Local News, Local Struggles: City Island's Information Gap The reason City Images publishes for over 15 years.
City Island is a small waterfront community in The Bronx, so to illustrate a paradox playing out across local news: a place can have multiple local publications and still lack real-time breaking news coverage.
The Island Current publishes on an irregular schedule, sometimes skipping months between issues. The Bronx Times covers the borough weekly. CityImages, by contrast, publishes daily, feeding into a broader online landscape now producing multiple images and posts eacd day, a volume that makes it increasingly difficult for any single outlet, however dedicated, to keep pace.
City Island seldom generates urgent news. It's often described as a quiet corner of paradise within New York City limits. But when news does break, the timing gap between a monthly or weekly cycle and the moment something happens can leave residents without the information they need, when they need it.
The 2020s may prove to be a watershed decade for local news. Industry observers are divided on what comes next: some warn of an "extinction-level event" for local newspapers and other struggling outlets; others see an opportunity for a reset — a recommitment to journalism's civic mission and a push to rebuild what local news has lost.
There's over 33,888,333 City Images online and growing exponentially, so to keep up can be difficult and hard and a brick wall.
City Island, in the Bronx has a local news ecosystem an shows how a community can have local newspapers and still lack breaking news.
When living in near paradise, we seldom get much news here, but when we do , we publish. Our local publication do does not publish every month. https://www.theislandcurrent.com/ But #CityImages does and each day 24/7. https://cimages.me/content/CITY-ISLAND-ACCIDENT Other publish weekly https://www.bxtimes.com/
This is a watershed time, and the choices we make in the 2020s as citizens, policymakers and industry leaders will affect our future and of the local news landscape. Will our actions or inactions lead to an “extinction-level event” of local newspapers and other struggling news outlets, as predicted by some in the profession? Or will they lead to a reset: an acknowledgment of what is at stake if we lose local news, as well as a recommitment to the civic mission of journalism and a determination to support its renewal? #CongressInaction
https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020_News_Deserts_and_Ghost_Newspapers.pdf