Why we need local journalism

No one lives in America, exactly. We all live somewhere in America, like the nearly 9 million of us in New York City.

The thing I love about local news is that it doesn’t scale. It happens one court hearing or campaign or crime at a time so that you can fairly try and connect political decisions to individual people, the life of the city to that of its inhabitants.

Tracking those connections is crucial since the powers that be will always try to arbitrage things, and get their cut. There’s only so much to go around, and how it gets spread defines who we are and how we live.

The news business at its best is basically the grocery business. If you put in work and do things right, you can usually grind out a small return. The reporters dutifully showing up at public hearings and court cases and press conferences, filing endless requests for public information so that it ends up, you know, public are there as a check on the elected officials who are supposed to represent us.

There’s really no way to scale that reporting work or automate it or make it go viral. (“This woman gave a disjointed speech in the form of a question at a community board meeting. What happened next will shock you!”)

Reporting is a necessary part of a functioning state, sure, but it’s also a job, like keeping the shelves stocked. Public service, too, is a job. When the economics of those businesses get out of whack — often because people in power increase their share to the point where there isn’t enough left to go around — things slowly rot, and then quickly collapse.

If there’s one lesson to take from the rise of Donald Trump, who came up out of a real-estate business here that’s designed not so much to provide shelter as to give people a place to hide and clean their cash, it’s that bad things happen when the mudthrowers outpace the muckrakers.

Mayor de Blasio, after years of denying any problem at all with decades-old lead paint poisoning children in New York City Housing Authority buildings, now says that making NYCHA great again will be his new “crusade.”

That rhetorical turnaround came because a U.S. attorney forced the mayor to take some share of responsibility for the damage that continued on his watch as government at each level — in Washington, Albany and Manhattan — withdrew money and let problems fester.

Prosecutors are people, and political people at that. They read the newspapers. In this case, the U.S. attorney and his investigators built on years of reporting from family after family in project after project from the News’ Greg B. Smith, who’s had the NYCHA beat — about a city within the city that’s home to more than half a million people — mostly to himself.

All told, there are just a handful of reporters left covering public housing, schools, transportation and courts. To make the most of limited resources, many journalists at the biggest outlets aim to swoop in with big stories, often about problems that got big because they’d been ignored by those same outlets.

Once the political story about NYCHA passes, we’ll see who’s still there to track life in public housing and what the city actually does to improve it.

We know what happens when the state stops investing the time and money to maintain things in part because few reporters, their own industry hurting, are there to keep watch. People get sick as the rain keeps coming and mold grows behind walls and poison flakes fall. Eventually the roof collapses.

Bad things happen when the mudthrowers outpace the muckrakers