Local media struggle in rural America, just like everywhere else

I'm going to collect here various recent stories about the impact that media/newspaper consolidation  is having on small towns and rural communities around the country. 

Here's a Washington Post story from January on the gutting of local newsrooms.  The story focuses, however, on Gannett's reductions, with anecdotes from cities like Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville.  It doesn't really attend to smaller markets, though Gannett (a/k/a USA Today network) also owns papers in places like Redding, California (population 90,000) home of the Record Searchlight.  That paper serves the northern third of the massive Golden State. 

High Country News links the decline in local media to perils for public health.  An excerpt follows:

In rural areas that already struggle with doctor shortages, the loss of rural news also cuts into readers’ knowledge of important health issues. “When you talk about outbreaks, it’s crucial local journalists get the information out,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at John Hopkins University Center for Health Security. 

Without a local paper, more people are relying on social media. “There’s no information vacuum in today’s media world, because it’s been filled with social media,” said Yotam Ophir, a health communication researcher at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. But that can be one of the biggest problems during disease outbreaks, because “social media during epidemics is full of misinformation and rumors.” On the other hand, he said, “A responsible news reporter, who has dedicated her life to health reporting, can weed out misinformation.”

And here's the High Country News from December, 2018, "What You Lose When you Lose Local News."  An excerpt from Emily Benson's story follows:

new research suggests America’s increasing partisanship may be related to a monumental shift in the nation’s media landscape over the past three decades. As local newspapers shrink and close, people interested in the news are left more reliant on national outlets. As a result, they become more disconnected from their own communities and elected officials, less interested in voting — and more politically polarized. Without a revival of support for local journalism, experts say, that trend may be difficult to turn around.

The story reports on a recent empirical study in the Journal of Communication that linked the presence of local media to civic participation:

When local print news coverage drops, residents are less likely to participate in civic activities, like contacting public officials or joining a community association; less knowledgeable about the candidates for their U.S. House district; less able to hold municipal officials accountable, leading to economic inefficiencies; and, ultimately, less likely to vote.

One finding was "nearly 2 percent more straight-ticket voting in such counties compared to similar ones that hadn’t lost newspapers."  Straight ticket voting is a measure of political polarization. 

Here's a story on Sinclair media, a dominant broadcast force in smaller markets.