The Roman Catholic Church is the largest international organization in the world, overseeing some 1.3 billion worshippers on every continent in practically every country on the globe. So when a group of foreign correspondents and international journalists gathered at the Vatican in September 2019 to meet Pope Francis, they might have been a little surprised to hear the worldwide head of half a million clergy confess that what was on his mind was local news. “It is the most genuine and the most authentic in the mass-media world,” he said, and citizens of all countries need “to intercept the same reality, to be able to transmit to a wider horizon all those values that belong to the life and history of the people, and at the same time give voice to poverty, challenges, sometimes urgent issues in the territories, along the streets, meeting families, in places of work.” Its immersion in “the daily, local reality, made up of people, events, projects, problems and hopes” is what makes it so important, and he implored reporters to do a better job covering news on the local level.
Unsurprisingly, the newspaper business is also declining all over Europe. Anna Masera, the ombudswoman for LaStampa, a daily newspaper published in Turin, told me that, in Italy, print circulation has plummeted from 2.4 million daily in 2008 to less than a million in 2019. But, other than Pope Francis, “hardly anybody in Italy talks about this local news crisis,” Masera told me. “They all struggle on their own.” Small digital sites are cropping up, but “these newsrooms are tiny, and the staff and collaborators underpaid, and they mostly rewrite press releases.” The result is a less informed public, at a time when Italian politics is especially tumultuous. Not only did its government collapse in 2019, but the cash-strapped country was also the European country hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
In conversation after conversation with journalists worldwide, I heard a similar story. Flavia Lima, the ombudswoman for Folha, one of the largest and most influential news organizations in Brazil, said that smaller papers and other news outlets are struggling with the same problems that American papers are having. A study found that 64 million Brazilians, almost a third of the population, live in news deserts or near deserts. All over the country, eighty-one news organizations have closed since 2011.
Angela Pimenta, director of the Institute for the Development of Journalism, or Projor—“an NGO that could be compared to a Poynter Institute wannabe,” as she put it—has been involved in mapping news outlets, both print and broadcast, within 5,570 municipalities, for the resulting research project, Atlas da Notícia. In a country of 208 million inhabitants, the ten leading newspapers garner only 1.44 million subscribers, including print and digital, she said.
She named three overarching factors: the economic crisis in Brazil, digital disruption, and demographics. Adding to this is a new worry: President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration no longer requires government agencies to publish public notices in Brazil’s print newspapers, thus cutting into a steady revenue source. Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers called it “another government initiative to weaken journalistic activity by hitting newspapers financially.” It is especially hard, the organization said, “on small and medium newspapers in the interior of the country, where the so-called news deserts are already forming.” Bolsonaro, a far-right nationalist elected in 2018, has attacked news organizations and criticized coverage in a technique that should be familiar to observers of President Trump. The two have praised each other, and Trump has expressed approval of Bolsonaro’s use of the expression “fake news” to slam the press. In all, Pimenta said, there are serious concerns about the ability of the Brazilian press to hold government accountable, and the remote regions of the vast country have the worst of it.
In Australia, Chris Janz, the managing director of a major news conglomerate, announced in 2017 that two dominant legacy newspapers in the country—the Age, based in Melbourne, and the Sydney Morning Herald—would make big job cutbacks, perhaps as many as 120 editorial positions. The parent company, Australian Metro Publishing, sought to save $30 million as revenue fell. Janz’s words sounded all too familiar to those who follow the news industry in America and around the world: “Like all publishers globally, we are confronting challenges. Print circulation and revenue have declined. While our digital audience is vastly bigger, digital revenue is less certain in the face of mega players Facebook and Google.”
In Portugal, Catarina Carvalho, the executive director of Diario de Noticias, a daily newspaper in Lisbon, told me: “The Portuguese local media have never been very important. It’s a matter of scale. The country is so tiny [11 million at best] that there is no critical mass for a strong local press. There are many media, but few sustainable. Most of them have always been very dependent, either on the Church or the local governments … for support and financing. Now we are seeing a new trend: Evangelical religions are buying local radios.”
The United States’ neighbor to the north is experiencing similar troubles, the executive director of the Canadian Journalism Foundation, Natalie Turvey, told me. With its vast open spaces and regions that are sparsely populated, Canada may be particularly susceptible to having regions beset by news poverty.
But the problem hits the major Canadian population centers, too. The Local News Research Project at Ryerson University in Toronto found that well over two hundred newspapers (mostly weeklies but some dailies, too) have closed since 2008. That’s roughly a fifth of the news organizations in Canada, according to April Lindgren, who heads the project. “I was fascinated by the fact that Brampton, a large suburban municipality near Toronto with nearly 700,000 people, until recently had no local radio station, no local television station, no daily newspaper, and no serious online news outlets,” she said. “A new investigative online site launched recently, but until it came along, the city’s residents had only one local news source, a community newspaper that publishes once per week and its companion website.”
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, told me that it’s hard to judge the overall state of local journalism globally. “Data is uneven and incomplete in many countries.” Is the situation worse in the United States, where more than two thousand weekly and daily newspapers have folded in the past decade or so? “Local newspapers were more plentiful and profitable in the United States than in most other countries in the late twentieth century because a) a big country created geographically distinct markets and b) a big advertising spend generated lots of revenues even though print was in long-term decline.”
With the move to digital, the first factor no longer matters very much for advertising. As ad money goes online, the revenue drop has become precipitous. In the few countries where local news seems to be enduring fairly well—Norway, for example—there has been a heavier dependence on “reader revenue” or subscriptions, as opposed to advertising. What’s more, “local papers were more accustomed to competition from multiple national papers with genuinely national distribution, so they had to work harder to acquire and retain subscribers/attention.”
While things may look worse in the United States—and may actually be worse—it’s tough all over. Technology, changing demographics, and troubled finances don’t discriminate on the basis of geography. Many of the same discouraging results follow when dependable news sources cut their staffs or disappear altogether: less civic engagement, more political polarization, more potential for government corruption. These are global trends, and global problems.