Ups and downs of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act

If you’re not familiar with the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, I’ll offer some basics.

The LJSA is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that has bipartisan support and is intended to bolster local journalism. It would do this by giving tax credits to newspaper subscribers, the employers of journalists, and local media advertisers.

Absent from this list of beneficiaries are journalists themselves. Coincidentally, Late Edition would also be ineligible, not because it’s digital, but because it’s less than two years old. In any case, I’m not particularly fond of state-sponsored journalism anyway. Believe it or not, I prefer to be at the mercy of my readers.

While this legislation will no doubt support the current model of local journalism, it does nothing to address the shortcomings of that model.

The owners of the Daily Mining Gazette operate like an investment firm, wringing what value they can out of the institution, which was their reputation, before (I’m anticipating) selling off the remaining parts. The government putting more money into that model just means more money being funneled to the Gazette’s owners, West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers. It offers no motivation for them to start producing better journalism. It hardly offers them motivation to hire reporters.

That said, I can’t say I’m against the LJSA either. In some communities across the country, particularly ones where the newspaper is still operated in good faith by people invested in their community, this could be a saving grace. A financial lifeline for community-focused reporting.

But I don’t think it will change much here.

On the other hand, Congress may act slowly, as they often do. Perhaps Late Edition (or its nonprofit successor, still in the works) will become eligible. Then I may have to change how I feel.