Local News Is Dying, and It’s Taking Small Town America With It
Local News Is Dying, and It’s Taking Small Town America With It
(Bloomberg) -- America is overrun with “news deserts,” cities and towns where local coverage is lacking or altogether absent. As newspaper circulation continues to decline along with ad revenue and newsroom employment, a common casualty is the expensive, time-consuming practice of original reporting.
Without journalists digging through property records or attending city council meetings, looking for official wrongdoing and revealing secret deals, local politicians will operate unchecked—with predictable consequences. But the fallout is much bigger than just keeping municipal government honest.
Studies have shown that communities without quality local news coverage see lower rates of voter turnout. Cities where newspapers shut down have even seen their municipal bond costs rise, suggesting an increase in government expense due to a lack of transparency. More broadly, towns without serious local news coverage demonstrate less social cohesion, corroding any actual sense of community.
A study published last month by Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy found that the quantity and quality of local news stories is lacking across the country. Only 17 percent of stories produced by local outlets are based on events that actually occurred nearby. And more than half of their news reports originated somewhere else, such as a wire service. With television, segments often come from a network or parent, easily repurposed by affiliates anywhere in the country. (Moreover, only 56 percent of all local reports addressed a critical informational need—such as crime or infrastructure—rather than celebrity gossip or sports.)
The study used U.S. Census data to identify almost 500 communities with 20,000 to 300,000 residents and randomly selected 100 of them. The analysis surveyed 16,000 stories produced by print, radio, television and digital media from both English and non-English outlets, found through media databases and manual searches.
“It’s the job of these outlets to focus on the civic, political and economic issues that are uniquely relevant to these geographic communities, because they will not be covered by out-of-market media outlets,” said Philip Napoli, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the lead author of the study. “Local government is exactly the kind of place where journalistic resources are being cut.”
But Napoli doesn’t blame the media for the lack of quality local journalism. Rather, he empathizes with their financial struggles. To keep pace with a changing and consolidating media ecosystem, local news outlets have dedicated their limited resources to covering and aggregating national stories reported by national news organizations.
As a result, only 11 percent of the surveyed news stories were local, original and addressed hard news, the report shows. And some outlets stopped producing stories about their local communities altogether.
Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Monclair State University, works with so-called hyperlocal media outlets in New Jersey that focus exclusively on providing news to small communities. But Murray said these bootstrap organizations are a long way away from filling the overarching local news gap that plagues the U.S.
Of course, the current economic reality facing local news operations makes it difficult to stay afloat, explained Joe Lanane, the executive editor of Community Impact Newspaper, which produces free hyperlocal papers for 45 communities in Texas. He said he understands the temptation to package news made elsewhere to cut costs, “but if we try to follow the rest of the news industry with national and state coverage, we’ll lose that battle,” he said.
And it’s not just rural America that’s seen a decline in local news. Communities closest to large media markets—such as New York, Washington or Los Angeles—have the least robust local journalism, the study found. “Content tends to flow from large markets to smaller markets, which can discourage consumption of local journalism,” Napoli said.
New Jersey, for example, lives in the shadow of both New York and Philadelphia. Sandwiched between large media markets, the state has struggled to lure journalists to cover local news for smaller outlets. Even inside the nation’s biggest media hub, outlets that cover local events are suffering. The New York Daily News halved its staff in July, and the Village Voice, a legendary investigator of malfeasance in New York City and Albany, officially died last weekend. In Washington, a slew of newspapers have shuttered, too.
Within urban, suburban and rural areas, minority communities remain the most underserved by local news coverage. The Duke study found that regions with large Hispanic populations in particular received less robust local journalism.
“Local news outlets play a vital role in the daily lives of communities who are often ignored by mega-media companies that are disconnected geographically and culturally,” said Hugo Balta, the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, in an email. “The regionalization of content production, a failed one-size-fits-all practice, is irrelevant to already underserved communities like Hispanics, especially in small markets where information about local government, education, health and other important issues is indispensable.”
“The public is suffering,” Balta said.
There is some good news, though—local news media still garners more public trust than its national counterparts. More than 7 in 10 Americans report they trust their local newspapers and television stations, while barely half say the same about national outlets, according to the Poynter Institute. But this could change, warned Murray.
“Building trust is a human-to-human endeavor,” Murray said. “I’m worried we’re going to see an erosion of trust in local media as the number of journalists on the ground in local communities declines.”
In New Jersey, the crisis has spurred government leaders to allocate $5 million to revive and strengthen local media. “Long term, this is a drop in the bucket,” Murray said. “But short term this could spur some amazing projects.” Community Impact Newspaper has also attempted to fill the gaps in small communities surrounding media-rich cities including Houston, Austin and Dallas.
Report for America, a journalism nonprofit modeled after AmeriCorps and Teach for America, has sought to bolster understaffed regional outlets by deploying 1,000 journalists to their newsrooms by 2022. But news media experts said this only scratches the surface of what’s needed to rehabilitate local media. “We’ve seen foundations and universities jump into this space, but we need more at the policy level,” said Napoli, who believes public funding could alleviate the local news crisis.
There may be little chance of that in the current political environment. The U.S. already spends very little government money on the media compared with other countries. Norway spends about $140 per capita each year on its public broadcasters, according to media consulting firm Nordicity. The U.K. spends $88, and Canada spends $22. The U.S., however, spends under $3.
Executive editors at local news outlets across the country agree that there needs to be more economic incentives to cover their communities.
“At the local level, news doesn’t stop when the news coverage goes away,” Lanane said. “Somebody has to do this work.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rovella at drovella@bloomberg.net
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