Revitalizing America's News Deserts
"Throughout the country, local journalism is being defunded and dismantled. A recent report by Northwestern Universitys Medill Local News Initiative shows that the newspaper industrystill the primary source of original reporting for our entire news media systemhas lost more than a quarter of its newspapers and almost 60 percent of its newsroom employees since 2005. More than one-fifth of the U.S. populationapproximately 70 million Americansnow live in an area with little or no access to local news."
"Weve come to call these media wastelands news deserts, though this metaphor can be misleading. People living in such areas still consume copious amounts of mediafrom unsubstantiated rumors swirling in Facebook groups to sensationalized fluff aired by cable news networks. Worse still, all manner of disinformation and conspiracy-peddling are rushing into the vacuum created by the collapse of local journalism, including rightwing propaganda operations made to look like authentic news reportingso-called pink-slime journalism."
Read more here: https://progressive.org/magazine/revitalizing-americas-news-deserts-pickard/
appalachiablue
(41,055 posts).. The bottom line is that local journalism is no longer profitable. The market is abandoning it at the very moment when we need local media the most, to provide critical information on everything from voting to vaccines. Any hope for a semblance of democracy necessitates reliable reporting, regardless of its commercial value. Profit was never meant to be the sole criterion for the value of journalism; we must treat news and information as the public goods they always were. A dwindling number of newspapers failing to produce even the bare minimum of news that society requires isnt just a journalism crisisits a democracy crisis.
While journalism isnt a silver bullet for solving the many challenges facing usfrom climate change to racial injustice to the soaring rate of income inequalitywe cannot begin to confront these wicked problems without a functional fourth estate. It seems that each month a new study demonstrates the detrimental effects of losing local newsfrom reduced voting and civic engagement to increased extremism and corruption. Yet, the United States has done little to confront what is clearly a national crisis. Americans have been slow to respond to the crisis in part because they misunderstand its structural nature.
As late as 2019, a Pew Research Center survey indicated that shockingly few Americans were aware that local journalism was under financial duress.
.. The depth of the journalism crisis has outpaced any concerted policy responseespecially at the level necessary for reconstructing the entire news media ecosystem. After a modest newspaper subsidy program died with the demise of President Bidens Build Back Better legislation, the only policy intervention to emerge at the federal level is the dubiously named Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow media firms to essentially collude & present a united front to negotiate better terms & extract more revenue from platforms like Facebook & Google. Despite much hype, the JCPA amounts to a corporate giveaway to big broadcasters & publishersmany of whom have been complicit in exacerbating the journalism crisisinstead of directly supporting journalists or creating new outlets. The likes of Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gannett, & Alden stand to benefit from the JCPA. This trickle-down approach to funding journalism attests to the paucity of the American social imagination & the lack of political will to devise nonmarket support for a vital public service.
A straightforward alternative to the JCPA would be taxing Facebook & Google to create a dedicated fund (perhaps combined with revenue streams from philanthropists, public subsidies, & other sources) to support nonprofit reporting in news deserts & other underserved areas.
We need systemic projects that guarantee a baseline level of news & information for all members of society, not just the privileged few who live in affluent neighborhoods. This dismal outlook notwithstanding, glimmers of an alternative news media system are flickering from the wreckage. One example is the growing number of progressive initiatives at the state & local levels.. The nonprofit sector also lends hope, ushering in a golden era for noncommercial experimentation..These newsrooms aim to empower historically marginalized communities to tell their own stories through their own media, demonstrating the potential for radically democratized media outlets that are public not just in name but in ownership & control.. They treat journalism as an essential public service whose primary purpose is to facilitate participatory democracy.. Like public schools, we could fund new anchor institutionspublic media centersin every community across the country...