Local newspapers are dying! Sound the alarm!
I could have written the same headline a quarter century ago, when my job was running local newspapers. The handwriting was on the wall, as it was for Belshazzar. Local stores were being replaced by chains, whose distant management didn’t want to bother with mom-and-pop advertising buys. Readers were beginning their inexorable descent into habitués of screens. Computers’ miraculous calculating power was reclassifying geographical communities into interest groups, where birds of a feather could flock together and to hell with anybody else. Local newspapers had been the house organ of geographical community and geographical community was a dead duck.
Bless the day we sold our newspaper company to Gannett, the nation’s biggest newspaper company, who hadn’t gotten the word yet. That was in the waning moments of the previous millennium. Today Gannett is a pathetic pimple of its quondam daunting self.
Local newspapers are dying because a) few read news on paper anymore, b) the geographical communities served by local newspapers have atomized, and c) with rare exceptions, newspaper companies proved blockheads adapting their product to the new universal medium. If no one reads local newspapers, no business will advertise in them, even if their advertising rivaled the efficiency of the online behemoths, which it does not. There’s a good reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tik-Tok, et al. have gobbled advertising budgets: they work, hitting their target with smart-bomb efficiency at a comparatively miniscule cost.
If local newspapers can’t make a buck, they should die.
Altruists, waking to the sad old news about local journalism, hope to prop up failed businesses with philanthropy. Only there isn’t enough money to sell people what they don’t want. Yes, it’s horrifying that no one’s covering local legislatures, authorities, schools, or cops unless all hell is breaking loose, but more horrifying still is that few seem to care. Yes, democracy is crumbling because of voter ignorance and indifference, but no well-researched piece into local skullduggery is going to fix that if nobody reads it.
We must face facts: the Internet has infected us all with A.D.D. Everybody online is crying fire all the time to snag my attention (and everybody seems to be online). Trump and his goons have transformed politics into a spine-tingling nailbiter, from which, alas, it’s impossible to avert our gaze. The less attention local government receives, the more it inclines to self-serving and mischief. (So-called George Santos is a contemporary phenomenon.) The less we know, the more easily we’re fooled.
Of course, we need local reporting – desperately – but to thrive it must fit our facts, not hearken back to a simpler, more comforting hour. I miss the community of my boyhood and career, but gone is gone, and wishing won’t restore it. A not-for-profit press, far from free, is beholden to its funders, and if its funders are few it becomes a house organ for a point of view.
Some promising experiments are emerging from the wreckage of local newspapers, tentative tendrils feeling their way toward the light. The rising generation may reject the dispiriting anonymity of modernity in favor of new sorts of neighborhood. New communities will generate the communications they require to cohere.
Our local supermarket still racks surviving local newspapers by the exit. I pause to look. Barring a calamity, these front pages are boring beyond belief. They deserve to die.
P.S. My fingers misdated yesterday’s missive, fast-forwarding it to December. I’ve given them a good talking-to. Thanks to all who brought this to my attention.