"Newsroom-to-newsroom collaborations could be the key to save a dying local news industry. Specialized outlets have an important role to play, too."
"The place to begin solving the crisis engulfing American journalism is from the bottom of the pit that we’re in. Look up, and there’s light. But first, we have to look down and around. At our feet are the lifeless remains of more than 2,500 news outlets that existed twenty years ago, and the ghosts of tens of thousands of jobs. The void left behind in so many communities has been filled by misinformation and polarized discourse, and our social fabric is torn.
The free press—our central organ of civic awareness—has sustained severe injury, but most Americans think that their local outlets are doing well; news still lights up our smartphones. Only experts seem to comprehend the seriousness of this quiet crisis.
One of them is Penny Abernathy, who has studied the growing problem and offers a grim diagnosis in the report she wrote for Northwestern’s Medill School of journalism called The State of Local News 2022. She tells us that newspapers are continuing to vanish rapidly—800 more will likely fail in the next three years. Digital alternatives remain scarce. Seventy million Americans now live in counties that don’t have their own newspaper—20 million are in news deserts. Newspaper revenue—$50 billion in 2005—is down to $10 billion. Employment has contracted 70 percent. Surviving newspapers are mostly owned by hedge funds or indebted to them, are publicly traded or in privately held chains."
David Sassoon writes for Inside Climate News October 22, 2023.
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