A decade ago, Clay Shirky, one of the most insightful thinkers on the internet’s effects on journalism, surveyed all the panicky things newspaper executives were considering to save their industry, including lawsuits against content-stealers, poorly conceived paywalls, and systems of “micro payments” to news organizations for individual articles. His essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” has since become a seminal piece of writing for being sharply critical of those who were steadfastly denying what he saw as the obvious endgame.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en bloc. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away….
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.
The newspaper industry now comprises two distinct groups: the haves and the have-nots. National giants like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post belong to the former, largely through convincing millions of readers to pay for digital subscriptions. With very few exceptions, local newspapers fall into the second category. Many are becoming “toast,” in Warren Buffett’s all-too-memorable phrase.
But the journalism remains vital. Local newspapers like the Palm Beach Post and the Miami Herald have for years doggedly told the unsavory story of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who would eventually face federal charges and then die in prison. Herald reporter Julie K. Brown’s decision to interview the girls and women that Epstein victimized was what made all the difference, and she did this work after many thought that the Epstein saga had gone stale. What happens when there isn’t a news organization that can give a reporter the time and resources for such work? One that has lawyers on staff or on call? Editors with serious investigative experience? The story may be known to some, but never fully revealed. In the Epstein case, the federal prosecutor charging him acknowledged that his team had been “assisted by some excellent investigative journalism.”
By late 2019, major Rust Belt papers were suffering particularly tough blows. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in 2018, was swiftly reducing the number of days the paper would be available in print for home delivery. Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab tallied up the medium-to-large cities in the region that no longer have a seven-day home-delivered print newspaper: Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Flint, Grand Rapids, Syracuse, Harrisburg, Toledo. Many of these cities are poor—in fact, some of the poorest in the nation. This fact, no doubt, contributes to the newspapers’ financial problems; their advertising markets are likely to be limited and weak, and they may have communities that are less digitally oriented, so less likely to buy digital subscriptions. Home delivery of a printed paper certainly isn’t the most dependable measure of a news organization’s value, but when it withers away, something important is lost.
New, all-digital news sites, many of them nonprofits, are essential. But, according to one significant study, they are not yet as important as newspaper companies, even in the shrunken and faded state that newspapers are in. Two researchers at Duke University, Philip Napoli and Jessica Mahone, studied a hundred communities across the United States to explore which types of outlets are the most significant producers of journalism. They analyzed more than 16,000 stories to determine whether each met the following criteria: Was the story local? Was it original? Did it address a critical information need? The results should give pause to those ready to say this legacy medium is a thing of the past: Newspapers produce more local reporting than television, radio, and online-only outlets combined. “There needs to be more of a focus on how do you support newspapers best,” Mahone told me. “That doesn’t reflect how a lot of philanthropies are approaching the problem.” Philanthropists and foundations tend to pour money into startups and nonprofits, while newspapers often are considered something to leave behind as quickly as possible. One well-intentioned journalism advocate wrote off newspapers by saying that “the ship has sailed.” “The idea that we have a news ecosystem ready to replace newspapers is just false,” Mahone said.
What worries Joel Berg most about the decline of local journalism is that poor people and advocates for the disenfranchised have far fewer ways to get their message out. The rich and powerful, on the other hand, always have a bully pulpit. When Berg first joined what’s now known as Hunger Free America, a nonprofit based in New York City, it was called the NYC Coalition Against Hunger. “Having little money or staff, our single most effective tool to hold the City and State of New York accountable on hunger and poverty was using the local media to highlight our cause,” he said. They put out press releases and held events to point to the level of hunger and poverty in New York, and to criticize government policies on food stamps, low wages, the rate of participation in free school breakfast programs, and the like. “Because we were able to get some lower-level elected officials media coverage, subsequently, high-level elected officials joined with us.”
Even in a media mecca like New York City, that has changed dramatically in the past two decades, he said. “At key City Council hearings, there used to always be at least one or two local reporters present.” Now, he says, such hearings sometimes have “zero press” in attendance and it’s much harder to get local media coverage for his causes. (In 2019, the arrival of a new nonprofit newsroom, The City, was a most welcome addition to the local-media landscape in New York’s five boroughs.)
Stories about poverty and hunger are not the kind of content that gets a lot of clicks. It’s not that such stories or projects can’t be made compelling. As New York Times public editor, I examined the coverage of poverty and economic inequality issues by the Times. I found it of high quality but insufficient in volume, and dwarfed by stories meant to appeal to the rich, or at least those aspiring to be so. The column hit a nerve. I rarely had more reader response, most of it calling for more attention to poverty or criticizing the glitzy stories about apartments that only the 1 percent could ever hope to afford.
“The fates of communities and local news organizations are intrinsically linked,” UNC’s Penny Abernathy said in a 2018 talk. Strong local papers have “encouraged social cohesion and political activism.” That may seem theoretical, but it’s all very real once it starts to fade away. When I visited Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania to talk to people about their media habits, I was struck by the attitudes about local news outlets. The county was one of those critical places that had voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012, and flipped red to Trump in 2016. The most reasonable people I talked to, no matter whom they had voted for, were regular readers of the local papers and regular watchers of the local news. Among all news sources, it is local news that manages to maintain at least some trust even in this deeply polarized political environment. The trust in local news is breaking down, but not as badly as trust in national news, according to a Gallup/Knight poll.
To those who argue that many of the functions of newspapers are outdated—you can get the weather report and movie times elsewhere and more efficiently—I would point out that it’s not just the watchdog journalism that matters. It’s the way a local columnist can express a community’s frustration or triumph, the way the local music critic can review a concert, the deeply reported feature stories, the assessment of a new restaurant, the obituaries, the letters to the editor. The newspaper ties a region together, helps it make sense of itself, fosters a sense of community, serves as a village square whose boundaries transcend Facebook’s filter bubble.
Barbara O’Brien, the Buffalo News reporter who scrutinized the troubling town finances in Orchard Park, is still on the job. (After her reporting about the mysterious $100,000 payout to the police chief, a town board member published an apologetic open letter to residents: “We failed in this circumstance, and we are indebted to the media and many citizens for holding our feet to the fire.”) the Buffalo News is still being delivered to households, and its coronavirus coverage, provided for free online, served its community well. But painful pay reductions and staff furloughs soon followed 2020’s economic downturn, as they did at so many news organizations worldwide. The four television stations in town are doing some enterprise reporting, and the local nonprofit, Investigative Post, has expanded its staff. Journalism is still happening in my hometown. Many communities aren’t nearly as fortunate.
My research for this book, combined with my decades in journalism, has left me with a great deal of sadness about what is happening and what is to come in the next several years. But I’m certainly not without hope. The loss of local news will continue, especially in the rural or remote areas that the newer efforts are unlikely to reach. The damage done by those losses will accelerate. American politics will become even more polarized; government and business corruption will flourish; the glue that holds communities together will weaken.
And though there is no stopping this momentum, I am convinced that those who care about good journalism have to do whatever is possible to make things better—more than is being done now. We must shore up newspapers with thoughtful policy changes. We must support existing news organizations and keep them operating as long as possible. We must encourage and sustain the new efforts that are filling at least some of the gaping holes, and are becoming more important every day.
I think of the words of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political writer jailed by Mussolini’s Fascist regime, who advocated what he called “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” If you know that your wood-frame house is on fire and the nearest fire department is many miles away, you still have to call 911, get out your garden hose and bucket, and keep acting as if the fire trucks are on the way.
So, too, with local news. The match was struck years ago, the kerosene poured, and the house is very much ablaze. But for the sake of democracy, in America and around the world, we need to save as much as possible of what remains, bringing the traditional strengths fully into the digital age. And, at the same time, we must energetically support and foster the newer models that are forging the local journalism so necessary for today and tomorrow.