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Friday, July 8th, 2022

The local news crisis is deepening America’s divides

Author:     Sara Fischer
Source:     Axios
Publication Date:     Jul 4, 2022
Link: The local news crisis is deepening America’s divides
Stephan:   Speaking as a journalist who once worked for two major papers that now no longer exist I mourn what is happening to newspaper journalism. The thing that made newspapers special is that they covered local news, not as it is covered on social media with all the partisanship and misinformation but from a perspective of objective data. Editorial pages were biased to be sure, but news reporting was supposed to be objective. Good editors drummed this into new reporters, and it became part of the culture. Now that local objective coverage is disappearing the oversight that kept politicians and business leaders more honest than they would otherwise have been is also disappearing, to the detriment of those local cultures.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela / Axios

Around two newspapers in the U.S. are closing every week, according to a new report, suggesting the local news crisis spurred by the pandemic will worsen in coming years.

Why it matters: Hyperlocal communities are being disproportionately impacted by the fall of local newspapers compared to bigger cities, deepening America’s economic divide.

  • The average poverty rate in a news desert, or a community without a local newspaper, in the U.S. is 16%, compared to the 11% national average, according to the new report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
  • “This is a crisis for our democracy and our society,” said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement.
  • “[W]hile the economic decline in many communities was occurring prior to the rise of news deserts, the loss of a local news organization will leave local residents without the critical information to begin to address those problems,” Abernathy told Axios via email.
  • “At a minimum, the loss of local news worsens the political, […]
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