Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

journalism

The Rise of News Deserts

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In 1970, Congress passed legislation to create the Newspaper Preservation Act. The act exempted “joint operating agreements” (JOAs) from antitrust law, and in effect allowed two competing newspapers to share the same business operations – printing presses, buildings, advertising operations, distribution methods – as long as the news operations remained separate and competitive. It was touted as a way to preserve competition between newspapers, especially in cities with two (or more) newspapers. The legislation had been introduced after the Supreme Court found a joint operating agreement in Tucson, Arizona, to be a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

The intention was (seemingly) laudable – preserve newspaper competition. What followed was very different from the stated intention. Other forces were at work. The economic foundation of traditional journalism was changing rather profoundly, and this was in the days before the internet. Joint operating agreements proliferated across the United States; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat operated under one. But St. Louis couldn’t support two newspapers, and eventually the Globe-Democrat, after being sold, shut down in 1986. 

One newspaper in a JOA closing operations became almost normal. Looking back, people who’ve studied what happened have raised the question of who benefitted from the JOAs and the closing of newspapers. The answer is no surprise; it was the big newspaper chains. 

Independent newspapers have become an increasingly rare enterprise. In practice, what happens is that news takes on a sameness, with the same national stories replicated across the landscape, and local news diminished. The internet didn’t cause the development, but it certainly advanced it. I can remember the shock of seeing the Shreveport, Louisiana Times sounding exactly like what you’d find in St. Louis, Detroit, or anywhere else – the same wire service stories, the same columnists, the same editorial slant. Here is St. Louis, even book reviews and movie reviews are purchased from syndicates. 

The upshot is that local news, and issues of local importance, get short shrift. The term “news desert” has come to be applied to the death of weekly and community newspapers, but it has equal application to the subject of local news as well. (Few realize this, but the pages and the headlines for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now owned by Lee Enterprises, are assembled in another city.) I suppose we should feel grateful that it’s still in the United States; it could be China. Lee, headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, publishes some 75 newspapers and touts its commitment to local news. 

When journalists talk about news deserts, they are usually referring to the widespread decline of weekly newspapers in the United States. In the past 15 years, some 20 percent of weekly and community newspapers have disappeared, according to The New York Times. Thousands of communities across the country have no local newspaper. No coverage of local council meetings or school boards. No coverage of local crime. No coverage of local politicians or elections. Where newspapers have managed to survive, they resemble shadows of their former selves. 

This is true even of many newspapers in cities like New Orleans, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Not that long ago, the St. Louis region had two major newspapers, a chain of suburban journals, and a host of community newspapers. Now it’s one newspaper, owned by a chain and usually dominated by national news. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat closed; the Suburban Journals were bought by the Post-Dispatch, their function officially “incorporated” but in practice eliminated.

We still have local television news, but TV news can’t do what newspapers do, and that’s to report in depth and detail. TV news focuses on what grabs attention – like crime, car wrecks, and the weather. And for TV news to cover something as mundane as a zoning change isn’t going to happen, no matter how important that change might be to a group of residents.

News deserts are of two kinds – the disappearance of newspapers in countless communities, and the disappearance of local news in what newspapers have survived. I can still find local news in the t. Louis Post-Dispatch, but more often than not I find a lot more stories from elsewhere, produced by the Associated Press and / or syndicated from the Washington Post.

This “death of the local” is more than a loss of familiar news and community- mindedness. The evidence is beginning to mount that the end of local news is contributing significantly to political polarization in the United States. We’ll look at that next week.

Related: A Conversation about Journalism.

Top photograph by Cason Asher via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Conversation about Journalism

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Paul CŽezanne (French, 1839 – 1906 ), The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’ƒEveŽnement”, 1866, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

We have to start talking about journalism in the United States, and specifically the decline of journalism. Newspapers, television programs, and online news sites have been talking for years about how to fix the problems of circulation, readership, viewership, and competition from social media platforms, but I don’t think they’re going deep enough.

I’ve been working on a new fiction manuscript for some months now. The story is rooted in a community and the people who live there. An event happens that attracts the news media, both local and national. While the event and the role of the media are only a small part of the story, I’ve spent time researching news media, news, and how (and often why) certain event are covered.

This wasn’t a big stretch; my B.A. degree is in journalism, and I worked with journalists for most of my professional career in corporate communications. For three decades after I graduated from college, journalism remained recognizable. In 2003-2004, I was the director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, amid a highly controversial reorganization. I dealt with journalists daily. I was interviewed daily, and usually by multiple reporters. (My first interview occurred 15 minutes into my first day on the job, when a TV reporter wanted a statement on a teacher sickout. I hadn’t even filled out my HR paperwork when I was standing before a camera.) 

As crazy and hectic as it was, this was journalism, and particularly local journalism, that I knew and understood. The reporters were covering news that people in the community cared about. They may have liked it or hated it, but there was no question it was important to them. 

In 2004, I returned to corporate communications, responsible for a very specific slice of company issues. I was still dealing with journalism that I knew. My colleagues responsible for more general media issues, however, were dealing with a journalism that seemed almost alien. The reporters were less reporter and more activist. They asked questions like reporters, but their stories often reflected nothing of what the discussion had been about. Staff meetings often became brainstorm sessions on how to deal with this. 

The issue lasted for years. Ultimately, only one thing was going to work: calling out the reporter for a bad or misleading story – and publishing the reprimand on the company web site or blog. It’s difficult to imagine the internal opposition to this – embarrassing a reporter was something you simply did not do. It was resisted for years, but nothing else worked. What finally broke the opposition was a story that postured as news but was so obviously propaganda that even a publication widely read by journalists called the reporters out. The company published the reprimand on its blog site. The awful reporting subsided for a long time after that.

What was new in reporting back then seems to be standard operating procedure today. Newspapers like to think the internet has eaten their lunch. And it has – particularly in classified and other kinds of advertising. But reporting barely disguised as activist opinion has had its effect as well – I know a lot of people who stopped subscribing to the local newspaper because the bias was blatant. 

And there’s no question that the newspaper has a bias, but what’s interesting is that the bias occurs mostly in national news stories, obtained by the paper’s subscription to wire services like the Associated Press and syndicates like Washington Post. Local coverage has severely diminished over the years, but the paper generally does a credible job with local news. (That is, unless local news becomes national news, then it reports like everyone else.)

Where I live is increasingly unusual in that my suburb of St. Louis shares a weekly community newspaper with a few other adjacent communities. It covers what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch cannot – local council and school board meetings, local development proposals, sales and property tax issues, and other issues that affect and often deeply concern people in the community. It has a lively letters-to-the-editor page that usually has only letters about local issues, events, and concerns. What the newspaper does, sometimes well and sometimes imperfectly, is facilitate democracy and self-government. 

People are looking closely at the connection between newspapers, and the decline of newspapers, and the increasing inability of the United States to govern itself, except by crisis. Next week, I’ll have a post about a newspaper that tried some rather innovative – it dropped all references to national news and issues from its opinion pages. 

Photograph of The New York Times by Wan Chen via Unsplash. Used with permission.