In my local, extremely progressive community, Facebook Groups are about 20x more important to democracy than local journalism, which residents genuflect to but provides less value than a replacement-level blog. I love journalism and stick up for it here all the time, but this platitude about local journalism has never rung true to me.

I’m guessing I know the local newspaper/newsletter you speak about being in Chicago. I was a very early supporter of them when they started up, but canceled a couple years back when it was clear they care far less about reporting and more about pushing personal beliefs and vendettas. To the point of outright destroying local businesses over petty ideological driven things.

I still think they do good work here and there, but their editorial standard is such that when faced with evidence of a reporter ignoring facts their response was to double down much less post a retraction. A conversation with one reporter I had basically summarized to “we will report what we want to how we want to, it’s our organization and we don’t get paid enough to be objective”. Fair enough, I suppose.

At that point random people with a blog is better since at least there is not an aura of neutral fact-based journalism behind it.

Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement for knowing the general happenings in my neighborhood and city. I’ve made an attempt to get more involved with local meetings and events the alderman holds, etc. but it seems far too little to keep up on anything in a major way.

Facebook Groups are garbage, but everything is in such a degraded state that they might look OK in 2026.

What's really needed is journalism done by professionals who are paid like professionals. That's a 100x better than any Facebook Group.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg continues to embrace the current administration.