Roush talks about the decline of local biz news coverage across the States

Veteran business journalist, author, dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University and founder of business journalism site Talking Biz News Christopher Roush talked about the drop in local business news coverage across America during an OPC book night on Oct. 11.

An excerpt from the text reads:

Roush, speaking to OPC Past President Paula Dwyer about his new book, The Future of Business Journalism, said expensive subscription services aimed at executives, such as Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNBC and The New York Times, have eclipsed local coverage as newspapers hemorrhaged staff or closed up shop over the last two decades.

“What they’re really doing is providing business and economics news to a very high-end clientele,” he said. “A clientele that can afford to pay $25,000 for a Bloomberg terminal on their desk or they can pay sometimes thousands of dollars for subscriptions to multiple publications.”

Roush said root causes of the crisis include the glut of free content that news organizations provided in the first years of exploding internet access, the loss of advertising revenue, and papers discontinuing their daily printed stock listings, which were once the backbone of local papers’ news sections.

Read the full text here.