News Deserts, Ghost Papers, and Beacons of Hope

Youngstown, Ohio

The Vindicator newsroom had a decidedly 1980s feel—reporters had cubicles and there was run-down gray carpet and furniture. And it was emptied out. Just a few of the desks were occupied by editors or reporters, but the expansive size of the newsroom suggested that this had once been a bigger, more bustling place. Those who were there were working hard, and also having fun, in the dark, gallows-humor way that’s typical of newsrooms. Mark Sweetwood, who commandeered a desk in the center of the newsroom, not sequestered in an office, was calling out assignments, deciding story lengths, and checking in with reporters. As I sat at one of the nearby desks, I could hear the familiar music of a typical newsroom: a blend of cynicism that cannot disguise a shared sense of mission, mixed with the rush of deadlines and worry about getting something wrong or otherwise missing a big story. Newsrooms run on plentiful caffeine, high anxiety, and sick jokes. I heard pained humor about the paper gearing up to cover its own funeral, and about deadlines that absolutely couldn’t be extended since, pretty soon, there would be no place to put a delayed story. The paper was about to close its doors.

Sweetwood told me that he kept thinking about a mostly forgotten column he admired and had recently reread. It was written by the late columnist Mike Royko, a Chicago journalism icon, on March 4, 1978, when the Chicago Daily News was going out of business. Royko puzzled over why a good newspaper, which the Daily News surely was, couldn’t make it. He concluded that public apathy and distraction were big factors. “In the Chicago area, 1.6 million people will turn on Welcome Back Kotter. About 2.1 million watch Charlie’s Angels. Wonder Woman draws 939,000. There’s a big market for mental cotton candy,” Royko wrote. “But out of 7 million who live in The Daily News circulation area, only 315,000 of them thought one of the better papers in America was worth 15 inflationary cents. When a new dictator takes over a country, one of the first things he does is seize or close the newspapers. Apathy isn’t as heavy-handed as a dictator. But it can get the same job done.”

Sweetwood saw the parallels with the Vindicator. People just didn’t care enough, he felt. But, of course, there was one huge difference. After the Daily News’s demise, Chicago would still have two other daily newspapers. (A fourth, Chicago Today, had folded less than four years earlier.) Youngstown? None.

That night, at a community forum in the local history center about the Vindicator’s impending death, residents cried, talked about what they would miss—the obituaries, the high school sports coverage, the competition for the area’s greatest golfer—and tried to come up with ways to save the company. They shared memories of delivering the paper as kids or of being featured in it for one reason or another. But, as one editor wondered with a dash of well-founded skepticism, what would happen if there had been a show of hands in that room to identify those who actually subscribed to the newspaper they said they would miss so much? Circulation, after all, had sunk to about 25,000 daily and 32,000 on Sunday, about a quarter of what it was in the late 1970 s. And that was far from the worst of the Vindicator’s problems.

Advertising had fallen off radically in a market that never was particularly robust. An employee union at the paper had gone on strike for nine months in 2004, just as Craigslist was coming on strong, meaning that the paper’s lucrative classified ads were drying up. The Vindicator never really recovered from that unfortunate confluence of events. And even at its height, the Vindicator was far less financially successful than most. Its best year was in 1989, the paper’s general manager, Mark Brown, told me, but even then the profit margin was 17 percent. That would be hefty in some industries, but far less than the 30 percent or more margins enjoyed by many newspapers and chains, margins that endured through the 1990s. The Vindicator had lost money for twenty of the past twenty-two years before it announced its closing. That was not the norm for regional newspapers, many of which had remained at least marginally profitable through those years.

The decision was also devastating for Brown’s mother, Betty Brown Jagnow, who served as the publisher, and still came in to the paper’s office a few days a week, well into her eighties. The Vindicator had been owned and run by their family for 132 of its 150 years. “It’s all we’ve ever known and all we ever wanted to do,” Brown told me, in a quiet voice and with a downcast expression, as we sat in his office, a converted storage room where bright lights blazed on an array of filing cabinets. It was not a fancy publisher’s digs. The paper had put most of its money into staffing the newsroom. Its forty-four journalists were a relatively robust staff for a paper of its circulation size; though greatly reduced, the Vindicator had not been cut to the bone.

There was a time, Brown recalled, when the Vindicator was able to send a staff reporter or a freelance stringer to every municipal board meeting and every school board meeting in the surrounding three-county area. “People knew that,” he said, “and they behaved.” But that practice had been gradually reduced over the years. The remaining staff was not nearly large enough to provide that kind of coverage, but it was a lot better than nothing.

Youngstown was the kind of region that badly needs that journalistic scrutiny, and by many accounts, still is. Writing in the New Republic in 2000, David Grann called Youngstown “Crimetown, USA,” as it was a hotbed of mafia activity and political corruption. The Vindicator’s editorial page editor, Bertram De Souza, had been at the paper for forty years, and had helped to reveal the malfeasance by one of Youngstown’s native sons—the infamous James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to jail after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes, and using his staff to do chores on his home and houseboat. “It is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” De Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” With the Vindicator gone, he said, there will be no other entity that will carry on that practice; no one to follow up on tips from sources; no one to examine public documents; no one to file Freedom of Information requests or demand access to meetings that should be public but are kept secret; no one with lawyers on retainer to help fight public-access battles. Almost inevitably, corruption will flourish, and the people of Youngstown won’t even realize what may be happening under their noses, De Souza said. “I’m scared for the community,” Mark Brown said.

Who will cover and uncover the news in Youngstown with the Vindicator gone? There were some signs of hope. A local competitor in nearby Warren planned to expand its Youngstown offerings, as did the local Business Journal. Before the Vindicator stopped publication in late August, Mark Brown was able to take a small measure of satisfaction in one development. He had agreed to sell the Vindicator’s name and certain of its assets (including its list of subscribers) to the Ogden newspaper chain, which publishes the Tribune Chronicle in nearby Warren. This meant that while the Vindicator would still close up shop, and its employees would lose their jobs, an edition of the Warren paper called the Vindicator would be distributed. But the Vindicator was still dead. Sure, it was better than nothing, but in terms of thorough local coverage, probably not much better.

There were a few other developments that helped ease the pain. The highly respected national nonprofit ProPublica decided to fund one investigative journalist at a Youngstown news outlet, as part of their efforts to address the local-news crisis. ProPublica works with twenty-three local partners across the country and pays the salary and a stipend for benefits so news organizations can devote a full-time reporter to work on a government accountability reporting project for a year. ProPublica also offers editing support, as well as data, research, engagement, audience, and production/design assistance. “What’s going on in Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley cries out for solid investigative reporting,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “We created the Local Reporting Network to fill that critically important need.” The three Youngstown TV stations would also do their part. One of them is owned by the same family that had run the newspaper for a century and a half.

Maybe most promisingly, the newspaper chain McClatchy said it would start an all-digital news site in Youngstown, partly with funding from Google. It would be called Mahoning Matters. (The Mahoning Valley is the area surrounding Youngstown, and the name is meant to reflect the organization’s intention to report regionally, beyond the city limits.) Mark Sweetwood, the former managing editor of the Vindicator, would be its only editor, and two former Vindy reporters would be the only full-time journalists in its small staff, along with a publisher, a business executive, and several freelance writers and photographers. Mahoning Matters was the first result of Compass Experiment, a McClatchy and Google partnership that describes itself as “a local news laboratory” founded “to explore new sustainable business models for local news.” But the Vindicator had forty people in its newsroom, not four. The new publication would not be able to produce nearly as much local journalism, and the lack of a physical newspaper would exclude some of the Vindicator’s core readership, many of whom had told me how much they still valued the old-fashioned tactile experience of reading the daily product in print.

In February 2020, McClatchy announced that it was more than $700 million in debt, and filed for bankruptcy. Control of the company would be turned over to the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, but its thirty newspapers would presumably be kept afloat, although it most likely meant even more severe cost-cutting and possibly the shuttering of enterprises like Mahoning Matters. Digital sites, it turns out, present many of the same problems as ones exhibited by newspapers. How do you capture advertising revenue, convince users to pay for your service, and free yourself from the fickleness and meddling of owners and donors? So far, no business model has been able to fully overcome these conundrums.

East Lansing, Michigan

When there’s no one to uncover the news, it might seem like there is no news to be uncovered. When there’s no one to sniff out scandal, it might seem like there is no scandal. But in East Lansing, Michigan, one woman’s radical approach to citizen-generated news found something quite different. “It’s amazing–there’s one scandal after another, if you look,” Alice Dreger told me.

You couldn’t call East Lansing a news desert, because the Gannett-owned Lansing State Journal was in the adjacent and much bigger city of Lansing. But Gannett has vastly cut its staff to stay profitable, and coverage of East Lansing’s government pretty much went away. The newspaper would cover the university, but rarely devote any column inches to East Lansing’s city government, schools, or neighborhood issues. “There was basically no news coverage here,” Dreger recalls.

Dreger is not a journalist by training. She is a bioethicist and taught at East Lansing’s Michigan State University as well as Northwestern University in Chicago. Her 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, recounts her activism and controversies surrounding intersex genital surgery. A New York Times book review called it “a splendidly entertaining education in ethics, activism, and science.” But since professional journalists weren’t covering her town, she and some other community members started a local “discussion list” online, which grew to include coverage of meetings, efforts to free up government documents, and long features about local issues. She even started training people about how to do basic community reporting. Her “news brigade,” which today numbers about 140, consists of housewives, students, and retired people of all stripes. They are compensated very little for their efforts, about $50 per article. “If you have a city on fire, and there’s no fire department, people have to grab buckets. We got people to realize here we had a city on fire,” she said.

For the first few years, Dreger’s brigade worked in a relatively casual way, as a “voluntary citizen-reporting project.” As they got more dedicated and more organized, Dreger turned the effort into a nonprofit corporation in 2014. She called her website East Lansing Info. She hired a retired automotive engineer as the managing editor. She started fundraising, but kept expenses extraordinarily low. And, she said, about half of what the site does is government reporting, which is what wasn’t being done before. She had to explain to readers why ELI wasn’t covering the biggest story the city has had in years: the scandal over Michigan State University physician Larry Nassar, a team doctor for USA Gymnastics accused of sexually assaulting or molesting hundreds of young women and minors, who was convicted and sentenced to multiple prison terms totaling more than a hundred years. “When I saw that the BBC was showing up, I realized that was not something we needed to be spending our time on,” she reasoned. (Reporting by a different newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, helped uncover the scandal and put Nassar in prison.)

In recent years, here’s some of what ELI has dug up:

•  A mercury spill was mishandled at the East Lansing wastewater treatment plant. (The city fired the whistleblower who revealed what was happening.)

•  East Lansing had a secret $200 million pension debt, which was gigantic for such a small city. The revelations were a core issue in the defeat of a popular mayor, Nathan Triplett, in 2015, in an election that drew high voter turnout.

•  A retaining wall, built at public expense with federal Housing and Urban Development funds, was benefiting the city attorney’s personal property. HUD later deemed it a misappropriation of funds and demanded the money be returned.

•  The city was selling off a piece of municipal property on the online auctioning website eBay.

•  “The air conditioner story,” as it’s become known, told of how city government effectively outlawed thousands of “noisy” home air conditioners based on a couple of complaints about one air conditioner.

“People used to tell us, ‘There’s no there there, in East Lansing,’” Dreger said. But the nonprofit, to some extent, has changed that. “When you create a news brigade, it’s amazing. You find out there’s a there there, and it’s beautiful. And nutty. It turns into home.” And that fulfills one of the many intangibles lost when local news fades—the sense of community, of place, the role of news organization as a kind of village square where people gather to share a common experience.

For Dreger, one of the most notable and surprising results of her experiment is the way a group of amateur reporters made East Lansing residents appreciative of professional journalism. “People didn’t see news as a service, they saw it as a product,” she said. But she has found that people, including those who work with her, “are having energetic conversations about the meaning and purpose of news. This has turned a lot of people into evangelists for news.”

Remarkably, ELI has a budget of only $100,000 a year, an amount that wouldn’t even cover two reporters’ salaries and benefits in many legacy newsrooms. “Nobody wants to talk about expenses,” Dreger told me. But she has found that it’s possible to run a nontraditional news organization on a shoestring. She sees a gender component to this situation. Women, culturally, are accustomed to volunteering their time or working for very low wages, especially when it benefits their communities. Women make up the majority of the 140 community members who have been “turned into reporters.”

Pflugerville, Texas

John Garrett is standing in a cavernous 32,000-square-foot room proudly showing me something bizarre in this day and age: his company’s shiny new Goss presses. Garrett and his wife and business partner, Jennifer, believe in print, and they are convinced that the news industry’s focus on chasing those elusive digital advertising dollars has contributed hugely to its demise.

“We’re not digital first,” Garrett said. The Garretts founded Community Impact in 2005 with one paid employee. When I visited in 2019, they had 230 employees, staffing 34 publications in 4 states, with more to come. Their newspapers are mailed, free, to everyone in the circulation area. The digital sites have no paywall.

“And every year we’ve given raises to everyone on staff,” he said, another rarity in the newspaper business. Reporters mostly make around $30,000 a year, some closer to $40,000. The company had never had a layoff despite starting up just a few years before the economic downturn and recession that brought an advertising collapse that decimated the news business. Community Impact had been moderately profitable almost every year, at about a 5 percent profit margin, Garrett said.

If Community Impact sounds like it takes a “penny-saver” approach to news, that’s misleading. The full-color tabloid-size papers are “stitched and trimmed,” meaning they are neatly edged and stapled, creating a high-end look. Though their staffs are tiny, the papers engage in true enterprise reporting on subjects like homelessness, road projects, taxes, and teacher salaries. They don’t do what Garrett calls the kind of “Johnny kicked a field goal” coverage that characterizes most giveaway papers and many subscription-based weeklies, but they may occasionally do a feature on a local business. Advertisers aren’t off limits for editorial coverage; but they’re also not the only ones to get some ink, as a Forbes profile of the company noted. “I can’t tell you how many people have told us we are their only real source of news, and that means a lot to us,” Garrett told me. “We see that as a big part of our mission.”

Its business model relies firmly on serving small, local advertisers by allowing them to reach very specific audiences in print. “I can honestly look advertisers in the eye and say we can compete with Facebook as far as targeting audiences,” Garrett told me. The ads are specific to individual mail-carrier routes, and include restaurants, dentist offices, and hospitals. It has turned out to be a lucrative business. But expanding the company hasn’t come without some scary moments. Probably the worst was the decision to spend $5 million on new presses at a time when conventional wisdom said that print was over and done with. “Dead trees,” as the scornful dismissal went.

“I visited Long Island to see the new Goss Magnum Compact presses. On my way, I prayed and asked God to make it really clear we should make this kind of investment,” Garrett told me. “I mean, I needed a clear sign.” He got it. Just after his return, the Austin American-Statesman announced it would be shuttering its presses, and would print the paper from a remote location. For Garrett, it meant that his instinct was correct. He couldn’t depend on another printer (in this case, the Statesman) to do their printing work. “We had to own our production.” Later, he realized there was another, equally important reason that this mattered. “I didn’t understand how important these skilled people were to the production process.” It has been a big part of Community Impact’s success. “The profits we have moved from outsourcing to insourcing are fueling our growth.”

Community Impact combined its monthly, free, direct-mailed newspapers with a frequently updated news page on the web. The company isn’t really a model for daily newspapers that are in trouble. But Garrett’s approach was a recognition that print advertising is still sustainable. More broadly, print still matters, even in the digital world. This print-advertising-based model, though, is especially susceptible to economic downturns like the one that accompanied the spread of the coronavirus. By March of 2020, advertising revenue had plunged deeply, and the company’s executives were taking pay cuts while they tried to stave off staff layoffs and while they considered reducing some of their editions.

Garrett thinks that dailies are likely to move to Sunday-only in print and digital the rest of the week, which is precisely what another against-the-grain thinker has planned at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.

Little Rock, Arkansas

In mid-2019, the iconoclastic Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher and owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was doing something very unusual, as he was wont to do. The seventy-two-year-old was giving away $12 million worth of free iPads to his subscribers across the state. The idea was that they would be able to read, in digital form, what looked exactly, page by page, like a daily print edition, while the Democrat-Gazette moved actual print publication for most of its readers to one day a week, on Sundays.

I had been watching Hussman’s against-the-grain moves for years, with admiration. In 2019, he gave $25 million to the University of North Carolina and became the namesake for the Hussman School of Journalism and Media; as part of the deal, he insisted that “journalism” and not “media” would come first in the official name. I heard him speak at a newspaper editors conference in the early 2000s, where he talked about why he’d put up a hard paywall at the paper after a two-year experiment in offering it free online. When I asked him about it in an interview, he recalled the experience of hearing from his readers and acquaintances in Little Rock. “They’d tell me, ‘Say, I really like that website of yours, and you know, I used to buy the paper but I don’t need to anymore.’” Of course, he recalled, “we were all waiting for the digital-advertising bonanza that was going to make all the difference.” But it never came, so in 2001, after two years, he changed his mind. No more free Democrat-Gazette. You could read it online, but you’d have to pay or be a print subscriber. “Between 2001 and 2011, we did not lose any circulation, while a lot of dailies were losing a third or even a half of theirs,” he told me.

The paper has also maintained its news hole—the space given to editorial content—and its newsroom employment is better than many papers in similar markets. When many regional papers have reduced newsroom employees to fifty or sixty, the Democrat-Gazette still had 106 staffers.

Despite this relatively strong position, Hussman said, his paper lost money in 2018 for the first time in twenty-five years. He calculates that circulation that once was 180,000 daily and 220,000 on Sunday is around half that now. If Hussman’s iPad idea sounds far-fetched and unlikely to succeed, that’s because it is admittedly a desperate measure for a desperate time. “My dad was a fabulous businessman and he used to ask people if they’d heard about the rabbit that climbed a tree. Somebody would say, well, rabbits don’t climb trees. And he’d reply, ‘I know, but this one had to.’” And so, too, he hopes for newspaper readers and their free iPads. “If I hadn’t devoted forty-five years of my life to this, there is no way I would be doing this.” Will this rabbit be able to climb the tree? In Hussman’s mind, it simply has to.

“It’s really important to the public to have the watchdog,” he said. The outlook is far from bright, even given Hussman’s approach. And it’s worse elsewhere: “I’m real pessimistic. I’m afraid that five or six years out, we’re going to end up with no local newspapers. And I’ll tell you what: It’s going to be a field day for corruption.”

East Palo Alto, California

Once served by two weeklies, the small, multi-ethnic, relatively poor city of East Palo Alto has become a news desert. The results, as surveyed by the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, are depressing: There was no news coverage for a week, when 80 percent of the school district’s 184 teachers, in an emotional public meeting, protested what they saw as the school superintendent’s mismanagement and signed a vote of no confidence. Finally, nearby city dailies published a story or two, and then dropped the issue. And when it came time in 2016 to elect a new city council in East Palo Alto and to decide on three ballot measures, including two that would raise local taxes, there was virtually no advance coverage. The Palo Alto Daily News mentioned the council race just once before Election Day, Farhi reported. “The rival Palo Alto Daily Post listed the candidates’ names in August—and then didn’t report another word until after Election Day.”

Lexington, Virginia

Darryl Woodson was busy, though too experienced to be frantic, on a Tuesday afternoon in October 2019, as deadline approached for the weekly News-Gazette. There was a big story happening: The former head nurse in the Rockbridge Regional Jail, who was convicted in a federal case involving the abuse of a prisoner, was being sentenced. The next morning, the story carried a large headline across the top of the paper’s front page: “Hassler Given One Year.” Page One also featured informative coverage of the candidates for the following week’s Board of Supervisors elections and some other meaty political news.

Woodson, a wiry man who, despite his graying hair, looks too young to have been at the paper since 1983, found a few minutes amid the news rush to tell me that he’s worried. Advertising revenue is way down at the News-Gazette from the days when there were three car dealerships in the area eager to take out full-page ads on a regular basis. And he’s thought about whether it would make sense to reduce expenses by trimming his editorial staff, even though he makes do now with only two-and-a-half reporting positions. The whole newspaper operation, including the advertising and circulation staff, amounts to thirteen employees; the broadsheet, with its crisp color photographs, is printed in Lynchburg at the daily News & Advance, about an hour southeast.

“We’re getting by, but it’s really gotten tough,” he said. The paper has tried to find new sources of revenue. The monthly, free-standing real estate section, heavy with ads, is helping to stanch the bleeding. The newspaper itself carries slick circulars from Walmart, Kroger’s supermarket, CVS, and other chain advertisers. But it’s a far cry from the old days.

If this family-owned newspaper were to fail, like so many other small weeklies in the United States, Lexington’s quality of life would suffer, residents were quick to tell me. “We’ve only got the News-Gazette and one radio station, so other than that, there’s just social media,” said a clerk at The Georges, a boutique hotel, where an array of the day’s printed newspapers are laid out for the guests: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This small town is dominated by Washington & Lee University, and student journalists produce a weekly website and broadcast called the Rockbridge Report that provides regional coverage. If the News-Gazette were to fail, Lexington would become yet another town too dependent on student publications for news. “When the Student Newspaper Is the Only Daily Paper in Town,” goes a New York Times headline in 2019 chronicling the problems facing Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In the fall of 2018, President Trump’s then-press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was asked to leave a tiny farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, the Red Hen. Owner Stephanie Wilkinson made the decision not to serve Sanders and her party after conferring with her staff—they were in agreement that some of the Trump administration’s decisions and actions were so offensive that one of his chief representatives simply wasn’t welcome. After much ado on Twitter, the event became a flashpoint for the polarized politics of the nation—and of the region. The News-Gazette covered the Red Hen contretemps with news stories and commentary, but Woodson made the decision to publish every local letter-to-the-editor that he received, as long as they met certain editorial standards. That resulted in pages and pages of passionately expressed missives printed over several weeks. “We might have published a hundred letters. I kind of lost count,” Woodson said, as we stood in the front office of the paper’s one-story brick building located in the heart of small-town Lexington: a town that features the Stonewall Jackson House and Museum, and where Robert E. Lee, the onetime university president and Confederate commander, is buried under the campus chapel that bears his name. The region and the university have grappled with conflicting ideas about their history, at times focusing on Confederate flags and monuments. There was even a proposal to change the name of the university, although, as one student journalist told me with utter conviction, “That will never, never happen.” Lexington may be small, but it’s not without news.