I have always joked that newspaper ink flows through my veins. When I was 12, I started delivering the newspaper around my neighborhood. My father built a cart I could pull behind my bicycle to hold all the newspapers, which I would carefully deliver to the front door of my customers (one of whom was my middle school homeroom teacher) rather than tossing it in the driveway, as my predecessors had done every morning.
For many of my generation, that is how the news was delivered whether early in the morning or in the afternoon. One such newspaper, Watertown Daily Times, has been tossed by children and adults alike onto front yards all over the town. In my local community, the weekly can still be picked up for free at various newsstands, or for 35 cents at the corner store, while the big city daily from the next town over is tossed into my patio chair twice a week and on holidays. And the small community weekly I once freelanced for is still going strong in the adjoining county.
Times is a local paper and covers the North Country - rural Upstate New York. Founded in 1861, the family-owned newspaper was, and remains, a well-respected news source. The recipient of many awards from New York Press Association, Times was, for decades, the smallest paper in the country with a full-time D.C. office. With a professional news staff, wire-service subscriptions and dozens of part-time stringers reporting from hamlets throughout the region, Times covered everything from international and national news to the most modest of local achievements, milestones and events. Countless readers had their life histories preserved in print, from birth announcements to obituaries, Pop Warner to Division I, election eve to indictment.
Times reported on themes important to North Country readers - the daily grind of dairy farming, the economic fallout from paper mill closings and getting through the winters. It helped residents chart their days and fostered an understanding of who and where they were. It served as a reservoir of shared experiences that promoted mutual understanding. In its coverage of school board and community meetings, the paper showed residents how democracy worked to address problems of everyday life. Readers ofTimes would not be surprised to learn that voting rates are much higher in jurisdictions served by local papers; that its readers report much higher trust in local newspapers than in other media sources or that newspaper closures have been linked to a decline in civic engagement, increases in government waste and increased political polarization.
As with virtually every local newspaper today, however, Times faces economic challenges. In recent years, declining readership and plummeting advertising revenue forced it to reduce newsroom staff and shutter some of its affiliated weeklies. Nevertheless, Times survives when many of its peers have closed their doors and, this year, its editors express renewed confidence in the growth and profitability of both its print and digital editions. In contrast, over the past decade alone, nearly 2,000 local newspapers have gone out of business. Advertisers have defected en masse to Google and Yahoo or to digital penny-savers such as Craigslist and NextDoor. Readers have abandoned fact-based news and migrated to social media sites, trading truth, inquiry and complexity for instant affirmation, likes and lies.
The downfall of local news has even hit the nation's capitol, Journalistic Center of America, Washington, D.C.
Local news in Arlington, Virginia is similarly at risk. It is true that a world-renowned paper, The Washington Post, lies just across the Potomac. Although its Metro Section covers regional news, The Post invests most heavily in deeply sourced national and international stories that appeal to a worldwide audience and advertisers. Arlington is also home toWashington Business Journal, the area’s successful news source for business, banking and property development. Financial news has proved to be that rare example of valuable and time-sensitive information for which both local readers and targeted advertisers are willing to pay.
Other local news outlets fare less well. Washington City Paper has barely survived a series of financial reversals and is hanging on, thus far, with a new subscriber membership program. DCist, a highly regarded online source of local news, suspended operations but was saved, at least temporarily, through its absorption into WAMU, a local NPR affiliate. Another highly anticipated local digital outlet, TBD, reported disappointing revenue and closed after a mere six months. In September, Axios D.C. debuted its digital newsletter, captioned “presented by Amazon.” However, its many “Messages from Amazon” (corporate press releases) may cause readers to question its editorial independence.
The Falls Church News-Press, a community paper since 1991, has been hit hard by declining advertising revenue and recently appealed for financial help from readers. One of the United States’ oldest newspapers, Alexandria Gazette Packet, was forced to start a GoFundMe page to help it weather the coronavirus crisis. The Connection newspapers, including Arlington Connection, recently warned that it is “facing an existential crisis from the combination of the nationwide downturn in newspaper advertising” compounded by the economic crisis of the coronavirus and may not survive. The Sun-Gazette/Inside NOVA, offering what its managing editor trumpets as a “strong editorial voice” (defiantly right-leaning in blue Northern Virginia), continues to publish, although with a much slimmer edition and now without free local delivery.
ArlingtonNow, launched in 2010, seems to have found a niche and a business model that, so far, has worked. With a mix of news aggregation (Morning Notes), copious sponsored posts (advertisements), guest editorials, county news releases and police blotter entries, as well as some award-winning firsthand reporting, ArlingtonNow has developed a following in the Washington, D.C. area. Even so, it, too, has cautioned that advertising revenue has declined and asked readers to help with monthly contributions.
I wish them all well, of course, but what is most important is whether, as a citizenry, we can find a way to pay them well. Currently, fewer than 15 percent of readers pay for local news either through subscriptions, donations or membership programs. In the long run, it really will not matter whether the news is delivered by bicycle or Amazon drone, provided it is delivered. But useful local news - news that reflects judgment, balance and careful sourcing and fact-checking and is performed with integrity and passion - is costly. It has to be created by curious, hardworking reporters. It plays a unique and irreplaceable role in safeguarding the public health, building social trust and narrating our lives.
We lose it at our peril.
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