Abstract
“News deserts” are growing in the USA.
“It’s easier for politicians to get away with things and it’s also harder for upcoming new politicians to be heard. Local reporting is how we know what politicians are doing to serve their communities. Without it, we see the reinforcement of the power of money in politics – those who can afford it will run, those who can’t will have a hard time getting their messages out.
“I live in New Jersey, where many small papers have been taken over by large chains. You really notice there are not so many local stories, and that’s a problem in terms of accountability. We need them.”
Referring to a 2013 story about staff of a former Republican governor of New Jersey closing a key road bridge, causing travel chaos, to settle scores with a Democrat mayor, she said: “It was a local paper that broke the Chris Christie and the George Washington Bridge story, for example, and brought it to our attention at the Times.”
This year marks 50 years since another important news story was brought to public attention from local sources. In 1969, a young freelance journalist named Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, one of the biggest atrocities ever perpetrated by the US military. Hersh had trouble getting the story published and eventually took it to Dispatch News Service, a small anti-war news agency in Washington. The story hit the wires on 12 November 1969 and was in newspapers the next day. His book on the massacre would earn Hersh a Pulitzer prize and a job on The New York Times.
Stories like these, with bigger political implications, may have more trouble getting told these days. Of the 3,143 counties in the USA, more than 2,000 now have no daily newspapers and 171 have no newspapers at all, according to the recent University of North Carolina study The Expanding News Desert.
Mike Shapiro runs Tapinto, a network of online local news platforms which operates under a franchise system and has eight million readers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Florida. He founded it 10 years ago to combat the loss of local news and the closure of small papers by hedge funds operating on behalf of big newspaper groups.
“Not having a local newspaper undermines democracy,” Shapiro told Index. “We tell our franchisees they must run at least one original news story for their town every day and also cover county news, which may be shared with other town papers if relevant.
“In the run-up to local elections, we print weekly statements by candidates in addition to covering debates. This means voters don’t have to just depend on a glossy brochure dropped through their doors with very little information on it. We also cover town council meetings, zoning meetings, board of health meetings and so on. Local news is so important for democracy – it’s not just about holding government accountable but about more engagement by citizens which, in turn, makes them more informed as voters and encourages them to vote.”
This view is borne out by the recent study Financing Dies In Darkness? (The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance) by Notre Dame’s Mendoza Business School, which indicates that newspaper closures are associated with less informed voters and lower voter turnouts.
Shapiro also believes there’s an actual financial cost for communities in “local news deserts”, particularly when it comes to decisions about local public spending decisions which communities can approve in referendums.
CREDIT: Taylor Callery/Ikon Images
“Bonds are often issued to build schools and other important community buildings, and citizens vote on a bond referendum. If the bond measure passes, key developers are given contracts. Keeping track of how and where that money is spent is important for communities – but if local government isn’t scrutinised, it allows corruption to fester,” he said.
“In New Jersey there are over 100 municipalities with no local newspaper. Some are economically disadvantaged and so have massive budgets but no press coverage – the local government could be doing a great job with that budget, or not – and not being informed about that is a big problem.”
The Notre Dame study also suggests that without local newspapers as watchdogs, local government isn’t subject to the same scrutiny from the public on things such as spending.
The lack of local news reporting in the small Los Angeles suburb of Bell allowed corrupt officials, headed by town manager Robert Rizzo, to get away with stealing more than $5 million in public funds by overpaying themselves for years.
A small investigative team from the Los Angeles Times eventually broke the story in 2010, and four years later Rizzo was sentenced to 12 years in jail.
There has perhaps never been a time to worry more about the loss of local news reporting than now. The first few months of 2019 saw a swathe of cuts by digital media and traditional print newspaper groups including Buzzfeed, Verizon Media, Gannet, Vice Media and McClatchy, which has added to the rapid shrinking of local journalism and the further growth of the “news deserts”.
It’s a phenomenon that has been widely documented in recent years. A Pew Research study indicates that between 2008 and 2017, newspaper newsroom employees declined by 45%, and across all media platforms newsroom employment fell by 23%.
Jeff Jarvis, a former journalist at the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, and now professor of journalism at CUNY’s Newmark School, says the loss of local journalism is important.
Jarvis sees the issue as a slow evolutionary process. “We are only at the beginning of a long period of disruption and we need to figure [out] how to serve communities,” he said. “Only one of our tools is storytelling and communication – we need to think about other things like education.”
Chris Daggett, former head of the philanthropic Geraldine R Dodge Foundation, has also been trying to figure it out, heading up an experimental incubator lab for local news in New Jersey in partnership with the Knight Foundation and The Democracy Fund. It was, says Daggett, who stepped down from the role last year, largely unsuccessful.
“We were trying to find the next business model to make local news work, but after eight years we failed. ProPublica [a non-profit newsroom with a focus on investigative journalism] has done good work but they are not exactly knocking the lights out. Tapinto is doing some interesting stuff with their franchise model, but on the whole it’s hard to get revenue,” he said.
“Local reporting is vital for democracy, but I think there is also a kind of laziness in the electorate right now and they don’t want local journalism until they need it. A reporter finds out something and then suddenly they are interested. The rise of Trump did see newspaper subscriptions go up as people saw a need for in-depth journalism.”
Zernike believes the loss of local reporting is a problem also for young journalists who, like her, used to cut their teeth at the local level. “It was where you honed your instincts – a wonderful training ground,” she said. “And it was local papers that used to bring talent to the nationals. We don’t have time to nurture those skills.”
The Little Newspaper that Definitely Could
“Why did I buy it? Well, I’m not very smart!” he said. “It was a terrible paper so we could buy it for next to nothing.”
His intent was to preserve the paper, which had been founded in 1909, saying: “The fuel was the heating up of the 2016 elections and the ‘fake media’ storm. I thought we could buy it and run it as a kind of journalism laboratory where we could attack erosion and trust in the media, and it became a mission.”
With a staff of two reporters, one delivery lady in her 70s and an office cat, the Malheur Enterprise embarked on a path that Zaintz calls “relentlessly local”.
When Zaintz bought the paper it had a circulation of 700. Now it has 20,000 unique readers per week in print and online issues throughout Malheur County.
“We don’t do clickbait, we don’t do high school sports. We cover real news and put the spotlight on community issues and solutions. We’ve proved that the public is hungry for real local news about substantive issues,” said Zaintz.
“Malheur County is 30% Latino and they are very under-represented in the power structure and in the media. We’ve also struggled to recruit foster parents here for children who have been removed from homes where there is drug abuse. Or we have to deal with the homeless. These issues need the media spotlight on them or the community will find it much harder to come up with solutions.”
The Malheur Enterprise covers local news so well that in 2018 it became the first weekly paper to be awarded the prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information award for a story about a criminal who had faked his mental health issues.
The result of the award is that ProPublica is now funding a third full-time journalist to work on that story for a year, and Zaintz will take on two interns this summer.
The online version of this article was amended on May 14th 2019 to correct the spelling of journalist Kate Zernike’s name. Zernike was also mistakenly referred to as ‘he’ in paragraph four. This has now been corrected.