Local journalism: Shrinking resources, growing challenges

Greenwich Public Library to hold community forum on newspapers

Jan 03, 2022

Morning Update

Monday, January 3, 2021

By Ken Tingley

The Glens Falls Rotary Club has asked me to speak at their weekly meeting on Thursday. I will be the first speaker during their 100th anniversary year.

I’ve spoken to Rotary before, although I suspect most of their current members were probably not around when I spoke in March 1999.

As the new editor, I talked about the important role the newspaper plays in the community. I feel even stronger about that today.

I’m going to remind the Rotary folks about many of stories the newspaper did that helped make local communities a better place to live. I’m sure they already know there are going to be fewer of those stories in the future.

Northwestern University recently published a report that examines the “local news crisis.”

The project is called, “Local journalism: Shrinking resources, growing challenges.”

Through a series of video interviews and a public webinar in November and December, the Northwestern study identified two key areas of concern:

- The reduction in local news may have cost lives during the pandemic because it paved the way for misinformation to take hold.

- National political divisions are filtering down to the local level, threatening public trust that many local news outlets have enjoyed for decades.

The conclusions were not news to me. During the final years I was editor, I found more accusations of bias toward the local newspaper than ever before and more misinformation being spread. Repeated fact checks had little impact.

The study concludes the pandemic has exposed the “diminished resources of the journalists tasked with covering it.”

“Local news organizations are just so much less equipped now, both literally and figuratively in terms of personnel, to cover even something as consequential as the coronavirus pandemic,” Just Security Senior Editor Viola Gienger told the authors of the Northwestern study.

Gienger believes the pandemic is a “national security issue,” and while many news organizations have taken an all-hands-on-deck approach, many news organizations just don’t have very many hands any more.

What I found frustrating about the report was the lack of input from small-town news organizations and what they are dealing with currently.

Many of those smaller news outlets have been able to give basic nuts and bolts coverage about infections, deaths and testing sites, but they could not provide the greater context that dispels the misinformation so rampant.

Still, local news outlets were having an important impact. The Pew Research Center found that people who relied on news outlets for their information on Covid-19 were far more likely to get vaccinated than those who relied on the former president or personal and community connections for information.

But here is also what I hope the Rotary Club and others in the community get from my Thursday speech. The newspaper is still a key component in holding the community together.

“When you don’t have a local news outlet,” said Boston Globe healthcare reporter Felipe Freyer, “you really start to lose your sense of community and the sense that there is a trusted source that you can turn to.”

Freyer believes local citizens start to forget that the people who run local government are actually their neighbors and local people like them.

“You lose that connection with your community and that opens up a doorway for misinformation to pour in,” Freyer said. “So the role of local news has a big role in my mind in the spread of misinformation and all the horrible things that have come as a result of that, including all the people who died because they didn’t get vaccinated.”

I understand the Rotary folks are looking for a big community project to help celebrate their centennial. What about helping to restore journalism to its rightful place of respect in the community. The newspaper needs to remain as the connective tissue in the community.

Later this spring, my second book will address the larger question nationally: Who will do the journalism in the future?

We all should be asking that question now.

Greenwich event

It is being billed as a conversation about the past, present and future of local journalism. It is a subject I love talking about.

My first book, “The Last American Editor,” was a reminder that newspapers tell the stories of local people and events. And the question is, who will do that in the future?

WAMC radio host Joe Donohue will be hosting this event at the Greenwich Public Library on Thursday, Jan. 13. It is limited to just 25 people and those that are vaccinated. Copies of the “The Last American Editor” can be obtained at Battenkill Books or at the event.