a local news dilemma

A while ago, the RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped working (at least with my feed reader), which caused me some consternation as I tried to decide whether to build a workaround or just give up on the Herald-Leader. I believe in supporting local news, so I’ve wanted to find a technical solution to this, but a lot of the decision making is out of my hands, and I don’t really have time on my hands to build myself the kind of webscraper that would be fun to try out. So, this issue has just kind of lingered for a while.

A few days ago, though, Herald-Leader articles started showing up in Reeder again. I don’t know whether something changed with Reeder, with kentucky.com, or with the newspaper’s parent company, but it was honestly a bit of a relief that things fixed themselves without my having to do anything. Well, at first.

See, in the meantime, while I was thinking about how I don’t have the time to build myself a Rube Goldberg workaround to get Herald-Leader articles back into my feed reader, I started asking myself whether I really missed that news coverage. I do want to know what’s going on locally, but there is some coverage (most crime coverage, stories about people winning the lottery). What’s more, my spouse doesn’t really follow the Herald-Leader despite our subscription, relying on other local news sources to get updates. The cost of our subscription is pretty high—and getting higher at the end of the year—so it’s worth asking if we are getting everything out of that cost.

So yes, I believe in supporting local news, but I’m starting to wonder if that means continuing to support the Herald-Leader. If we stopped paying our expensive subscription, we could roll that into supporting our local NPR station, WUKY, which covers big Lexington stories. We’d have money left over to support the non-profit Kentucky Lantern, a non-profit, Creative Commons-using outfit that I’ve appreciated over the past year or two.

Even after that, we’d still have money leftover for me to start supporting tech news outfits like 404 Media or Platformer. Those aren’t local news outfits, and there’s a need for good local news, but as someone personally and professionally invested in tech, I really also need there to be good tech reporting out there.

We’ve subscribed to the Herald-Leader since moving to Lexington over five years ago, and it feels weird to be considering a cancellation. That said, I do feel like I could get just as much from cheaper sources—and have some money to get other news that I really, really care about. What’s more, as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve gone back through tags on my site and remembered that I’ve posted at least twice before about the paper’s RSS feeds giving out on me. It’s great that Herald-Leader coverage is back in my feed reader now, but I don’t know if that will hold up. Maybe it’s time to cut ties.

• local news
• RSS
• Lexington Herald-Leader
• Reeder
• web scraping
• NPR
• 404 Media
• Platformer