By The Herald Editorial Board
The desertification of local community-based journalism in the United States continues its steady creep, a fact that readers of The Herald — even as it continues its daily operation online and five days a week in print — have noticed with last year’s loss of about half of its newsroom staff of reporters, editors and photographers to budget cuts.
The desert hasn’t overtaken Snohomish County yet — although it’s getting more arid here — but elsewhere in the nation, entire communities and regions have lost reliable and regular coverage of hometowns and counties.
Legislation in Olympia, proposed by an Edmonds state senator, may help hold back the desert sands.
The State of Local News: In the most recent report on the state of local news, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found that since 2005 more than 3,200 print newspapers in the U.S. have vanished, disappearing at the rate of more than two each week. In 2023, the report says, 130 papers closed and many more reduced their operations, eliminating pages or publication days and have cut staff, often by as much as half, for a total loss of more than 7,000 newspaper jobs in 2023 alone.
In its report from 2022, Medill predicted that by the end of this year, the U.S. would have lost a third of its print newspapers over the past two decades. That mark, it now says, has already been exceeded. What remains are 5,600 newspapers, most of them weeklies, leaving some 55 million Americans with no access to local news.
Local journalism — and we’ll include locally based online publications, radio and television with print publications — have been compared to mangroves, those tropical coastline trees with a tangle of above-water roots. Mangroves are vital players in coastal ecosystems, filtering toxins from the water, providing protective habitat, holding shorelines in place and providing protection from storms.
Mangroves and newspapers: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it so: “Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy inter-dependencies — to keep the schools decent, the streets clean and to sustain local businesses and job creators.”
The disruptive advance of technology has much to do with journalism’s desertification; seen at the start of the century with a loss of classified and print advertising to websites, then continuing with a shift in habits away from print to websites and now the scrolling feeds on phones. Our pocket portals have done a good job of diverting eyes,but they are more effective at delivering casserole-dump recipes, movie clips and dance moves than the news and information on which communities rely.
Staying on the beat: Even for those who don’t regularly read local journalism, their communities cannot operate well without it, a realization that has prompted community efforts for fundraising, such as The Herald’s Investigative Journalism Fund, campaigns for sponsorships of reporters and even legislation in state Legislatures and Congress, including tax credits to support local news outlets and the creation in the state Legislature of a News Fellowship program, run by Washington State University’s Murrow School of Journalism, that has funded the hiring of 16 reporters working with 22 newspapers throughout the state.
The latest effort, proposed by state Sen. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds — who while in graduate school supported himself by covering school board meetings for the Mukilteo Beacon — would significantly expand on those efforts by establishing a grant fund with $20 million each year to support some 100 local journalism outfits, particularly in under-served communities, helping sustain salaries and hire additional staff to better cover civic affairs in those communities.
Those reporters make a difference, Liias said, keeping government honest and building a sense of community and solidarity.
“There’s nothing like seeing a reporter show up at a local public meeting to change the tenor and tone of those conversations and make sure that what our public agencies are doing is in line and in keeping with what our communities want,” Liias said in introducing the bill Tuesday.
The news corps: The legislation, Senate Bill 5400, had its first hearing this week before the chamber’s labor and commerce committee and is scheduled for an executive session on Feb. 7.
The Local Journalism News Corps program would provide grants to news outlets in the state — newspapers, websites and television and radio stations — with at least three employed journalists. Grants would be proportional to the hours worked by the outlets’ reporting staff, with reports submitted to the state Department of Commerce by each outlet.
The fund would be supported by expansion of an existing tax that is currently supporting the workforce education investment account, an additional business and occupation tax on advanced computing and technology business that supports $9 million in year for higher education programs, salaries and student financial aid. Under the legislation, the funding for those education programs would increase to $15 million annually and would receive additional amounts above the $20 million raised for the journalism fund.
Although Liias, in an earlier interview, said he expects some push-back from the companies being taxed, he sees the program — like the original workforce education program — as ultimately beneficial to those businesses, including those who republish the work of local news outlets on their sites, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others.
Those companies are benefiting from that content and don’t compensate those outlets beyond expanding their reach, essentially getting their news for free without a subscription, while tacking on their own advertising. Liias’ legislation, which has 13 bipartisan cosponsors, would help expand that subscriber base across the state.
“If we do it this way, we also will create a win-win for the platforms, because we’ll be creating more content, more views, more clicks,” he said. “Everybody wins when there’s more coverage in our communities.”
Among those supporting the legislation was Dee Anne Finken, leading local news efforts with the state League of Women Voters, and a former reporter and journalism professor at Clark College, She described the decline in publications and staffing “not as a journalism problem but a democracy problem.”
“The Washington League’s recent study of the decline of local news linked it with at least six major impacts on our communities and democracy,” she said. “Reduced voter turnout, higher government costs, fewer candidates for local office, increased political polarization, reduced civic engagement and greater obstacles for public health. Senate Bill 5400 represents a serious effort to responsibly address this crisis, one that is that so gravely hampers us all from participating fully in our communities and our democracy.”
As the causes of local journalism’s waning business strength are varied, so, too, will be its solutions. Ultimately, local news outlets are working to rebuild business models that fund the work of those gathering, reporting and writing the news, but the stories and information that are provided are too important to communities, individuals and our democracy to interrupt, even in the short-term.
The legislation offers a fair path to support more of that work, sustain newspapers and other news outlets and push back the shifting sands of news deserts.
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