Mitchell Oakley: Loss of local journalism spells trouble for everyone

News deserts. Have you heard of them?

News deserts are communities without a local newspaper covering everyday issues. Deserts are created by newspaper closings as well as newspapers that aren’t as financially fit as they once were.

Poynter.com reported in 2022 that some 2,500 newspapers have closed since 2004. The report was issued by Penny Abernathy on local news in America. In the fifth edition of her report, it was found that 360 more newspapers have closed since 2019. Most of them have been weekly newspapers like the one you are reading.

Interestingly, very few daily newspapers have failed. But Abernathy’s report, “The State of Local News 2022,” indicated that of the top 100 circulated newspapers, 40 no longer publish seven days a week.

To note the plight of the industry is the fact that the newspaper newsroom employment has dropped 57 percent during the period of 2008 to 2020, according to Pew Research. The actual number is a loss of about 40,000 employees.

Even though dailies aren’t shutting down, the loss of employees hurts news coverage and plays into the news desert when there’s no one to cover certain aspects of a community. Paywalls on online editions are part of many newspapers’ efforts to make a profit, but can be harmful to providing the news the community needs if citizens are unable to pay the price.

Communities with high poverty rates and those with lower incomes that are now fighting inflation are unlikely to be subscribers. Obviously, that plays into a wider desert and continues to put pressure on the newspaper to survive with the paywall.

According to the Washington Post Magazine, Abernathy says, a news desert is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grass-roots level.” North Carolina, for example, has counties without a newspaper and some counties have seen multiple newspapers decrease to only one.

I believe local news can be saved. There are newspapers that continue to be successful. Abernathy, in the Poynter article, named The Pilot in Southern Pines, N.C. as one such newspaper. Maybe we need to take a hard look at successful newspapers and figure out what they are doing right and how they are doing it, then devise a template that could be applied at other newspapers.

I think newspapers, to be saved, must be more collaborative than competitive. What is good for one newspaper could be applied or tweaked and be good for another.

A year or so ago, there was a proposal made to provide government funding for newspapers. People believe today that most newspapers are already too political. Putting newspapers on the public till would essentially prevent them from being government watchdogs — a role that every newspaper should play in society.

Jason Chaffetz, former Republican congressman for Utah, believes the loss of newspapers in rural and urban areas is hurting conservatives, according to a piece he wrote for Newsweek.

He said he believes that a bill titled the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act would give publishers an opportunity to work together to negotiate a better deal with Facebook and Google for providing them with local news.

Chaffetz wrote, “It is currently impossible for any individual publisher to stand up to the tech giants. Since Facebook and Google benefit disproportionately from free local news content, they should have to negotiate like any other company for that deal and return more of the value back to the people who deliver it in the first place.”

The loss of newspapers and journalists is, indeed, troubling. More so than ever, we need journalists reporting on every aspect of a community and playing oversight on government.

Will the gap that has created news deserts be closed in the future? I’m not sure, but I believe it is time for publishers across the country to work cooperatively to do just that. In fact, I believe the life of their product is at stake.