Violet Dawson
Surrounded by national news and social media platforms, local journalism cuts through the noise.
In today’s media landscape, algorithms feed us stories designed to confirm what we believe, locking us into political echo chambers but local journalism breaks through that cycle. This issue is all about why trusting your local news matters and why it’s worth listening to.
The Inland Empire has become a news desert. But local news makes us feel connected to our community.
National news outlets are getting less trustworthy, peddling sensationalized stories to get clicks however they can, regardless of political affiliation. Although national news is important, these big corporations have different narratives they want to push, inclining their audience to think strongly in the way that the corporation wants you to.
This has divided our communities into a digital civil war fueled by increasingly radicalized echo chambers. Which is now spilling out into the real world with acts of political violence, calls for deadly vengeance and dehumanizing.
With being locked in an echo chamber it made us not listen to people around us, whether they have opinions that align with our views or not.
But we turned away from this ideology and focused on local journalism.
Local newsrooms are a beautiful asset to a town, as they are truth tellers. It’s a privilege that local journalists are able to form these connections because it makes for more sincere and real news. Being a local journalist, reporting seems more intimate and personal which reflects on the way we write.
We learn to work with another to put our school and city on display for our readers. Although we are a team, we grew to see each other as family. For the past year we’ve built a good team in our newsroom. We work well together in taking photos, editing and even get advice for each other about the stories we write. But this is what highlights student journalism.
Student journalism demolishes the cages of the algorithmically manipulated echo chambers that keep us afraid, angry and divided. But instead, we can build a community with our news not just on our campus but worldwide.
The news that we write becomes a light in the darkness, that is in a sea of hopeless hatred and division that is spread across the world.