Barbara O’Brien’s article was routine-enough fare for a local newspaper. It would not go on to win a journalism award or change the world. It didn’t even make Sunday’s front page on that day in May of 2019. It merely was the kind of day-in-and-day-out local reporting that makes secretive town officials unhappy because of what they can’t get away with, and lets local taxpayers know how their money is being spent.
O’Brien, who reports on several suburban towns for the Buffalo News, had found that the Orchard Park police chief, who was retiring abruptly, would receive an unexplained $100,000 as part of his departure. A few weeks before O’Brien’s story was published, she had asked town officials for the chief’s separation agreement, but they said it couldn’t be released because it included a confidentiality clause. Why would there be such a thing, she asked. The town supervisor referred the questions to the town attorney, who wouldn’t comment.
O’Brien doggedly took the next steps, as her story explained:
The Buffalo News obtained a copy of the sixteen-page agreement after filing a Freedom of Information Law request with the town. Keeping such a contract private is in violation of the Freedom of Information Law, according to Robert J. Freeman, executive director of the state Committee on Open Government.
“The contract is public, notwithstanding a confidentiality clause,” Freeman said. “The courts have held time and again that an agreement requiring confidentiality cannot overcome rights conferred in the Freedom of Information Law.”
Examining the agreement, O’Brien came across the $100,000 payout, and wrote the story. And she would, of course, keep digging—because that is what diligent local reporters do. But there are fewer and fewer of them all the time.
The Buffalo News is the regional newspaper where, until 2012, I served as top editor for thirteen years. It’s the largest news organization in New York State outside the New York City metro area. Like virtually every other newspaper in the United States and many around the world, it’s struggling. In the internet age, circulation volume and advertising revenue have plummeted, and the newsroom staff is less than half what it was when I took the reins, down from two hundred to fewer than a hundred journalists. That sounds bad, but is actually better than most. American newspapers cut 45 percent of their newsroom staffs between 2008 and 2017, with many of the deepest cutbacks coming in the years after that. In some places, the situation is far worse. (I use the term newspapers as a shorthand for newspaper companies, and mean to include their digital, as well as print, presence.)
It matters—immensely. As Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, put it: “If we don’t monitor power at the local level, there will be massive abuse of power at the local level.” And that’s just the beginning of the damage that’s already been done, with much more on the way. As a major PEN America study concluded in 2019: “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Democracy, in other words, loses its foundation.
The decline of local news is every bit as troubling as the spread of disinformation on the internet. Cries of “fake news!” from President Trump and his sympathizers may seem like the biggest problem in the media ecosystem. It’s true that the public’s lack of trust in their news sources, sometimes for good reason, is a great worry. But intentional disinformation, media bias, and the disparagement of the press for political reasons are not the subjects of this book. While these may grab the public’s attention, another crisis is happening more quietly. Some of the most trusted sources of news—local sources, particularly local newspapers—are slipping away, never to return. The cost to democracy is great. It takes a toll on civic engagement—even on citizens’ ability to have a common sense of reality and facts, the very basis of self-governance. So I’ll be clear: I’m not here to address the politicized “fake news” problem or the actual disinformation problem. This book is about the real-news problem.
“Welcome to Ground Zero,” said Mark Sweetwood, managing editor of the Youngstown Vindicator, when I told him, in the center of his newsroom (one that no longer exists), about the book I was researching on the troubles of local news. I came to the Ohio city only four days after a stunning announcement that an already battered community took like a sucker punch: Their daily newspaper was going out of business. August 31, 2019, would be the last day it published.
The Vindicator is far from alone. More than two thousand American newspapers have closed their doors and stopped their presses since 2004. And many of those that remain are mere shadows of their former selves. Consider Denver, where the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News boasted six hundred journalists twenty years ago—a robust group to cover a city, surrounding metro area, and much of Colorado as a whole. Both papers won Pulitzer Prizes. That situation has changed radically. The “Rocky,” as it was known, went out of business in 2009. And the Denver Post, owned by a hedge fund fronted by a group called Digital First Media, is down to under seventy in its newsroom. “It’s painful—there’s a knot in my gut to see what we built up over time torn down in this relentless way,” Greg Moore told me in 2018. He was the Post’s top editor from 2002 to 2016, when he stepped away, disheartened by what he called the ownership’s “harvesting strategy.”
My old paper, the Buffalo News, is facing an existential threat. It lost money in 2018 for the first time in decades. This development was frightening to its employees and management, though unknown to almost all local residents. Why would they think the paper was hurting? After all, there were so many years that the News would send a million dollars a week to its Omaha-based owner, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. (Until early 2020, Berkshire owned dozens of papers, including the Omaha World-Herald.) And though Buffett, who bought the paper in the 1970s, says he loves newspapers, he had made it clear that he was not inclined, over the long term, to support papers that are losing money. He believes in the purpose of journalism but is not a newspaper philanthropist; the interests of Berkshire’s shareholders come first. And the famed investor is extremely bearish about the future of local newspapers.
“They’re going to disappear,” Buffett said in a 2019 interview with Yahoo Finance. In a particularly memorable description, he said the newspaper business over the past few decades “went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to … toast.” It’s not hard to see the results of that trend: From 2004 to 2015, the U.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets as a result of closures and mergers, a study in the Newspaper Research Journal found. Since then, the pace has only quickened, and the future looks grimmer still. These days, there are hundreds of counties in America with no newspaper or meaningful news outlet at all, creating “news deserts,” as they’ve become known. And many of those that do remain are “ghost newspapers”—phantoms of the publications they once were, and not much good to the communities they purport to serve.
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet joined his voice to the dirge a few weeks after Buffett’s interview, with even more specific doom-predicting: “I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire,” he told an audience at the International News Media Association World Congress.
But, there’s a serious perception problem—American citizens don’t know about what’s happening to local news, or they choose not to believe it. As with issues like the global climate emergency, it is hard to convince a significant chunk of the public that they ought to care deeply about this, or do anything about it. There are plenty of news sources—free, after all—on the internet, though relatively few that dig into local news with the skill of seasoned newspaper reporters like Barbara O’Brien. People may believe that their Facebook friends will tell them what they need to know, without the benefit of professional reporting. Their thinking seems to go something like this: News will find me if it’s important enough. A Pew study in 2019 astonished many journalists, who live with the ugly reality of their drain-circling news business: Most Americans—almost three of every four respondents—believe that local news outlets are in good financial shape. And fewer than one in six Americans actually pays for local news, which includes having a subscription, print or digital, to the local newspaper. Apparently, only a small percentage of the public sees the need to open their wallets for their local newspapers or other local news sources, and they aren’t accustomed to doing so. As newspapers decline in staff and quality, they see even less reason to do so. Overcoming those factors is a steep climb—with very little time to crest the hill.
Since becoming the media columnist for the Washington Post, I’ve made it a practice to talk to local news consumers wherever I travel. Often, the takeaway is not encouraging. Many of the people I’ve interviewed, or simply chatted with, are disenchanted with their local news sources. They see local TV news as frothy—empty calories. Many of them mostly watch it for the mainstays of weather and sports. What about the local newspaper or its website, if they have one? It’s a shadow of what it once was, they often observe; it doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and it seems to be chasing clicks most of the time. They also complain bitterly about inaccuracy or political bias—either seeing the paper as in the pocket of local business or, frequently, too far to the left (occasionally, too far to the right).
A Northern California man named Jeffrey Miller emailed me after I’d written a column about the withering of the Denver papers. Miller wanted to explain that he was struggling with his own conscience about maintaining a subscription to his greatly diminished local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, which is owned by the profit-sucking Digital First Media, controlled by Alden Global, a hedge fund: “The paper has become almost useless to me, and it feels like paying for it is only helping a hedge fund instead of advancing journalism.” Miller said he would sometimes see articles repeated in the same edition, that sports coverage from the night before rarely made it into the paper, and that the quality of the reporting overall had dropped precipitously. There were a few local columnists he still enjoyed reading, but that was about the extent of it. The Mercury News, once a powerhouse local paper, owned by the high-quality Knight-Ridder chain, with a staff of more than three hundred journalists, has changed almost beyond recognition. Miller asked me whether I thought he should quit or keep subscribing. I sympathized with his quandary, but asked him to stick with the paper, despite his legitimate complaints. As I explained, the Merc, even in its enervated state, is probably the only hope for regularly covering city and county government and the public schools, and for maintaining something of a “village square” for the region. Miller, who is an avid news consumer and subscribes to national newspapers, agreed that he would do so, at least temporarily. But many subscribers make a different decision: They bail out. And their departure perpetuates the problem that seems to have no answer, but that does have a serious cost to citizenship and democracy.
When local news fails, the foundations of democracy weaken. The public, which depends on accurate, factual information in order to make good decisions, suffers. The consequences may not always be obvious, but they are insidious.
The tight connection between local news and good citizenship became abundantly clear in 2018 for Nate McMurray, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a heavily Republican district in western New York. Although McMurray, the supervisor of the town of Grand Island, was battling a party enrollment skewed against him (the district is the size of Rhode Island and spreads into eight counties), he did have one monumental advantage: His Republican opponent, incumbent congressman Chris Collins, had just been indicted on insider-trading charges. One would think that would be disqualifying. News of Collins’s indictment did make a difference in the election, especially in the parts of the district where local news was strong. The Buffalo News’s Washington correspondent, Jerry Zremski, had broken the insider-trading story and the paper followed developments diligently for months. Many who would likely have voted for the incumbent crossed the aisle to vote blue. But that wasn’t always the case in the more far-flung parts of the district, ones less served by strong local news.
The problem, as McMurray saw it, was that in some parts of the sprawling congressional district, voters were shockingly uninformed. The largely rural and suburban district includes Orleans County. It was identified by the University of North Carolina’s Penny Muse Abernathy, probably America’s leading expert on the subject, as a “news desert,” a rare one in New York State.
“I’d be going door to door, or meeting with people at a diner or a fair, for example, and in the most isolated areas, a lot of people had no idea that their own congressman had been indicted,” McMurray told me. Orleans County was, he said, “one of the toughest places.” Some people didn’t even know who Collins was, but many were incredulous when he told them of the federal charges.
“People told me I was making it up,” said McMurray. That shouldn’t have been the case, given that both Rochester and Buffalo television news were giving plenty of airtime to the scandal as it developed, and those stations were available throughout the district. But there was a time when almost everyone in the district had ready access to the print editions of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, a Gannett paper, or the Buffalo News, or were within easy reach of smaller local papers.
Meanwhile, Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president, was taking full advantage of the decline of credible news sources. He sent fundraising emails to constituents blasting what he called “fake news” about his misdeeds, and relied heavily on TV ads to get the message out about his supposed effectiveness in Congress. McMurray put it this way: “The lack of real journalism in a lot of the more remote parts of the district meant that people were relying on gossip, conservative radio, or social media. People were really deep into their echo chambers, or they just didn’t care.”
McMurray ended up losing the 2018 election by a whisker—less than half a percentage point. As for incumbent Chris Collins, he pleaded guilty to two felonies, resigned from Congress, and was sentenced to prison. Some of his former constituents may be unaware of that, too, or wouldn’t believe it if they saw it in a neighbor’s Facebook post.
It’s a vicious cycle—and one that has drawn the interest of researchers who have found that lack of trusted, factual information can lead to an overall decline of civic engagement. A Journal of Politics study showed that people in districts with weaker local coverage were less likely to be politically engaged and less likely to share opinions about the candidates running or give evaluations of their current representatives. Voting becomes more politically polarized when local news fades, says a study published in 2018 in the Journal of Communication—citizens are less likely to vote a split ticket, choosing candidates from various political parties. Instead, relying on national sources of news, including cable news outlets, they are more likely to retreat into tribal corners, voting along strict party lines.
It’s not just about voting. It’s about tax dollars. When local reporting waned, municipal borrowing costs went up, and government efficiency went down, according to a 2018 Hutchins Center working paper titled “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance.” A dearth of watchdog reporting has dire and quite specific results: “Following a newspaper closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points, costing the municipality an additional $650,000 per issue. This effect is causal and not driven by underlying economic conditions. The loss of government monitoring resulting from a closure is associated with higher government wages and deficits, and increased likelihoods of costly advance re-fundings and negotiated sales.” What the researchers found was something we know intuitively but they found to be quantifiable: “Local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money.”
The harm is not confined to the United States. Studies in Japan and Switzerland have found much the same dynamic: In places where news breaks down, so does citizenship; where newspaper market share increases, so does political accountability. The journalists I talked to or corresponded with in Brazil, in Italy, in Great Britain, in Canada, and elsewhere were worried about these industry trends and the fallout for the public, too.
This book will tell the most troubling news-media story of our time: how democracy suffers when local journalism fades. Through reporting in some of the so-called news deserts (or those stricken by “news poverty,” as one researcher put it) around the United States—places with little or no local news—it will show the contours of the damage. And though I cannot fully answer the question of how to solve the problem, if indeed there is a solution, I will also look at the range of what is happening in this environment: the rise of nonprofit news organizations, the efforts of local public radio, the cooperation between large national news organizations and small local outlets. But for most newspapers, at least, the change is simple: continual decline with no end in sight.
There are exceptions. Some metropolitan areas—for example, the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota—have relatively healthy local-journalism ecosystems. There are some encouraging signs in Boston. And there are bits of what looked like good (or less clearly bad) news, as some legacy newspapers met unexpected fates. At the Los Angeles Times, a local billionaire bought the paper in 2018, providing hope to an important news source that had been buffeted by bad management and deep cutbacks. Its editor, Norman Pearlstine, began rebuilding it. (But even there, a year after that heralded purchase, the good news was not unalloyed. A critically important effort to gain and keep digital subscribers got off to a slow start before picking up steam in 2020.) The New Orleans Times-Picayune, whose coverage of Hurricane Katrina had been so vital in 2005 and beyond, had yielded suddenly to its upstart competitor in Baton Rouge, the Advocate, announcing that it would cease to exist as it had since 1837. The paper’s historic name would live on, though, as the more-aggressive Advocate took it over and made its presence known in the Crescent City, hiring some of the Times-Picayune’s staff.
Innovative efforts to keep local news alive in a postnewspaper age are having some success—from impressive, nonprofit digital sites like MinnPost in Minnesota or Voice of San Diego to a fast-growing effort called Report for America, modeled partially on the Peace Corps, that puts hundreds of young journalists in underserved areas or hollowed-out newsrooms.
This is not by any means a strictly American phenomenon—far from it, since the effects of technology and the disappearing business model for traditional media sources do not agree to stay within arbitrary geographical boundaries.
Nostalgia is not the point here. There is no turning back the clock to pre-internet days when one-paycheck families watched the network evening news and got two dailies delivered, one before breakfast, one in the late afternoon. Another paean to the roar of rumbling presses, or to the glorious sound of print-advertising dollars ringing the cash register, does no good. Rather, what follows is intended to survey the damage and to sound a loud alarm, alerting citizens to the growing crisis in local news that has already done serious harm to our democracy: further polarizing our society, providing less incentive to vote, and failing to keep public officials accountable.
This story is not only about newspapers, though they are central to the narrative because their presence or absence affects so much of a region’s news. Local television and radio are important, though their challenges are different in nature, often the result of the consolidation of ownership under corporations whose leadership doesn’t care about journalism very much. As UNC’s Abernathy told me bluntly: “We are seeing a collapse of the local news ecosystem.” If she and Warren Buffett and Dean Baquet are right, if local newspapers are on the brink of extinction, with no adequate replacement in sight, citizens ought to know the extent of the losses now, before it’s entirely too late. While Buffett said that most newspapers were “toast” because “the world has changed hugely,” I don’t believe that new technology is necessarily the answer. Online news sites have not been consistently better at capturing digital advertising revenue or convincing users to pay for content. In the internet age, information is largely free and many don’t want to pay for it. Newspapers used to supply weather, comics, horoscopes, classifieds, and crosswords to get readers to pay for news, but even when the new digital-only news sites stripped away those add-ons, a leaner, meaner product has not always been more efficient, attractive, or lucrative. They still only represent a small portion of the industry, employ a fraction of out-of-work journalists, and cannot claim to have done a substantially better job at uncovering the news.
This is not to say that all local papers practice high-quality journalism. Some, and not just the smallest, are little more than the so-called “penny-savers,” doing journalism by press release. Others suffer from lack of staff. One reader in Texas emailed me an image of the September 1, 2019, edition of the Abilene Reporter-News, which featured a flattering piece about a local accounting firm on its front page with a huge headline: “Condley & Co. at 80: Reputation Paramount.” The photo was a lineup of eight smiling employees, with a framed portrait of the firm’s founder on a table. My correspondent’s comment was pithy: “When you live in a city with a daily newspaper and still live in a news desert.” It brought to mind an axiom: “Journalism is what somebody doesn’t want you to know. The rest is advertising.” Still, I’d wager that many of the readers of the Reporter-News would be sorry to lose their daily paper, which offers sports, obituaries, and other valuable coverage—and I hope they don’t. At the core, this book is about a once-profitable industry that was able to support an important public function but is now no longer profitable. We need to find other ways to support that function, or hope that consumers or other sources will be persuaded to pay for or subsidize that service somehow.
Reporting this book meant chronicling a situation that was quickly and constantly deteriorating. Huge media chains were merging, more newspapers were going out of business, digital sites were being abruptly axed, journalists continued to be laid off, not just at newspapers but at digital-first news companies that once were considered the rightful heirs to old-style print. When the coronavirus hit in early 2020, the immediate economic impact on news organizations could be felt worldwide. Advertising, already sparse, almost disappeared for some. By late March, newspapers in Australia and Great Britain had folded or suspended printing. In the United States and elsewhere, new rounds of layoffs or pay cuts devastated the very local newsrooms that were making themselves more vital than ever to their readers by covering the burgeoning public-health emergency. But even before this disaster happened, the harsh consequences were playing out in communities. Meetings of public officials took place without coverage. Agency budgets and municipal contracts went forward without scrutiny. Readers, unhappy with news coverage or financially strapped because they had lost their jobs, decided to end their subscriptions. Despite some hopeful signs, the ghosting of local news was happening before my eyes—fast, and with no end in sight.