There have been some big, deep cuts in print newsrooms lately. USA Today, the Washington Times, Miami Herald and the New York Times have all cut staff dramatically this year.  While those major outlets have managed to stay afloat for now, local daily newspapers have been going under altogether. It’s mainly been print media that’s suffered the most, but local TV affiliates have also been axing staff lately.

Of course, the culprit is the Internet, with its on-demand and easy navigation to news that matters to the reader. But ease and instantaneousness isn’t the only reason the Internet is winning the media battle. The combination of accountability afforded through the Web interface and coverage of major events that matter to a lot of people rather than a few is yet another reason why national media outlets on the Internet are so easily overtaking local reporting. Even those local papers that have migrated largely to the Web haven’t found salvation there. And the local news blog site movement hasn’t exactly taken off. As much as it’s played a part in shaping the history of news reporting in America, local news is dying.

There are plenty of people who lament the loss of print media and local papers. I have a place in my heart for local weeklies, having written and edited for a couple in my past. But allow me point out an example of why the death of local news can be as sweet as Tim Tebow’s tears. A big thanks to Mr. Rob Sheppe, who sent me a link to an article on a man in Arizona who recently resigned from his job as the IT guy for a school district after he was found to have installed SETI@home on about 5,000 computers that belonged to the schools.

Here’s a brief synopsis: The IT guy was in charge of installing all of the software on new computers for the school district, I take it there were around 5,000 of them. As an added bonus he also downloaded a free software program called SETI@home, which uses donor computers’ processors to analyze in real time mountains of data provided from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The program runs in the background whenever the computer’s on, looking for any weak or diverse signals of non-natural background noise in deep space. In other words, SETI@home helps the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute suss out evidence of the extra terrestrial intelligence for which it searches.

Here’s how the local CBS affiliate in Phoenix reported it:

Headline: “Alien-hunting school employee resigns.”
The guy is a “hero in the alien seeking world” and an “alien seeker.”
The lede: “He searched for UFOs, aliens and creatures from outer space.”
And a quote from the school district superintendent, “As an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.”

The article did mention the stated reason why the guy’s in hot water. The district estimates that since the computers were running the program 24 hours a day for 10 years, it has shelled out about an extra million bucks in utility bills and PC repairs. The superintendent also added that the computers were running slowly. (I can attest to this, having installed and ultimately ditched a similar program from Stanford, Folding@home, which runs protein folding sequences to get a better grip on how cancer, Alzheimer’s and other dread diseases originate.)

The guy’s wife tells the local news affiliate that her husband had permission from the last administration. We can also hardly assume that he went around to each school after hours to personally ensure all computers remained on. So the guy’s real crime here is slowing down school computers by about 30 percent. Still, he resigned his post and faces a possible lawsuit. He also becomes the weirdo alien hunter, thanks in large part to the local CBS station.

At no point did the article bother to mention that that SETI is an acronym (it referred to Seti throughout), what it stands for or that it’s a respected, well-funded scientific institute with ties to the JPL, NASA and just about every legitimate space venture on the planet.

It lacked research and appeared to be skewed against this guy without offering any explanation of what he was really up to. I dug a little further and after about 20 seconds of research, I found that the author of the article won an AP Reporter of the Year award in 2002, teaches advanced broadcast reporting at Arizona State University and reported on an Amtrak disaster in Alabama in 1993. Another few minutes later, I found that the Amtrak crash he covered took place on September 22, 1993. In a heavy fog, a barge hit a railroad overpass and distorted the bridge above minutes before Amtrak’s Sunset Limited passenger train came upon the bent tracks and derailed into Bayou Canot, in Saraland, Alabama. Forty-seven people died (five crew members and 42 passengers). It remains the worst accident in Amtrak history. I also had little trouble finding that the  barge was owned by Warrior and Gulf Navigation Company, that CSX owned and maintained the railroad bridge and that Elvi Stevens, 69, of Orange City, Fla., suffered a broken leg in the wreck.

Research.

I’m not a space guy. I haven’t been a fan of NASA since I was a kid. I don’t believe that aliens crashed at Roswell. My point is not to defend the legitimacy of SETI or its research. My point is that there’s a guy in Arizona whose neighbors, thanks to a half-hearted report by his local CBS affiliate, now likely think he watches the skies, hangs out on weekends along the fence surrounding Area 51 and probably kind of liked the probing he got from the alien he believes abducted him for a tour of crop circles.

This is why local news is dying a fast, gushy death.

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More on HowStuffWorks.com:
How can a PlayStation 3 donate its processing power to medical research?
How SETI Works
How Area 51 Works