Help Wanted:
Energetic, civic-minded people for incredibly important work. Unlimited opportunity for advancement in a fast-growing industry. Entrepreneurship encouraged.
The Job:
Local Journalism.
Yes, local journalism. The industry that in recent years has shed tens of thousands of jobs and witnessed the shuttering of more than 2,500 newspapers, most of them in rural areas. Seventy million Americans now live in counties without a newspaper. Many of the surviving news outlets are merely “ghost” papers, no longer with staff to cover local news.
How can there be opportunity in an industry that appears to be dying? Despite the ubiquitous obituaries explaining the demise of local journalism, the industry isn’t dying; it’s molting. The traditional local journalism model is falling away and being replaced by something different, something likely better suited for rural America.
After years of paralysis created by the collapse of the pre-internet newspaper model, the industry is rallying. According to independent news consortium Lion Publishers, new newsrooms have been launching at the rate of 50 a year for the last five years. These represent for-profits, non-profits, public-benefit corporations, limited liability companies, and husband-and-wife teams. Lion has more than 400 media members who help local startups raise financing. They are one of many news-focused cooperatives that have emerged to build journalism back up.
In Colorado, 170 news organizations have teamed up to form a collaborative which works jointly on stories but also offers training and resources to journalists from smaller outlets around the state. In Charleston, South Carolina, the family-owned newspaper Post & Courier has created a network of 17 news organizations that works with community newspaper reporters to identify and investigate local stories.
To fill the vacuum left by newspapers abandoning coverage in state capitals, a new non-profit, States Newsroom, has opened operations in 28 states and now employs more than 136 full-time editors, reporters, and support staff.
Projects designed to support local media like these are proliferating throughout the US.
But what about the communities that have lost their daily or weekly newspapers? Or communities that never had these papers in the first place? These communities receive limited attention because many do not have the financial base to support even modest publications.
One of the more creative solutions to this problem comes from Newsmatics, a company with which I am affiliated. Newsmatics has been a pioneer in internet news distribution. They recently expanded their operations to create Affinity Group Publishing (AGP) designed to fill gaps in news coverage for underserved communities.
Over the next few months, AGP will be testing a new model which offers users the opportunity to post their own stories on AGP’s local interest sites, like the North Dakota Lifestyle Weekly, the Georgia Cultural Digest, and Kansas’s Sunflower State Newswire. These sites (and others like them in all 50 states) already provide local news from Newsmatic’s thousands of sources. Soon, community members will be able to post their own articles, in effect creating local news publications, no matter how small the community.
This is where the “Help Wanted” at the top of this column comes in. Anyone interested in starting, writing, editing, or sponsoring local news can find out more by contacting AGP at this link.
In addition to these initiatives, two important national developments which could encourage the growth of a new form of journalism are currently in the pipeline.
When Congress enacted President Biden’s infrastructure program in 2021, the bill included $65 billion to expand broadband in communities across the US and subsidize the cost of internet service for low-income households. This funding will remove a barrier that has disadvantaged the development of rural communities and their local news infrastructure.
Providing it does not get from President Biden’s budget, the second important development may come before year’s end. It is a program to provide tax credits to help small news operations hire journalists.
Local journalism will survive because America cannot allow it to fail. As a new study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism finds, “The loss of local journalism has been accompanied by the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens. In communities without a credible source of local news, voter participation declines, corruption in both government and business increases, and local residents end up paying more in taxes and at checkout.”
Loss of local news reporting has also become a pocketbook issue. When local governments operate without media scrutiny, lack of operational transparency prompts Wall Street and banking institutions to raise borrowing rates to compensate for uncertainty.
Traditional journalism, for all its virtues, has been an expensive industry. New, emerging journalism has fewer barriers to entry. A community’s size is no longer a factor. What now matters is a community’s determination to have a forum for local news and local citizens’ dedication to provide that information.
Developing local journalism has never been easier – or more important.