A few years ago, I moved to a small town in New Mexico to fulfill a dream of mine. I wanted to operate a newspaper. I have always respected local newspapers and worked in many small newspapers over the years. I have also watched as many of those newspapers were either swallowed up by media giants in far-away places or forced to shutter because of lack of revenue.
Newspapers survive on advertising and subscriptions. With more and more companies moving to social media for advertising, newspaper revenue has shrunk dramatically. Staff cuts at larger newspapers have also decimated a once-thriving bastion of democracy.
I will always advocate for small newspapers and the towns that rely on them.
In Woodstock, Vermont, the general store was founded in 1886, making it an upstart compared to the weekly newspaper the Vermont Standard, which since 1853 has chronicled local triumphs and tragedies, births and deaths, Little League scores and garden club meetings, high school graduations, business openings, and petty crimes.
The Standard occupies the building it once shared with the local funeral home. Back then, the presses had to be shut down when there was a funeral because the floor would shake so much.
There is the smell of ink and newsprint from the bundles of back issues on the floor, and a handwritten list of next week’s advertisers thumbtacked to a bulletin board.
The newspaper moved back there after surviving a flood in 2011 in one rented office when the Ottauquechee River overflowed, then a fire in another in 2018. Now it is trying to surmount another threat: the destructive changes to an industry threatened by shifting reader habits, shrinking advertising, and acquisitions by distant corporations that starve newspapers of their resources and strip them of their assets.
Those challenges are as urgent in New England as anywhere else. But something else is happening there. Unlike that small newspaper in New Mexico, New Englanders still disproportionally support their local newspapers, far fewer of which have closed than in the rest of the country. Circulation rose during the Covid-19 pandemic, when readers were reminded of the value of local news; many even sent in unsolicited donations. There are fewer “news deserts”-places with no local media outlets at all. Nonprofits and student journalists are stepping in to fill what gaps exist. And wealthy residents in places from Nantucket to the Berkshires to Harpswell, Maine, are taking over or buying back their community newspapers, or starting new ones.
Its owner was among the first. After leaving to make his fortune in the ski industry, he came home and bought the local paper he had once delivered from a wagon as a boy. He still subsidizes it to the tune of about $3,000 every time it prints its weekly edition.
The local newspaper is the glue that pulls together towns like this, keeps their residents connected, supports their businesses, and holds their powerful accountable.
Greedy corporate executives, along with other economic, social, and technological realities, have already cost the nation one-quarter of its newspapers, including more than 2,000 weeklies, since 2004. About 90 shut down during the pandemic. Of those that remain, many have been scooped up and pared down by national chains and hedge funds with few ties to the communities they cover, such as Gannett, which owns 613 papers; Digital First/Tribune (207); and Lee/BH Media (170).
New England has not been entirely spared from this dramatic downturn. Massachusetts and Connecticut have been favorite hunting grounds for the big chains, which have bought up (and in some cases shut down) large numbers of newspapers there and left many others ghosts of what they once were. Fifty-five weeklies in Connecticut and 67 in Massachusetts closed between 2004 and 2019, and another seven - six of them owned by Gannett - during the pandemic. Others have reduced the number of days they publish, laid off staff, outsourced content, or gone partly or fully digital.
Elsewhere in the region, though, the losses have been much, much smaller. Of the thousands of newspapers closed nationwide since 2004, 12 were in Maine, three in Vermont, two in New Hampshire, and one in Rhode Island. Only four daily newspapers out of 81 in New England shut down in that period. And while the South has 91 counties with no media outlet at all, New England has but one. That is by far the smallest number of any region in the country.
Those familiar plastic tubes still stand next to a vast number of mailboxes along New England country roads awaiting delivery of the local paper. Journalists still labor on, in offices that look like Norman Rockwell prints in towns that could be settings for Frank Capra films. Half of their readers say the local news they get is still relevant and useful - two and a half times the proportion of their fellow Americans who think so. People there see newspapers as part of the fabric of their communities. A lot of the newspapers in New England are older than many towns in other parts of the United States.
It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638, that the first printer in Britain’s American colonies set up shop. The first newspaper was in Boston. With the advancement of the steam-powered printing press in the 1820s, newspapers got so cheap that even the lowest-paid workers in New England’s fast-growing industrial cities could afford to buy one. Scores of them did; Massachusetts and Connecticut as early as the mid-17th century required that everyone be taught to read, and literacy was widespread. There were huge numbers of newspapers, with massive circulations. At one point, Boston had nine dailies; just one of them, the Boston Post, had 628,000 subscribers.
For 250 years this culture on the East Coast has been super-steeped in reading. It is a culture that craves and elevates this sense of being literate and being informed. Civic life is also more hands-on there. The tradition of town meeting in particular brings together everyone in a community.
Local newspapers are essential to this system.
Such essential chroniclers of local history are they that when the Clinton Item in Massachusetts closed its office, 50 volunteers stepped up to move the 400 bound green volumes of back issues in a human chain to the town’s history museum.
So, what happens when the newspapers disappear for good?
When a hurricane took aim at the densely populated coastal city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, whose fishing fleet is the largest in America, the mayor was struck by the absence of reporters from the local press the Standard-Times. The newspaper, which dates back in one form or another to 1850, had been hemorrhaging reporters as it bounced from one national owner to another; the newsroom directory lists five reporters and editors and a photographer, down from 50. Now the property of Virginia-based Gannett, the Standard-Times produces rewritten news releases and covers high school sports, its critics say, but offers almost none of the kind of watchdog journalism that communities need from their newspapers.
Even politicians, often targets of that scrutiny, are alarmed about this trend.
The importance of community journalism is about more than nostalgia and sentiment. In places where local newspaper circulation falls, one study found, so does voter turnout. In cities and towns where newspapers close or have been hollowed out, government efficiency declines, taxes rise, and municipal borrowing costs increase, another study showed. Yet other research suggests that, by focusing on local issues that cross party lines, local newspapers blunt the spread of political polarization. What happens in a small city or town, after all, often has more immediate impact on people’s lives than what happens in Washington.
Officials remember parrying with reporters from three different papers in North Adams, Massachusetts. Then a series of owners bought the daily North Adams Transcript, which ended up disappearing as an independent newspaper and being merged into the Berkshire Eagle.
In Middlebury, Vermont, the weekly Addison County Independent is housed in an old toothbrush factory on the edge of downtown, along with Vermont Sports and VT Ski+Ride, two regional magazines which help keep them afloat.
Working for small newspapers is not easy in these times dvertising revenue was down during the pandemic. Not only is it tough to attract young readers; young media buyers will not take space in the print edition unless they can measure exactly how many people read the ads, the same way they can count the clicks online. The best place to reach a whole town is in the pages of its local paper. But suddenly people do not believe that is true any longer.
It is not lost on newspaper editors and publishers in New England that one reason they have endured is because the aging population - first, second, and third oldest in the country in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont - has long relied on newspapers.
Younger readers are there for the taking. You do not care about school coverage until you have children, then it matters.
What readers get from their local papers reflects the day-to-day things that make New England charming, distinctive, and occasionally confounding.
Papers run feel good stories that uplift and inspire and feature new businesses and innovative ideas that larger newspapers ignore. But local papers also cover painful and contentious topics, often at the risk of blowback from their towns.
They also matter as much to the journalists - who live, and are often from, these towns - as to their readers. Local journalists and editors are accountable from the moment they wake up until they go to sleep. And not only do local journalists know everybody, but they also know their stories and they know their families’ stories, and they know the stories that do not get into the newspapers as well as the ones that do. They interact with people on their best days and their worst days.
Nonprofits are stepping in to fill those gaps. A dozen or more journalism nonprofits have started up each year since 2008.
In other places in New England where newspapers have closed down or faded away, journalism faculty and students are stepping in.
The idea is not only to make sure that news continues to be covered, but that young journalists consider careers in local media. Several have gone on to full-time jobs at local papers, often in the communities they are from.
When the Harpswell Anchor closed, the coastal Maine town came together to resurrect it as a nonprofit.
Other New England papers are consolidating - under local, rather than faraway, owners. That is the case for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and the eight other daily and weekly newspapers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire that are part of Newspapers of New England, formed by a Massachusetts newspaper family. MaineToday Media operates seven of Maine’s eight dailies, several of which it bought back from the Seattle Times, plus several dailies in Vermont and 30 weeklies.
And the Berkshire Eagle, whose roots go back to its founding in 1789, was purchased from Denver-based Digital First Media.
The Bangor Daily News has moved out of its own building into a floor and a half of rented space downtown, overlooking a resurgent Market Square neighborhood of artist studios, bookstores, and the kinds of young people with whom newspapers struggle to connect.
The newspaper people at the Berkshire Athenaeum are getting older. So are the owners and benefactors of New England papers that are still independent.
Covid may have hurt the bottom line, but it reminded people in New England how they valued local news.
And many of those towns enjoy the will and the resources to keep their papers going.
Maybe it is a special calling papers in New England have. To show the rest of us how small newspapers can be saved.
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