More on the demise of small-town newspapers

 Gardiner, Montana (north entrance of Yellowstone National Park):
Bozeman Chronicle, Billings Gazette and Livingston Enterprise 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017 

Margaret Sullivan wrote a few days ago for the Washington Post about the sharp drop off in newspapers in America.  The headline is "Every week, two more newspapers close — and ‘news deserts’ grow larger."  the subhead is "In poorer, less-wired parts of the U.S., it’s harder to find credible news about your local community. That has dire implications for democracy."  Here's an excerpt: 

News deserts are communities lacking a news source that provides meaningful and trustworthy local reporting on issues such as health, government and the environment. It’s a vacuum that leaves residents ignorant of what’s going on in their world, incapable of fully participating as informed citizens. What’s their local government up to? Who deserves their vote? How are their tax dollars being spent? All are questions that go unanswered in a news desert.

Local newspapers are hardly the only news sources that can do the job, but they are the ones that have traditionally filled that role. And they are disappearing.

One-third of American newspapers that existed roughly two decades ago will be out of business by 2025.    

Offices of Mount Shasta Herald, Mt. Shasta California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2021

*  * *

Already, some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have shuttered since 2005; there are fewer than 6,500 left. Every week, two more disappear. And while many digital-only news sites have cropped up around the nation, most communities that lost a local newspaper will not get a print or digital replacement.

“What’s discouraging is that this trend plays into, and worsens, the whole divide we see in America,” Abernathy, the report’s principal author, told me this week.

The neediest areas — those that are more remote, poorer and less wired — are the ones that get hurt the worst. Most of the new investment and innovation pouring into the media sector, as valuable and needed as it is, doesn’t reach these regions.

The Texas Tribune also did a story about the same Medill School (Northwestern University) study that prompted the Washington Post piece.  The focus here, of course, is on the Lone Star State.

Since 2005, Texas has lost more newspaper journalists per capita than any state other than California and New Jersey, according to a new national study on the state of local news. Over that period, Texas lost about one-third of its newspapers — 211 closed, leaving 423.

The State of Local News 2022, a report released Wednesday by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, notes that more than one-tenth of Texas counties — 27 of 254 — no longer have a local newspaper, daily or weekly.

I took the photo above in Gardiner, Montana, population 833, in 2017.  I was struck that three newspapers were available in this tiny town, whose economy is based on ecotourism, at the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park.  The papers of the larger cities (Bozeman and Billings) in the southern part of the state were available, as was the Livingston paper.  Livingston, population 8,040,  is about 50 miles north of Gardiner and is the county seat of Park County, population 17,000.  The Livingston Enterprise publishes five days a week, M to F, in the afternoon.  (Other photos of Gardiner are here, as it was featured in a recent post about flooding in that region).  

Prior related posts are here, here, and here, the latter two focusing on how the pandemic has impacted local newspapers.  I learned from my mother a few months ago that my hometown newspaper, the Newton County Times, no longer has an office in Jasper, the county seat--or anywhere else in Newton County.  Instead, it is based in neighboring Harrison, the micropolitan regional center.