Democracy depends upon local journalism

Just the Facts

This week’s column is admittedly a bit overdue, however, I can’t think of a more relevant time to discuss the importance of local journalism. First and foremost, Anaconda is so incredibly fortunate to have a newspaper printed right here in our small yet quickly expanding town when there are papers across the country that are shutting down at the astronomical rate of 2.5 per week.

Eek, that’s scary – maybe for some of us more than others, but the consequences of dissolving local journalism has monumental repercussions that impact everyone. And I do mean everyone.

“The decline of newspapers has had several adverse consequences, including: declines in civic engagement, increases in government waste, increases in political polarization, and the increased nationalization of local elections,” a Wikipedia article on the subject states.

The Associated Press mirrored that testimony when they reported that the decline in newspapers has been linked to “misinformation, corruption, polarization and a worsening advertising climate.”

I saw a meme on social media the other day that asked how can we trust news sources when they are almost entirely owned by six big companies? The answer is, support local journalism.

Chuck Plunkett, a journalist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for over 23 years, explained his situation from his time at The Denver Post in a TED Talk and I found his perspective very relevant to this discussion.

“Inside a windowless meeting room in March 2018, we learned that 30 more would have to go. This paper that once had 300 journalists, would now have 70. It didn’t make sense. Here we’d won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, we shifted focus from paper to digital, we met ambitious online targets, and emails from the brass talked up The Post’s double-digit profit margins. If we were so successful and so profitable, why was our newsroom getting smaller and smaller and smaller,” he said.

Plunkett joined The Denver Post in 2003, a time when it had almost 300 journalists on staff and was hailed as one of the 10 giants in the newspaper industry. In 2013, they would go on to win a Pulitzer for their coverage of the Aurora movie theater shooting. However, despite the success, the paper went into a decline like so many others around the country.

“I knew that what was happening here, to The Denver Post, was happening around the country. Since 2004, more than 1,800 newsrooms have closed. You’ve heard of food deserts? These are news deserts – communities, and often whole counties, with little to zero news coverage whatsoever. Adding to the problem, many newspapers have become ghost ships pretending to sail with newsrooms, but really just wrapping ads around filler copy,” Plunkett said.

So why are we talking about a journalist we don’t know at a paper we don’t read? Consider the bigger picture. Insulting and refusing to support journalism because you have a bone to pick with larger, and oftentimes biased news sources, then coupling that ideology with local reporters isn’t doing anyone any favors. I can’t tell you how often people scream obscenities about the media just to hear their own voices. 

So, here’s what Plunkett explained a community without journalism looks like: “Now, you might be thinking, 'Who cares? Let this dying industry die.' And I get it – the local news has been declining for so long that many of you don’t even remember what it was like to have a great local paper. Perhaps you’ve seen 'All The President’s Men' or 'The Post,' movies that romanticize what journalism once was. But I’m not here to be romantic or nostalgic. I’m here to warn you that when local news dies, so does our democracy. And that should concern you regardless of whether you subscribe.”

He continued, “A democracy is a government of the people. People are the ultimate source of authority and power. A newsroom functions like a mirror: journalists see the community and reflect it back to us. That information is empowering – seeing, knowing, and understanding is how we make decisions. When you have a great local newsroom, you have journalists listening in on every city council meeting, sitting through State House and Senate hearings, and the many important yet devastatingly boring committee hearings. They expose flaws within ill-conceived ordinances and those bills fail because the public is well-informed. They understand the pros and cons behind each ballot measure because journalists did the heavy lifting for them. Better yet, researchers found that reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote – 13 percent. That could change the outcome of almost any election.”

I’ll let that sink in. But after it does, please consider his words the next time you want to disregard the importance and necessity of local journalism.