Earlier this month, the McClatchy Company, publisher of 30 daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and the Charlotte Observer, was sold in a bankruptcy auction to the Chatham Management Group, a New Jersey hedge fund. Hedge fund ownership of other papers has led to sharp budget cuts and reduced local coverage. Due to competition from the Internet and other pressures, more than 2,000 American newspapers have gone out of business since 2004. Financial stresses from the coronavirus pandemic have only made things worse.
Our guest, veteran journalist Margaret Sullivan, believes the decline of local news coverage is a crisis every bit as serious as the spread of disinformation on the Internet. In a new book, Sullivan argues that when local news fails, citizens lack critical information to make good decisions, and democracy is weakened. (...)
DAVIES: The decline of traditional media organizations, especially daily newspapers, is not a new story. Why did you want to sound the alarm about it now?
SULLIVAN: Well, it's - it is an alarming situation but one that, most members of the public don't seem to be very tuned into. In fact there's research that's been done that shows that, you know, some 70% of Americans think that local news organizations are doing pretty well financially. That's not the case, especially when it comes to newspapers. And after spending most of my career at a regional newspaper in Buffalo, I know how important that is to the community and to - sort of as an underpinning of our democracy.
And I thought it would be important to show people the connection between the decline of local news and what's happening in our society at large. And it's - it means less political engagement, less voting across party lines, the possibility of more corruption at the local government level and, I think, the weakening of community ties in which we all kind of relate to each other based on a shared, you know, group of facts that we may want to do different things with - interpret in different ways. But we all can sort of agree on what's happening. So I see it as a real crisis. And I wanted to let people know what the price of it is before it's entirely too late.
DAVIES: One medium-sized newspaper that you write about is the Youngstown, Ohio, Vindicator. Just tell us briefly its story and what it meant to the community and what happened.
SULLIVAN: So last summer, there was a surprise announcement that The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, which is a substantial city, was going to close its doors the next month. The announcement was in July. They would - their last day of publication would be in August. And it was a shocker to the community. The paper had been around for over 150 years, mostly family-owned during that time and still family-owned. And people just couldn't believe it.
So I actually went off to Youngstown and spent quite a bit of time chatting with people and trying to - spending time in the newsroom there and trying to understand what had happened and what the cost of it would be. It's a very disturbing story because it would leave a pretty decent-sized city without its own newspaper anymore and one that had been a real part of the community. Everybody called it The Vindy. Everybody had, you know, had a story about delivering it. Or your mom's obit had been in it. Or they covered my sports event - whatever it was. This was going to go away.
I attended a community meeting, and people were in tears about it. But a - one of the editors who I spoke with later said, well, that was very poignant, but I wonder if we had had a show of hands about who among the crying audience had actually been seven-day-a-week subscribers - I wonder what that would have been. And his theory was that not very many. Circulation had gone way, way down.
DAVIES: So what was the impact when The Vindicator went under in Youngstown?
SULLIVAN: Well, since The Vindicator closed, of course, there's a loss to the community. And there's no doubt about that. And people are feeling it. But there have been some things that have kind of come in to help to fill the gap a little bit. There is a new digital-only organization that McClatchy and Google are involved in called Mahoning Matters, with - the Mahoning Valley is the larger area around Youngstown. I think they have four reporters and a couple editors. So that's, you know, maybe six people. That's a far cry from the 44-member Vindicator newsroom but still a good thing.
A neighboring news chain has started to put out an addition in Youngstown that, again, isn't really a fully Youngstown paper, but it does something. They do still - and they took on The Vindicator name. So there is still something called the Youngstown Vindicator. It just isn't what it once was. And ProPublica, the great, you know, and much-esteemed digital-only investigative journalism organization, has put a reporter in Youngstown at one of the TV stations to you know help do some of this enterprise or investigative coverage. So, you know, I think it's a great, little laboratory. There was a big loss. And people feel it, and the community feels it. And yet there are some bright spots, too.
DAVIES: You cite an example of the impact of the decline of many small newspapers in the case of a congressman from western New York, Chris Collins, who was indicted for fraud as he was running for reelection. And this gave his opponent, seemingly, a huge advantage, a guy named Nate McMurray. What did McMurray find when he sought to raise this as a campaign issue?
SULLIVAN: Well, McMurray, who was a Democrat running in a very red district - in fact, it's New York state's most Republican district and one that spreads across eight counties - found that when he went out to some of the more rural parts of the district, where there was less local news coverage and where newspapers had gone under, that - you know, he told me that when he would start to talk to people about Chris Collins's indictment on insider trading charges, that some of them said, what are you talking about? We - you know, they did not know about it. And when he tried to inform them about it, they would, you know, sort of shout back that this was fake news.
And, in fact, Chris Collins was fundraising from the reports of his indictment that The Buffalo News, my old paper, had been writing about a lot. So in the parts of the district that had more local news and were more sort of immersed in local news coverage, a lot of people crossed the aisle to vote for the challenger, people who normally would, we can say, I think, confidently would have voted Republican. But in the parts of the district that had far less local news, one of which is termed a news desert, that didn't happen nearly as much. And McMurray said that, you know, he was really surprised. But he could understand it because he thought that people were getting a lot of their information from less dependable sources - social media, talk radio and just what he called rumors.
So there - you know, it's impossible to say exactly what would have happened if there'd been a great local newspaper in those parts of the district. But the sort of anecdotal evidence suggests that it really did have an effect.
DAVIES: Right. So McMurray, the challenger, lost the primary. The congressman ultimately resigned, right?
SULLIVAN: That's right. McMurray lost by just a whisker, one half of 1%, which was far, far less than what would normally have happened. And, you know, he would say that if there'd been great local news coverage in the further out parts of the district, including this news desert area, he believes he would have won. And then, ultimately, Chris Collins - the case went to trial. And he was sentenced to a jail term.
DAVIES: You know, another point you make is that the loss of local news coverage isn't just about watchdog reporting and investigations into local government officials, as important as that is. There was also a way in which they knitted communities together. So what's the impact when the paper closes?
SULLIVAN: Well, I mean, this is something that I feel so strongly about because part of - a big chunk of my time at the Buffalo News was as the features editor. So the people who I was dealing with every day and supervising and whose work I was lucky enough to edit were, for example, the book critic, the movie critic, the pop music critic, people who wrote feature stories about local people. And, you know, this was in a daily section called Life and Arts.
And when that section and when those jobs go away, which they have in Buffalo, I think that we lose something. We lose that connection. That has nothing to do with corrupt local officials. It has to do with how we relate to each other as members of a community. Our arts and our culture and, you know, sort of our society as a community, I think, becomes less knitted together and weakened.
SULLIVAN: Well, it's - it is an alarming situation but one that, most members of the public don't seem to be very tuned into. In fact there's research that's been done that shows that, you know, some 70% of Americans think that local news organizations are doing pretty well financially. That's not the case, especially when it comes to newspapers. And after spending most of my career at a regional newspaper in Buffalo, I know how important that is to the community and to - sort of as an underpinning of our democracy.
And I thought it would be important to show people the connection between the decline of local news and what's happening in our society at large. And it's - it means less political engagement, less voting across party lines, the possibility of more corruption at the local government level and, I think, the weakening of community ties in which we all kind of relate to each other based on a shared, you know, group of facts that we may want to do different things with - interpret in different ways. But we all can sort of agree on what's happening. So I see it as a real crisis. And I wanted to let people know what the price of it is before it's entirely too late.DAVIES: One medium-sized newspaper that you write about is the Youngstown, Ohio, Vindicator. Just tell us briefly its story and what it meant to the community and what happened.
SULLIVAN: So last summer, there was a surprise announcement that The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, which is a substantial city, was going to close its doors the next month. The announcement was in July. They would - their last day of publication would be in August. And it was a shocker to the community. The paper had been around for over 150 years, mostly family-owned during that time and still family-owned. And people just couldn't believe it.
So I actually went off to Youngstown and spent quite a bit of time chatting with people and trying to - spending time in the newsroom there and trying to understand what had happened and what the cost of it would be. It's a very disturbing story because it would leave a pretty decent-sized city without its own newspaper anymore and one that had been a real part of the community. Everybody called it The Vindy. Everybody had, you know, had a story about delivering it. Or your mom's obit had been in it. Or they covered my sports event - whatever it was. This was going to go away.
I attended a community meeting, and people were in tears about it. But a - one of the editors who I spoke with later said, well, that was very poignant, but I wonder if we had had a show of hands about who among the crying audience had actually been seven-day-a-week subscribers - I wonder what that would have been. And his theory was that not very many. Circulation had gone way, way down.
DAVIES: So what was the impact when The Vindicator went under in Youngstown?
SULLIVAN: Well, since The Vindicator closed, of course, there's a loss to the community. And there's no doubt about that. And people are feeling it. But there have been some things that have kind of come in to help to fill the gap a little bit. There is a new digital-only organization that McClatchy and Google are involved in called Mahoning Matters, with - the Mahoning Valley is the larger area around Youngstown. I think they have four reporters and a couple editors. So that's, you know, maybe six people. That's a far cry from the 44-member Vindicator newsroom but still a good thing.
A neighboring news chain has started to put out an addition in Youngstown that, again, isn't really a fully Youngstown paper, but it does something. They do still - and they took on The Vindicator name. So there is still something called the Youngstown Vindicator. It just isn't what it once was. And ProPublica, the great, you know, and much-esteemed digital-only investigative journalism organization, has put a reporter in Youngstown at one of the TV stations to you know help do some of this enterprise or investigative coverage. So, you know, I think it's a great, little laboratory. There was a big loss. And people feel it, and the community feels it. And yet there are some bright spots, too.
DAVIES: You cite an example of the impact of the decline of many small newspapers in the case of a congressman from western New York, Chris Collins, who was indicted for fraud as he was running for reelection. And this gave his opponent, seemingly, a huge advantage, a guy named Nate McMurray. What did McMurray find when he sought to raise this as a campaign issue?
SULLIVAN: Well, McMurray, who was a Democrat running in a very red district - in fact, it's New York state's most Republican district and one that spreads across eight counties - found that when he went out to some of the more rural parts of the district, where there was less local news coverage and where newspapers had gone under, that - you know, he told me that when he would start to talk to people about Chris Collins's indictment on insider trading charges, that some of them said, what are you talking about? We - you know, they did not know about it. And when he tried to inform them about it, they would, you know, sort of shout back that this was fake news.
And, in fact, Chris Collins was fundraising from the reports of his indictment that The Buffalo News, my old paper, had been writing about a lot. So in the parts of the district that had more local news and were more sort of immersed in local news coverage, a lot of people crossed the aisle to vote for the challenger, people who normally would, we can say, I think, confidently would have voted Republican. But in the parts of the district that had far less local news, one of which is termed a news desert, that didn't happen nearly as much. And McMurray said that, you know, he was really surprised. But he could understand it because he thought that people were getting a lot of their information from less dependable sources - social media, talk radio and just what he called rumors.
So there - you know, it's impossible to say exactly what would have happened if there'd been a great local newspaper in those parts of the district. But the sort of anecdotal evidence suggests that it really did have an effect.
DAVIES: Right. So McMurray, the challenger, lost the primary. The congressman ultimately resigned, right?
SULLIVAN: That's right. McMurray lost by just a whisker, one half of 1%, which was far, far less than what would normally have happened. And, you know, he would say that if there'd been great local news coverage in the further out parts of the district, including this news desert area, he believes he would have won. And then, ultimately, Chris Collins - the case went to trial. And he was sentenced to a jail term.
DAVIES: You know, another point you make is that the loss of local news coverage isn't just about watchdog reporting and investigations into local government officials, as important as that is. There was also a way in which they knitted communities together. So what's the impact when the paper closes?
SULLIVAN: Well, I mean, this is something that I feel so strongly about because part of - a big chunk of my time at the Buffalo News was as the features editor. So the people who I was dealing with every day and supervising and whose work I was lucky enough to edit were, for example, the book critic, the movie critic, the pop music critic, people who wrote feature stories about local people. And, you know, this was in a daily section called Life and Arts.
And when that section and when those jobs go away, which they have in Buffalo, I think that we lose something. We lose that connection. That has nothing to do with corrupt local officials. It has to do with how we relate to each other as members of a community. Our arts and our culture and, you know, sort of our society as a community, I think, becomes less knitted together and weakened.
by Dave Davies, NPR | Read more:
Image: Mark Lennihan / Associated Press
