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Losing Reliable Channels to the Community

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This is a cautionary tale. According to NPR’s Marketplace, in the last twenty years 3200 newspapers in the U.S. have folded.

This has not been a good month for my home state of New Jersey. No less than four newspapers have announced they will no longer publish daily print editions, opting for digital news hybrids that are typically shorter and less thorough. The closure of the print edition of North Jersey’s Star Ledger—the state’s biggest paper—is especially a loss, but so is the demise of the print version of the Times of Trenton, a newspaper that serves the states’ capitol city. My county, one of the wealthiest in the country and one of the largest in the state, will lose print versions of the Hunterdon Democrat.

These closures are at the behest of New Jersey Advance Media, owned by the Newhouse family. These changes follow a pattern where group news owners gut local journalism, leaving many traditional functions like political reporting barely present. So far, the only remaining online versions of local news are hardly up to the task, unless you want to know that status of various high school wrestling teams. A check with Advance Media’s NJ.com yesterday led with a Dear Abby column.

If we thought the nation’s most densely populated state was in a news desert before, we have only begun to experience the sense of loss when there are no reporters left to describe what we need to know. Advance Media’s shrinking staff at their ghost papers try hard, but they can only do so much.

This is all happening in a state that is near the top in terms of literacy rates, family income, and educational attainment. It is also a surprisingly complex state, with large forests and farms, a diverse population, a long coastline, and dense urban sprawl. But even with a state-based cable news channel, it is harder to know what is going in even the more local of the 500 municipal districts in the rest of the Garden State.

This is a cautionary tale. According to NPR’s Marketplace, in the last twenty years 3200 newspapers in the U.S. have folded. Some 208 counties in the country have no local news. Feel fortunate if your local news media are surviving in the traditional form of more extensive news coverage that is possible in print.

newspaper boxes NiemanLab

I see this broad decline in print journalism most dramatically in younger Americans, who have not only lost the newspaper habit, but the news-seeking habit as well. There are too many other choices that offer more immediate forms of gratification. Add in the double-threat of disinformation efforts from sources ranging local political operatives to the Kremlin, and we are ill-prepared to enter a public and informed discussion of vital issues. If anything, this last election is a reminder of the price we pay for a public seemingly ill-informed about the policy consequences of their votes.  I’m afraid the founders of the nation would be appalled at the rampant fantasy-making that passes for discussion in our own”information age.”

To be sure, we are engaged with others in an endless spectrum of online communities. But in no sense should we consider most platforms as comparable vehicles for meaningful public “discussion.”  If we need a comparison, the typical social media post more closely resembles a shout issued from a passing car than a considered account of an important event. Becoming an informed citizen means reading more than a few sentences or seeing a 90-second video news report. And that’s assuming you can find a news organization dedicated to need to know news as much as want to know news. In the words on the masthead of the Washington Post, The lights seem to be fading in ‘democracies that die in darkness.’

At the same time, the consumption of reliable online news occupies less of our time. The resulting fragmentation of the nation into specific audiences means that it is less likely that Americans will pay attention to significant events, or even  the same informational sources. If you ask friends what they are seeing online or on cable, the odds are good that “their” content is different than yours. Neil Postman had it mostly right in his classic 1985 book, subtitled “Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” We are indeed Amusing Ourselves to Death, but with more esoteric ‘narrowcasting’ that satisfies the personal over the collective national interest.

Looking for a Paper in Baltimore

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A news site online is a step back from journalism on display in a public space.

Recent work took me to a hotel on the edge of the Inner Harbor in downtown Baltimore.  Those few square miles have everything a city might want: one of the two finest aquariums in the United States, scores of restaurants and shops, classic wooden ships moored in the small rectangular harbor, and a ring of convention hotels. Just a few blocks back sits the legendary Camden Yards baseball field, just an over-the-fence shot from Babe Ruth’s birthplace.  And further up Platt St: a stunning cathedral-sized train shed full of fascinating remnants of the Civil War.

One  morning I needed a news hit beyond the chatty hosts of the morning talk shows.  And I was tired of reading headlines from my tablet, with its cramped size and its jumpy touch-screen.

What I didn’t expect was that it would be a major challenge to buy that simple artifact of the civil society, a real newspaper.

Of course it’s old news that hard copies from nation’s biggest journalistic institutions are on the way out. The thought of a newspaper subscription never comes up among my students, though some find their way to these outlets online.  According to the Pew Research Center, only a quarter of millennials show any interest in political or civic news; a fact that doesn’t bode well for the future.

 If we think an occasional glance at Gawker or CNN or Fox News will keep us in the loop, we’re badly mistaken.

Even so, one would expect to pass street kiosks and stores still hawking hard copies of papers from the many cities in the nation’s populated northeast corridor.  After all, half of all news subscribers in the nation still read paper-only versions.  Yet on that day this vital instrument of the open society was mostly absent from the public square.

The clerk in the store on the first floor of my posh hotel didn’t flinch when she said they carried no papers.  None?  So I started a slog across the harbor plaza, passing the tall ships, the overpriced chain restaurants selling all things fried, and perhaps another fifty establishments waiting for buyers of what most of us don’t really need (i.e., a candy store the size of a supermarket).  Surely there would be a corner box selling The Baltimore Sun or USA Today, or The New York Times or perhaps the Washington Post.  No luck.  Then into a Barnes and Noble in its stunning Power House venue next to the National Aquarium.  Yet again I seemed to be striking out. Then a staffer told me to ask someone behind the check-out counter.  And, sure enough, from under a desk in a corner of the store came a copy of The Post.  Why it was hidden from public view I will never know.  I felt like a citizen of Soviet times picking up some illicit samizdat from a dissident.  Even pornography seemed to have better placement in the store.

This is all dismaying.  Access to a news site online is not the same as news displayed in the places we frequent. The front pages especially of the nation’s tabloids were always written to draw in the passerby.  Their “screamer” headlines were meant to turn recent events into news you somehow needed.  Anybody walking down a street in the 1970s or 80s got a register of the nation’s pulse even if they weren’t buying.

Seeking out these sites online against mountains of competitors is a step towards the isolation of national and local news, with the consequence of equal isolation of the civil sphere from the rest of American life. These agents of democracy obviously hang by a frayed thread, competing in a carnival of more provocative digital content. It’s no surprise digital news platforms are in financial trouble, and that newsrooms once built for sizable staffs are now some of the lonelier offices on the planet.

The deeper problem is that there are too few newspapers sitting in the driveways or front steps of homes in our neighborhoods.  If we think an occasional glance at Gawker or CNN or Fox News will keep us in the loop, we’re badly mistaken.  And at about 200 words a minute, television news reduces events to headlines rather than discursive coverage. The ubiquitous newspaper available on a city’s streets remains the much richer form of reporting, and an important marker of our connections to this culture we call our own.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu

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