NewsBreak's Transformational Potential

By reinvigorating local media, can local news take back its power as the fourth estate

Beth Macdonald Unsplash

Writing has become a much more complicated process with many venues to orchestrate. Writing a substack post is the most personal since there is no approval process and it is distributed through a subscriber list. It feels the most direct and spontaneous. It is where one can tell the backstory, and most be one’s regular self.

When writing for NewsBreak, I am crafting a persona for a wider platform, even as NewsBreak is seeking to localize the global, which is a high concept for a moment, when after coronavirus interjected to pause the world in its trajectory toward ever-increasing centralization.

There is a new interest in local news being talked about across forums as the shift to online media has affected local news providers as it has just about everything else.

In December of 2019, The Journal of the New York Bar Association published Why Local News Matters, and What We Can Do to Save It By Penny Muse Abernathy. In the following paragraph, she describes the pro…