A hypothetical small space colony drawn by NASA employee Rick Guidice in the 1970s.

Read local news instead of doomscrolling

How does one exist online, right now, without being a constant mess of anxiety? It’s what I’ve been working on lately. I’ve told you about rejecting anxiety bait and not getting your news from social media, and both of those can make a big difference. But there’s something even simpler that I think can help: focusing more on local news. 

Now, to be clear, I would never argue that there’s no point to following national news—it’s important to know what’s going on. But almost all of us aren’t paying enough attention to local issues, and that’s part of why we’re constantly freaking out. 

The stakes of the national news constantly feel existential at the moment, mostly because they are. It also feels like there’s very little you, as one person, can do about it. Local news is helpful because the stakes are generally much more tangible and you can generally do something very concrete in order to change things. 

There are reasons that we all read less local news than we used to. At one point “the news” was delivered to your house on physical pieces of paper, generally produced locally and including a mix of local and national news (called a “news paper”). Now most people get their news from the internet. In theory this could mean more local news but in practice it has meant the opposite. There are all kinds of reasons for this, from local newsrooms gutted due to disappearing advertising revenue to the tendency of social networks to flatten culture into the few news stories that go viral nationally or internationally. Overall people read less local news now than they used to

And that’s too bad. Anxiety about the news is rooted in a feeling of powerlessness. Local news offers an anecdote to that feeling. You, personally, can have a much bigger impact on the political direction of your city and state than you can on the direction of the country. 

Part of this is just math—fewer voters means your vote has more impact. But another part of it is the relative level of engagement. Your local city government, for example, probably doesn’t get nearly the number of phone calls or letters from residents that your senator or member of congress does, meaning any phone call you make expressing concerns is going to have a much bigger impact than calls you make to your national representative. And you have even more power than that: you can just show up. City council meetings are public. In most cities you’ll even have a chance to speak. 

This is going to take some effort on your part. First, you are going to need to find a way to stay informed, which can be difficult in our current era—there just aren’t a lot of small (or even medium) town journalists anymore. You are going to need to be pro-active. I recommend regularly checking the homepage of any local media publications regularly, or even paying for a physical subscription. You can also start following local journalists and politicians you support on social networks—it’s a great way to add some local content to your feeds. Or learn when your city or county council meetings are and what they’ll be talking about—the agenda is public and typically available online.

The specifics don’t matter. Just take steps to ensure that more of the things you’re reading, watching, and listening to on a regular basis are talking about your local community. You’ll feel better for it. 

3 responses to “Read local news instead of doomscrolling”

  1. Bill, organizer of stuff Avatar

    @JustinPotBlog Unfortunately, there are generally no reliable sources of local news left in the US. A handful of large cities have a newspaper, but most of those are now owned by wealthy individuals or generic content farms like Gannet. Most smaller cities and towns have one or two "papers" that are owned by large content farms and don't have any local reporting, only the occasional press release or article about the local animal shelter. Spme have even been replaced by LLM-based slop generators

  2. Jérémy Garniaux Avatar

    @JustinPotBlog I agree. "Live at the right scale" should be our first principle, always. It's socially and ecologically the proper way to do things without harming yourself, the others or the environment, and having a gripe on our own leaving environment.

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