A New Jersey lawmaker is trying to bolster local journalism after more than a decade of layoffs, with some help from the government: A tax deduction for subscribers.
Under Assemblyman Roy Freiman’s bill, you’d get a $250 deduction on your state income taxes if you subscribe to a New Jersey paper or digital publication. For most families, it would be a small savings. But every bit helps.
We do have a dog in this race, of course: Our newsroom is down several hundred reporters since its peak – from a staff of around 350 to just 140 full time. Local news, though, is a public good.
Reporters used to knock on hundreds more doors and keep tabs on what goes on with your local school board or town council. With fewer resources for that now, due to declining ad revenue, people are less aware of who exactly represents them and what those folks are doing.
They have a better-informed opinion of Joe Biden or Phil Murphy than their state assemblyman, or a massive local economic development project like the $400 million Wind Port in Salem County. “I felt that I lost my voice at the Statehouse,” Assemblyman John Burzichelli (D-Gloucester) lamented, citing the lack of quality, in-depth coverage of South Jersey.
He just lost his seat, too, after two decades in the Legislature – which he attributes to a surge of anger at Washington and pandemic politics. There’s something to that. As national news increasingly dominates, voters become more polarized, a team of researchers from places like MIT and Yale recently found.
“An often-unexplored consequence of the disappearance of local news is the fact that local politics will become increasingly determined by national matters,” one of the study’s co-authors, Charles Angelucci, told The Hill.
Online ads are cheap, and this revenue stream is now dominated by just two companies, Google and Facebook. Neither has a serious news operation. Meanwhile, newspapers are expensive to operate.
“There is trucking, presses and various departments necessary to operate a newspaper,” Star-Ledger Publisher Richard Vezza says. “Imagine a company delivering a physical product, let’s say their widgets, to 50,000 customers each day. No company or industry I know of does that.”
As newspapers rely more on circulation revenue and fight to hold onto readers, providing subscribers with a tax break will help both them and the newspaper, he adds.
Why, you might ask, should newspapers get a subsidy from the government? Well, other businesses do. The housing industry does, thanks to the home mortgage tax deduction. The same goes for fossil fuels and transportation. And what we’re seeing now with the absence of local news coverage is a core infrastructure problem: You can’t run a democracy without providing people with basic civic information.
We’ve had some local growth in digital outlets, like new sprouts after a forest fire. But there are still plenty of news deserts. One issue to carefully explore in hearings is how to avoid the potential pitfall of an outlet like a white supremacist newspaper. But overall, Freiman’s approach is promising.
Because this tax break is going to the subscriber, it has the advantage of not running aid to news organizations directly, avoiding the issue of the government picking winners and losers. And this much is clear: You can’t have a healthy democracy without robust local news.
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether it’s a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.
"save" - Google News
November 14, 2021 at 08:00PM
https://ift.tt/3oubm0l
Help save local news: Give subscribers a tax break | Editorial - NJ.com
"save" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2SvBSrf
https://ift.tt/2zJxCxA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Help save local news: Give subscribers a tax break | Editorial - NJ.com"
Post a Comment