case for this project, many governmental meetings are live streamed, including the School Committee, the Select Board, the Board of Health, and the Planning Board. However, there are still controversies surrounding whether government meetings should be broadcast in a non Covid era. According to an article published in the Gotham Gazette in 2014, New York City passed a law mandating that municipal departments, panels, and special committees broadcast their meetings long before the pandemic. However, there was pushback, and many of them failed to adhere to the law (Wisnieski, 2014). This pushback was evident after Covid as well. The Altamont Enterprise, a newspaper produced in Albany, New York, wrote in June 2023 about a report produced by the New York Coalition for Open Government and the Cornell University State Policy and Advocacy Clinic, which revealed that of the 1240 cities and towns evaluated during the pandemic, only 285 have persisted in generating a live stream or recording (The Altamont Enterprise, 2023). There are ongoing controversies associated with the costs and technology requirements necessary to host meetings online, or in a hybrid format that allows for both online and in person participation.

Sources