News Deserts: How the fall of local media is threatening democracy everywhere
By Seamus Bozeman
As printed in Pasadena City College’s Spring 2023 edition of Spotlight magazine with the overarching theme of Identity.
As the world becomes more interconnected and the life around us speeds up, a relic of the past gets left in the dust. The newsstand, once a physical destination full of newspapers and coins, no longer sits along the sidewalk. Abandoned by the changing landscape of media and how we consume our news, American newsstands are on our phones, on news apps and on social media.
The identities of both rural and urbanized America have fundamentally changed by the collapse of local media outlets as thousands of communities have lost a major democratic watchdog.
Sam Kille is the vice president of communications at the Ground Truth Project. Through the Report for America organization, the project works with small and large newsrooms across the country to fund their growth, instead of their decline. In an exclusive interview with Spotlight, Kille emphasizes the devastating ripple effect felt by the collapse of local news.
“In the last couple of decades there’s been nearly a sixty percent decrease in the number of reporters in this country,” Kille said. “We’ve seen the number of news organizations, especially newspapers that have either folded or drastically reduced their circulation.”
This dramatic decline has left millions without access to local media in their communities. This inaccessibility or non-existence of a local media outlet is referred to as “news desert.”
Just north of Pasadena sits Altadena. Longtime resident Michael Bicay considers his community an example of a news desert. According to Bicay, the community has felt less connected and disjointed because of the lack of a local news organization. This has led to an increased reliance on neighborhood watch sites like Nextdoor, Patch and Citizen, which he considers unreliable and full of advertisements.
“I think it makes it harder to develop a sense of community,” Bicay said. “I think if we had credible news organizations that focused on more local stories both the good, the bad and the indifferent, that would be good.”
In a functioning democracy local news is vitally important and without one, or one in a precipitous decline, affecting millions of people across the United States, journalists are not able to act as watchdogs for our institutions. Because of this people in these communities are disproportionately affected by the lack of civic participation, increased corporate corruption, and political crimes.
“You’re not getting the news that’s really important,” Kille said. “National news isn’t going to talk about who your school board members are or whether or not your city council just voted to give itself a huge pay raise.”
Emma Gallegos is a former writer at Pasadena Star News and current equity reporter at EdSource, a non-profit news organization focusing on challenges in California education. In a conversation with Spotlight, she emphasizes the effect news deserts have on access to information and democracy.
“For a democracy to function in a healthy way everyone has to understand what’s going on in their communities,” Gallegos said. “I think journalism shines a light on what’s happening.”
Without a local press, Gallegos went on to say that problems can fester in our communities and when situations come to light it can feed into feelings of “cynicism” and “people feeling disconnected from their government.”
The decline of local media is a national issue that fails to get the notoriety it should as larger national media outlets endeavor to fill those voids. Recent studies by Gallup and the Knight Foundation have shown 44% of Americans have higher trust in their local media sites and newspapers, while only 21% trust a national media outlet, like CNN, FOX or The New York Times.
Pink slime websites, named after fake pink processed meat products, are opinion blogs posing as real and credible news. They are typically filled with misinformation and disinformation.
“They are created by partisan organizations, both on the left and right,” Kille said. “These pink slime news sites that look all official, their names sound like what you expect a newspaper or news organization name to be. They have a mix of actual real news but then they all have a lot of press releases or stories that really favor certain political candidates. That in itself is a very concerning and growing problem.”
According to a study conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review, it was found that a majority of the pink slime websites were created in the run up to the 2020 presidential elections.
Another major problem in the ongoing decline of journalism across America is the lack of funding for grassroots print outlets that prevent the proliferation of pink slime websites. Their revenue used to come from advertisements, but as paper became less relevant in our digitized world, ad revenue became harder to come by. Google and similar corporations claimed ad revenue, leaving transitioning and vulnerable newspapers without.
Gaps left by lost ad revenue are covered almost entirely by subscriptions, or direct donations from their readers. However, many readers today often avoid paying for online news access.
“The Industry led by newspapers was letting people read their content online for free,” Jim Rainey, an enterprise reporter for the LA Times said. “This was the original sin of newspapers in the internet age.”
The government does not fund or assist local print news organizations, only a select few hyper local television and radio stations. The main concern with federal or local governments funding news organizations stems from the idea that money buys power and influence. In Russia and North Korea, where state-run media outlets are the norm, the government oversees the editorial direction and censorship of newspapers and news outlets.
Organizations like Report for America are working to pass legislation in Congress to provide funding for local print media outlets without editorial stipulations or biases on where more funding should go. One of those bills is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. The bill would also create and incentivise newsrooms to keep more journalists and tax credits would be granted to those who paid for subscriptions to their local outlets.
Without access to a local media outlet, people resort to larger national outlets that don’t cover their local issues. Without genuine local connections, or ways to be informed about the community through credible news sites, political divides expand as misinformation and anger are left nurtured by Nextdoor, Citizen and Facebook.
What people consume is different depending on their generation. Gen-X may gravitate towards The New York Times or other national publications while many Gen-Z PCC students may use Instagram or other social media sites to get their daily news.
Second-year PCC student Henry Caceres said that he uses Instagram to follow a lot of Los Angeles area publications, while also watching local TV channels. He feels very informed of his local community and what is happening around him.
“I would say I’m pretty aware because of the social media that I follow,” Caceres said. “Because there’s a lot of LA based meme pages.”
The shift to online journalism has been an ongoing process for the last twenty years, but the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the shift. Nationally, around 360 daily and weekly newspapers shut down in the span of two years.
As many industries and jobs have rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic, journalism has continued to struggle and everyday Americans continue to lose out on access to news in their communities.
Even though the outlook of local media is bleak, there are organizations and media startups who are looking to revitalize these news deserts that blanket the United States. The Lookout Santa Cruz, The Long Beach Post and CalMatters are a few notable examples. These outlets receive support from Report for America as well as donations and some subscription revenue.
These newspapers are often the last line of defense in our democracy, holding politicians accountable and informing taxpayers, voters, citizens. Losing access to local journalism is akin to losing the heartbeat of the communities they serve. To lose local journalism is, quite literally, to lose stories that need to be told.
The story has been updated to note the change of Sam Killie from Interim VP of Communications at the Ground Truth Project to VP of Communications
