America’s ‘news deserts’ and what it means for democracy
2024-03-22 00:26:04
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
With this year's presidential nominees now decided, you may be forgiven for dreading another year of constant news updates.
We're going to keep moving here, just some breaking news coming in. President Trump has now apparently won, so we really do have a rematch now.
And while it might seem like there's more news than ever, there's actually an extinction taking place in the nation's newsrooms.
Across the country, there are deserts of news. Local newspapers print fewer pages less frequently and in some cases collapse entirely.
In fact, one in five Americans now lives in one of these so-called news deserts, meaning an area without a single local paper. And the trend is not slowing down.
The collapse of local news is so severe and it's getting worse by the year. We're actually seeing an average of two and a half newspapers per week close in the United States now.
For Stephen Waldman, a journalist and founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy group Rebuild Local News, these losses matter, but why? In a year with so much at stake for the entire nation, why do these local voices need protecting?
The local news crisis means people don't have basic information of use to their families about health and education, but it's also a threat to democracy itself.
I'm Joan Grieve, a senior political reporter for The Guardian US, and this is Politics Weekly America.
Stephen, it's great to have you on the podcast for the first time. Before we get into discussing the problem of local news deserts, I want to ask you about your own media consumption. Where do you get your news from and what is available to you in terms of local journalism?
Well, I live in one of the weirder parts of the country when it comes to local news, which is New York City, because our big paper, The New York Times, is actually a national paper, increasingly, not a local paper. So I, of course, read that, but I also devour the Brooklyn Eagle and a bunch of other kind of community newsletters and websites to get local news.
So for your own perspective, you wouldn't say you live in a local news desert, luckily.
No, I don't think so, though. You know, even in big cities, there's this weird phenomenon where there's plenty of information on things on the city and state level, but when you get to the election day and you're trying to figure out who to vote for for city, council or state legislatures, it is a desert. I can't find any information at all.
I wanted to ask you about the many local news deserts that do exist in the U.
S. As you know very well, many regions in the country just do not have the same diversity in its news offerings that we do in New York and D.C. Where do we see the problem of local news deserts playing out most acutely?
Well, I would say rural areas are the most hard hit. There's been something like 3,000 newspapers that have closed in the last two decades, and a disproportionate number of them are weekly newspapers in rural areas. And so you now have more than 2,000 communities that have no local news at all. But in truth, if you look more closely, there's big gaps in coverage. everywhere.
Like in cities, you have news outlets. So in that sense, it's not a news desert. But the number of reporters has declined so much that there is often minimal coverage of neighborhoods or minimal depth of local issues.
And what explains that phenomenon? Why is it that newsrooms have just so much fewer resources now? Does it just come down to supply and demand? Are people in some parts of the country simply not buying local papers anymore, or can this be attributed to something else?
It's really the Internet breaking the business model. It's not actually mostly that readers have fled local news. It's that advertisers have fled local news. And they fled to go to Google and Facebook and Autotrader and Craigslist. And that is really what crushed the business models of local news.
And can you give me an example? Tell me about a paper that's recently disappeared and what the effect of that loss has been on the local community.
You have news deserts all over the country. So, like Youngstown, Ohio, which is a pretty big city, lost its daily newspaper.
Six days after The Vindicator made its 150th anniversary front page news, the announcement came today. the newspaper will close.
Readers could see it coming. The paper was noticeably smaller and, most importantly, there were fewer and fewer ads. In the end, there was no choice but to close it all. And what you see across the country is that it leads to, first of all, just people in the community not being informed about what's going on in their community, including who to vote for. But not just that.
The information that you need about where the playground is going to be built or where the next development is going to happen. Statistically, we've seen that when you have less local news, you have more corruption and higher taxes and lower bond ratings. So it has very negative effects on the health of communities in really concrete ways.
And I'm glad that you mentioned Youngstown, because I feel like that really is a stark example of this trend. When the local newspaper there, The Vindicator, abruptly went out of business in 2019, Youngstown became the biggest U.S. city without its own daily newspaper. So I think that really shows that this trend is not isolated just to rural areas. There are some large population centers here that are really struggling with a lack of local journalism.
Yeah. And this is where the definition of news desert is a little bit limited. News desert tends to refer to places that have no news outlets at all. But in many other parts of the country, you have what are called ghost newspapers, which are newspapers that are still publishing, but the local news has gotten so thin and superficial that it's really not coming anywhere close to serving the needs of communities. And that happens in big cities and suburbs and all over the place.
And exactly how bad is this decline? Are we at least seeing this trend slow down now, or is this problem actually accelerating?
The problem is actually accelerating. So the study of news deserts that the Medill program at Northwestern University does each year, last year said newspapers were closing at an average rate of two per week. This year, they said it's closing at an average of 2.5 per week. So it's actually getting worse. The other way of looking at this is that there's been about a 59 to 60% drop in the number of reporters.
About half of the daily newspaper circulation in America now is owned by a hedge fund or a private equity firm, a financial firm. The most important implication of that is not so much partisan or ideological at this point. It's that they tend to cut the newsrooms.
And I can imagine, too, that if you have fewer reporters, then that means that the remaining reporters have to pick up more slack. And I feel like that could create a problem of burnout.
Absolutely. It creates a problem of burnout and, frankly, depth. The folks that are left are stretched very thin and they can do certain types of reporting, but what it leads to is less in-depth reporting and investigative reporting.
And I can imagine, too, that if you are relying largely on wire copy, then you aren't going to have that richness of local coverage that we used to see from local papers.
Yeah, exactly. Most of the wire copy is state level or national level. So you won't, from the wire services, be getting information about your school board.
Absolutely. Yeah. And all of this reminds me of that viral clip from a few years ago, which I'm sure you've seen, where a number of anchors on a variety of local TV stations all appear to be reading from the same script. Hi, I'm Fox, San Antonio's Jessica Hedley.
And I'm Ryan Wolf.
Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Treasure Valley communities, the El Paso,
Las Cruces communities, Eastern Iowa communities, Mid-Michigan communities. But we are concerned about a troubled country and the irresponsible one-sided news stories.
plaguing our country.
The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.
When you see clips like that, what concerns you most? How might that trend hurt our understanding of major news events?
A few things. One is if, basically, if local news becomes sort of nationalized, first of all, it's just not going to be very good at covering the community. And all the problems we talked about before, including corruption and bad civic participation and polarization, all those problems will get worse. The other problem is that it leads to a homogeneity in the viewpoints and in the types of information. If everyone is basically getting the same feed, there lacks, you know, the local color and the local distinctive information.
And I want to make sure that we talk about the stakes here, because some people listening to this might be thinking that, sure, local papers are a charming window into a community because they share local stories, maybe birth announcements, obituaries, classifieds. But, Steven, you've actually described the disappearance of local papers and local journalism more broadly as a threat to democracy itself. Tell me why.
Well, on a basic level, it's really hard for people in a community to solve their problems when they don't have good information about what the problems are or who the proper stakeholders are. And then, you know, on another very basic level is we're having more and more elections where people have less and less information about who they're voting for, which is not a good recipe, you know, for democracy.
And can you give me an example of a time when local journalists have done an effective job of holding their local leaders to account? Or maybe, on the flip side, an instance where local leaders were really able to run amok because there was a lack of local journalists who were there to scrutinize their actions?
Oh, there's so many examples. One that kind of hits both is one in Bell, California, where there was this sort of working class community in California, where there was no journalism, no covering the county governments. And they voted to basically pay the city manager $800,000 a year. And it was sort of amazing, because it wasn't really done, you know, under the covers. It was done in public, but there was no one there to notice it.
A raucous crowd gathered outside City Hall as word spread that officials were being rounded up and arrested.
One even had his door broken.
A few years later, the Los Angeles Times, which was not really the local paper in that area, but was nearby, did find out about it, wrote about it. And there were, you know, legal consequences for the people who were doing that. Needless to say, it was corruption on steroids. So when you talk about, like, corruption or malfeasance, if you're not having someone watchdogging that, that power is going to get abused.
So I think we've done a good job outlining why local journalism is so important. And so now I want to ask you, how can this decline in local newsrooms be stopped? In an age of social media and 24-7 news coverage, can we still expect people to support local news?
Well, we have to encourage people to support local news, but it's going to have to be in a different way than we used to. Like, in fact, most people weren't really supporting local news. Like, a typical newspaper was basically underwritten by the advertisers, for the most part, not actually the readers. And so one of the sea changes that we have to have is that the people in the communities are going to have to support community news, or it's not going to survive. Now, that could be in a few different ways.
There is a whole new wave of non-profit local news organizations, so people can donate to the non-profit news organizations. If you have a commercial newspaper, they can subscribe. And then there's a few other new things. One is that philanthropy needs to help support local news. And then finally, public policy, government or taxpayer support, done very, very carefully, is going to need to be a part of the solution, too, because we have what the economists call a market failure, and there is no sign that the commercial model is going to fix this.
In fact, it's getting worse. We have to accept the idea that some kinds of local news are kind of a civic good. Just how you would support the local library, or schools, or the symphony, we need to view local news in the same way as something that is just healthy for the community, essential for the community, and needs to be supported in a variety of ways. Now, there's a real problem here, which is that right at the moment that we need consumers to support local news more, most newspapers are making their product worse. And that's because they're reacting to the loss of advertising revenue.
So the local news world is going to need to figure out ways of actually improving the way that they cover the community, if they're going to then ask consumers to support them through either donations or subscriptions.
And we talked about the role that government can play here. Do we see any political proposals on the horizon that might help local newsrooms stay alive?
Yeah, actually, it's kind of amazing. There's really some exciting conversation going on, on both the federal, national level, and in the states. The trick, of course, is you can't have public policy that ends up undermining the editorial independence of local news. And on a simple level, it's a little scary as a thought. You're covering government, and we're asking help from the government.
But there are ways of doing it that insulate the news organizations. There's a bill in Congress that provides tax credits for small businesses that advertise in local news. So it's actually, the benefit goes to restaurants and grocery stores, and they decide where to advertise, not a government official deciding what news organization. So things like that, that are kind of broad, universal standards, you can do that without it backfire for undermining the independence of the editorial.
And do you get the sense that there's more public awareness about the importance of local journalism and the fact that local journalism is on the decline?
Well, a little bit more aware, but we actually have a long way to go. I think part of the problem is people are overwhelmed with information. It's not like there's a shortage of news. And so if you say to an average person, like, you know, we're working on the local news shortage, and they hear the word news and shortage, they might say, what on earth are you talking about? There's news everywhere.
There's information everywhere. You have to just get people thinking about that distinction between local and national, and between reporting and commentary. And if they focus on it that way, then I think it very quickly, they understand what the problem is.
And I also want to tie all of this into the election, because this year's election is rapidly approaching, and it's going to be covered nonstop. Stephen, in your mind, when local journalism disappears, how does that loss shape people's ideas about elections, both federal and local?
Well, there used to be this cliche that all politics is local, and that is increasingly not true. Like, a lot of local politics is actually national, and just based on national partisan politics. And then the other part of this relates to the rise of artificial intelligence, which is, it's going to get easier and easier to do deep fakes on the news of a anchor person who seems like a reputable person, in fact, someone you know, and they're saying something that is just completely made up. When that happens on the national level, there's a lot of national publications that can kind of spot that and call it out. When that kind of fraud happens on the local level, and there's no local reporting to catch it, I think it's going to get eaten up and affect elections much more likely on the local level than it is on the national level.
I also want to talk about the issue of trust in journalism. We've seen a lot of talk in recent years, particularly from one of the presidential nominees, about this idea of fake news. Do we generally see that readers have more trust in their local papers and local television stations? Does it seem like they have more built-in trust of those local outlets versus national outlets?
Yes, people so far do have more trust in local news than they do in national news. That's the good news. The bad news is that that trust is dropping, just as it is with national news. We are at risk of blowing that advantage and leading to a situation where even local news is not trusted.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is a major factor. You already addressed this a little bit, but I want to return to this idea that local journalism can help reduce political division in the country. As you know, political division has really been on a steep rise in recent years in the U.S. Is it naive of me to think that becoming more local in our news consumption might help reduce political division in the country and might encourage a more conciliatory approach to government on the whole?
I don't think that's naive at all. In fact, there have been academic studies that have shown that when you have less local news, you have more polarization. In one way, if you think about it, it's actually a little counterintuitive. You might think, well, news people like to stir up trouble and focus on controversy and division, so why would having less local news lead to more polarization? I think it's a couple of things.
One is that the vacuum in local news has been filled by national news and social media. The national news tends to be more partisan and the social media tends to be more inaccurate, but there's something else, which is it's not like. local controversies aren't volatile. Local topics can be really hot and divisive also, but in the past, those local controversies cut across different lines than the national ones did. There might be someone who you disagree with about national politics, but you're on the same side when it comes to where the sewage treatment plant should be located in your community.
The other thing is that you are likely to know them. You're more likely to know that person or see them at the grocery store. That's just. the reality of human psychology is that if your enemy is someone across country that you're seeing on national TV, it's very easy to demonize them and think of them as cartoon characters. When there's someone who you have to talk to at the Little League game or somewhere in town, you're more likely to see them as a human being.
You may still disagree with them. You may still hate them, but you're going to be less likely to move to extreme attitudes toward your opponents.
Related to that, I would think that it would be incredibly beneficial to have reporters and editors who not only cover the community, but also live in the community themselves, and maybe they have friends and neighbors who are also their readers. Do you think that that closeness in a community can really help to build trust in a local newsroom?
I think that's crucial. That's such an important point because in a world of digital news and then AI, I think having direct interactions with reporters is going to become one of the most important, if not the only, way, for people to develop trust in news. In one sense, that sounds terrifying, because it doesn't sound like that's a scalable solution like a reporter in every living room. But on the other hand, it's encouraging because we have seen that if you have reporters there, that really does improve trust. Having a reporter in town does a couple of things.
One is that people in the community see that reporter doing their work. At the school board meeting, they're the one there until one in the morning, badly dressed in that table in the corner, and so you have a sense that they're looking out for you. The other thing it does is it enables readers to interact with the reporter and criticize them or ask them questions, or have the reporter explain why they did it. in certain ways. There's really nothing better than that for improving the level of trust.
And finally, Stephen, we always like to ask a what else question on our show. I know I could ask you about the latest goings on in Washington, but instead, to carry on the theme of our discussion, I wanted to ask what local news story has really captured your attention recently?
The newsroom in Marion, Kansas really has been on my mind. This is a very small newsroom of a couple people, and they had been doing over the years really aggressive, thorough reporting about the community, abuses in the police department. And then recently, the police department decided they didn't like some of this and raided the newsroom and seized their computers and phones, I believe. In this case, it's not economic attack, as it is from most places. It was more literal attacks.
But it just reminded me that the newspapers and news websites that are really trying to do this well are facing really tremendous odds. I mean, there are financial odds, not enough reporters, they're not paid very well. And then, on top of that, they are facing tremendous hostility from a lot of people who have come to think that the news reporters are the enemies of the people.
Stephen Waldman, founder and president of Rebuild Local News, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast this week.
Thank you so much for having me.
Before I go, I want to recommend The Guardian's brilliant podcast series, Black Box. It's all about how artificial intelligence is colliding with human lives. In the final episode of the series, it's asking, could AI be the end of humanity? Not necessarily. Search for Black Box wherever you get your podcasts.
But for now, it's goodbye. The producer this week is Tom Glasser, and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj. I'm Joan Grieve. Thanks, as always, for listening.
This is The Guardian.
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