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(Music) Jason Hibbs: Local journalism has been faltering for more than a decade, almost a quarter of the 9000 newspapers published just 15 years ago are gone.

This has created news deserts across the country and many of them in underserved communities.

Today on BackStory, we're discussing what happened and how this affects our democracy, our society, and we will explore some innovative models trying to fill that void.

That might just be the future of local journalism.

Our guest today, Penny Muse Abernathy in 2020, she wrote a major report based on extensive research.

It's called news deserts and ghost newspapers.

Will local news survive?

She's also the author of two books the strategic digital media entrepreneur and Saving Community Journalism.

She's a former senior business executive at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and is currently a visiting professor at Northwestern University.

Nancy Derringer has worked as a reporter, editor and freelancer in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan.

She has published in Smart Money, The Washington Post, Slate and Our Detroit.

Nancy was a Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, a staff writer at the online publication of the Center for Michigan, and is currently a columnist at Deadline Detroit.

And finally, Lee Chilcote founded and edits the land called dot org.

That's a local news startup that reports on Cleveland neighborhoods and inner ring suburbs.

They deliver in-depth stories and foster accountability, and form the community and try to inspire people to take action in their communities.

Lee is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair.

Next City Belt Planning and other publications.

Thanks to all of you for being here, Penny.

Let's dove right in and start with you.

What did you find in your research?

What has happened to local journalism these past 20 years?

Penny Muse Abernathy: Well, basically what we've lost is a linchpin in our democracy and in our society.

one way to think about it is we're a really big country.

If you look at us geographically and for almost 200 years, we depended on newspapers to kind of knit us together.

That was especially true in small and mid-sized towns.

And what those newspapers did is they tied this to back to Washington, back to the East Coast or to the West Coast.

And they also helped us create a sense of geographic community so that nurtured community as well as nurturing democracy.

What we have and what has happened basically over the last 20 years is the commercial model that sustained journalism for the last 200 years collapsed.

It collapsed for a number of reasons, including the fact that people's behavior change they moved migrated to digital and secondly, as a migrated on the digital advertisers follow readers and consumers of news , and they follow them there, too.

So for those of us who've been in the business for quite a number of years, the thought was OK, newspapers will transition.

There will be something that will come and we will still have newspapers in whatever form they're delivered in, whether it's digital, whether it's print, whether it's broadcast.

What we didn't count on would there is there would not be a viable commercial model that would actually come up and we're just kind of blossom into the barren landscape to take the place.

So what concerns me most?

You mentioned the statistics at the beginning.

Not only have we lost a quarter of our newspapers, most of those in small and mid-size communities, so that means there's nobody to cover the local town council meeting, the school board, meeting, the zoning meeting, all of those things that affect quality of our lives.

There's also we've lost more than half almost 60% of the newspaper journalist, and most of that has occurred at the big state and regional newspapers who used to provide backup and do the major trend stories and investigative pieces that improved the lives of residents, not just in one community, but in many communities.

It basically saved lives in a verdict disasters.

So to me, what's most concerning is how do we recreate things to get back to a state where we are serving those in the society, regardless of whether they were served before?

But bringing us all together so that we knit back together democracy beginning at the grassroots level and we knit back our society, beginning at the grassroots level.

Jason Hibbs: So Nancy Penney did a great job of walking us through.

Nancy Derringer: I have nothing to add to that.

I'm just going to take off.

Jason Hibbs: Well, let me ask you, where do you believe we are now and what does the future hold?

Nancy Derringer: I believe now we are at a very precarious place in our democracy.

I believe that it's a dark place.

We have replaced credible news sources with this kind of shotgun spray of sources, which, you know, run the gamut from crazy to fact-based.

And a lot of people are opting for the crazy ones.

And so, you know, when Penny was talking about losing larger papers and then and now smaller papers, I was thinking that once upon a time, I was naive enough to believe that the little papers would be OK because, you know, Google can't steal the advertising that you need to go to your local bakery or grocery store.

But I was wrong about that, too.

And and it's been replaced in large part by social media, which is, you know, probably the most dangerous thing you can rely on to get your information from.

So you know, where we are now is I. I don't want to sound too bleak, but I really think we are going to get worse before things get better.

And what lies ahead?

I I am reminded of something that a friend of mine, a very smart friend of mine who works for The Washington Post, told me, like maybe ten years ago when he said the person who will fix the phone.

The local news problem has not been born yet.

And what he meant by that was we're we're we're like the the Hebrews in the desert with Moses.

We have to like, work 40 years of bad habits and bad practices and traditions that no longer apply out of our bloodstream before we can kind of re approach the problem and figure out what, what may work.

Jason Hibbs: But we do have some people doing very innovative things.

And Lee, I'm so glad you're here because you're one of those people you launched LAN Kelly or less than two years ago.

It's very different in the types of stories that you're covering and the people doing the reporting.

Will you tell us about that?

Lee Chilcote: Sure.

Thank you, Jason.

So I think what everything that any and Nancy said is true.

But I also think that there are around the country, there are some innovative models that are springing up to address the news and information gaps in cities and in smaller communities.

And at least some of that.

And I would argue, you know, the great thrust of it is in nonprofit news that nonprofit news provides a different kind of model.

It's mission based, it's funding sources are different and it it has a responsibility to the community.

So The Land is a is a nonprofit news start up here in Cleveland, and we began about a year and a half ago, basically in response to the kind of twin threats of the pandemic and losing the Plain Dealer, which is are our legacy newspaper here in Cleveland that essentially collapsed during the right before and then during the pandemic.

And and now the content in the Plain Dealer comes from Cleveland.com, which was at its sister nonunion newsroom.

So it.

Again, our our news is in response to kind of the isolation and the disconnection that folks felt during the pandemic wanting to kind of knit the community together, as Penny stated, and also, quite frankly, to bring a different kind of news to a place like Cleveland.

We are the poorest city in the country right up there with with Detroit and several other communities.

Our poverty rate is between 30 and 35 5%.

We are a city that is majority residents of color, whether it's black or Hispanic or other ethnicities.

And for the majority of Clevelanders, life in the last decade or so since the Great Recession has not gotten better.

Their communities have not gotten better.

The city has spruced itself up with a rebuilt downtown and some neighborhoods that have seen some rebuilding and some gentrification, all of which is positive for the city.

But the vast majority of residents are being left behind, and that is part of the mission of our publication is to work with those residents to elevate their voices and to tell some of the stories that are not being told.

Jason Hibbs: And I understand your reporting staff is a little different to.

Lee Chilcote: Yeah, we're a startup, so there's just three of us on staff.

There's there's me and another reporter, and then we have a development staff person that's helping with everything from marketing to fundraising.

And as we grow, we anticipate we'll add a few more and kind of accumulate a small newsroom.

I think one thing that you're seeing in nonprofit news is that, you know, it's very different.

It's a very different kind of model.

I don't I want to kind of disabuse your viewers of the notion that we're going to go back to the way things were 20, 30, 40 years ago because you don't have to open a newspaper anymore to find out, you know who's playing at your local concert hall.

And so the way that people consume information is different.

They use social media.

Know they use the internet.

And so I think what nonprofit news and what innovative news sources have the ability to do is to dig a little bit deeper and to tell the stories of accountability of solutions and help connect people with reliable, high quality information sources that then help them to get engaged in their communities.

Jason Hibbs: So Penny of Lee just decided, you know, it's too hard and you had less local news in that community.

What does the research show happens when those pesky reporters disappear and local leaders are able to operate unencumbered by the questions and the open records requests?

Penny Muse Abernathy: Well, I think it's interesting to think about.

Newspapers have historically provided three functions for us.

one was to help set the agenda for debate of public policy issues.

So the second was to basically encourage economic development.

And then the third was the kind of ties together geographically.

And that's important even at a digital age, because we elect politicians at both the national and state level geographically and the people we elect to the school board in many ways mean more to us than the people we elect to the White House in terms of the quality of life that we have in a community.

So I mean, I think that one way to look at it is the recent research has shown a number of things when you lose a newspaper and nothing like what Lee has comes in as an alternative.

Right.

And one of the problems, and I'm so glad he talked about Cleveland.

I want to come back if we have time and talk about it because I think Cleveland is a unique situation in a couple of ways.

But it's also very typical the places we have been most likely to lose a newspaper have been and economically struggling communities.

So if you think about it, those are the very communities that need the kind of information that a good, strong local news organization would do.

So recent research has shown that when you lose a newspaper and there's no alternative, voter participation goes down.

And that's especially true in Off-Year elections, when you don't have somebody at the top of the ticket pulling everything else along.

And part of the reason is you just can't get information.

I live in a news desert and getting information on congressional candidates or the US House of Representatives is almost very impossible to get.

Corruption goes flourishes over time.

It starts in a small way.

Somebody gets away with it and it goes and it flourishes.

Both in government and recent research out of Harvard has shown it flourishes in private industry as well.

You start getting dumps of toxic material into streams and the like.

And then finally, what also happens to is that you end up paying more as taxpayers, because when people look into say, Is this a community I want to underwrite a bond for, they're looking for information.

How closely is somebody watching over how efficiently government is running?

So I mean, there are there are a host of things we should be concerned about on a grassroots level as to what happens when you don't have something like what Lee is talking about in Cleveland.

Jason Hibbs: And Penny, I understand it even changes the way people vote.

Research indicates it leads to more straight ticket voting.

Penny Muse Abernathy: Right.

And know that a lot of research has shown that it's leading to polarization.

And basically what happens is if you go on social media, way more than 90% of the news that you see on social media is is basically national politics.

Yes, you don't even know what's going on at the local school board.

And I mean, and often those issues are very, very different from what's happening on the national stage.

And that's been one of the problems too, is we see polarization going down in terms of the mask mandates and everything else that we've seen this year in our local school board meetings, where you have disruptions of crowds who are basically taking cues from what national politicians are saying.

Jason Hibbs: Well, we've got to take a quick break.

We have some resources for those of you who would like to learn more about this issue and we'll be back with more back story and just.

The moment.

(Music) Welcome back to back story, let's dove right back in.

Nancy, I know you told our producer that you're a fan of micropayments where people will pay per story online.

That might be a solution, but I thought newspapers tried that a few years ago and it did not work.

Nancy Derringer: That may be true, I am a fan of micropayments, but what I sometimes struggle with is, you know, I was listening to your other two panelists and thinking how smart they were and the things they were saying were were absolutely correct.

But I was also thinking about how we used to consume a newspaper.

It was a it was a very general knowledge piece of paper that would pile of paper that would land on our doorsteps.

And you know, in the A.S., it was national international than metro than features and sports.

And of course, all of this was was driven by advertising.

But you know, you could you could read it and and get a good sense, not the best sense, not perfect sense of what was going on in your community.

I think a lot of what Lee is talking about, you know, finding specific information about these kind of dialed in things like tax rates and recycling and whatever those things, you have to go looking for them now.

I mean, they're out there and are some great startups that are doing that kind of work.

And it's it's wonderful, but you have to go looking for this stuff now, bring this back to micropayments.

There's a school shooting that happened in my metro area just this afternoon.

People are going to hear about this school shooting in Michigan, and they're going to come and they're going to want to see these stories.

Just as when I hear about a mass shooting in Las Vegas, you know, I want to read about that.

So they go to the local and of course, everybody knows.

If you really want to know what's going on in the community, the best place to look is in your local newspaper or your local TV stations, the people who are not parachuting in from Washington or New York, but frequently, I will find when I go to these local papers that they're paywalled and that's fine.

I believe in paywalls.

I mean, reporters have to eat too.

But I always think, you know, I would love to be able to throw them $0.50 or whatever the, you know , or a dollar to be able to read this story just so that I can get a sense of what's going on from a local source.

So that's what I mean by micropayment.

It's almost like a gift card that you can swipe through on a number of of, you know, because I'm not going to subscribe to the L.A. Times or the Las Vegas paper or whatever, just to find out about this stuff.

I want to know one story because I don't and then get out.

And that's that's what I mean by micropayments.

Jason Hibbs: Interesting.

OK. And just one note we are recording this episode on the last day of November 2021.

Penny, I understand there's pending legislation in Congress that could help with funding as well.

Penny Muse Abernathy: Yeah, there is this called.

It was originally called the Local Journalism Sustainability Act.

The good news was the original version had bipartisan support.

It has been lumped in with the reconciliation bill that the bill back better.

So there's a real question as to whether it will go through.

What I like about it is it doesn't provide direct support, but it brags indirect support for hiring reporters at small newspapers.

There's a limit to how much large newspapers can do, and it only applies to local and metro newspapers to.

This doesn't apply to the New York Times.

Let me tell you why I think we need it because I've struggle.

As for a long time as I as a journalist, should you accept government aid?

Well, truth of matter is we have public broadcasting now.

Admittedly, there's so little money that goes to public broadcasting.

We got more appropriately call it nonprofit broadcasting because the majority of the funds come from nonprofit donations.

But what we've seen from the research in recent years is that if you were in a community where you have average to above average economic growth prospects for either the economy or population, and you have an owner who both has capital to invest for a good long, five years or so goes, you can't just snap your fingers and become profitable and say and be sustainable.

And he has the ability to react to local considerations for both businesses and individuals.

You have a good chance of creating both a for profit or nonprofit model.

What worries me the most is the places we have lost news organizations and have not had replacements tend to be those very dire, economically struggling places.

Cleveland is a classic example.

You can put that up against what happened in Youngstown.

Cleveland, at least has community foundations with significant endowments.

Youngstown, by contrast, just down the road, does not.

So I mean, in places where you really need it, Youngstown has a similar poverty rate of about 30%.

So in places that you really need it, you've got scale in Cleveland.

So there's an opportunity to bring all of those together.

And you know, you've got that, you've got nonprofit support.

And that's been the real issue is the nonprofit support has been very.

Slim, as has the public support, and I think that, you know, it's interesting, it's interesting for us to be debating it.

I like the local Journalism Sustainability Act because it's something that faces in over five years and we can assess it.

Jason Hibbs: Lee, as mentioned, there's been some talk of government giving direct payments to news organizations.

Would you accept taxpayer dollars from the government and are you worried that in the future government might try to influence coverage?

I mean, should we really go down that path?

Lee Chilcote: You know, I have not looked closely at that bill, but I have been following the chatter among some of my colleagues in the nonprofit news sector, and it looks like it's I know it's gotten the support of a of a trade group that were part of the Institute for Nonprofit News, and it looks like a solid piece of legislation that would allow that would fund help to to fund indirectly local journalism and would not allow complete independence of content and so forth.

So it looks like something that could really help to to bolster local news.

And in addition to that, I would say that the most difficult part of of building a local news organization, whether it's for profit or nonprofit, is the gobs of money problem.

OK, this is what my colleague calls the gobs of money problem that you need gobs of money to do it now.

Not really, but you do need a substantial budget and staff in order to have a newsroom that can really cover a community, especially a community like Cleveland, that is quite large.

And so, you know, we need all the help we can get.

And I think that there's a real argument to be made that public support is warranted and is valuable if it's done in the right way and that it exists.

Certainly, it exists in many other communities, in many other countries.

Jason Hibbs: And to be clear, that Bill, I believe Penny was referring to that is all about indirect support to the local news organizations, but there has been some talk of just direct payments to newsrooms.

I want to ask Nancy, what do you think about that?

Is that a path we should go down?

Direct payments?

Nancy Derringer: I would be very suspicious of that.

I think it's there has to be a better way than than accepting money from the government.

You know, I'm sure Lee is probably over there thinking if somebody wants to write me a check man, I'm not going to look closely at it because that's, you know, we all that's the gobs of money problem is absolutely right.

You need you need quite a bit of it to to run even a little shoestring start up like, you know.

Lee Chilcote: And as as Jason pointed as Jason and Penny pointed out, it's it's my understanding of it is that it's indirect support.

So, you know, it's essentially like it's like a tax break.

I mean, you're you're you're getting a tax break based on hiring.

So it's certainly something that exists.

Again, I haven't looked at it that closely, but it's certainly something that exists in plenty of industries and cities and states use economic development incentives all day long to incentivize industries.

And so why wouldn't they use it in the local news industry, the.

Jason Hibbs: National media, especially cable news?

They're criticized frequently, and the criticism is not unfounded.

There's a lot of commentary and junk where news should be.

The people still trust the local reporters on the ground, and if not, you know, how can we restore that trust?

Penny Muse Abernathy: Well, I would point out that a lot of research in the last two years has shown that while trust is declining and has declined substantially for national, there still is a wellspring of support for local.

And I think part of that is if you have a strong local news organization like Lee is talking about building, you earn trust, you earn respect over time.

People learn to look to you as the most credible and comprehensive source of news and information they need.

So trust is something you earn, and there's good reason some news organizations do not have trust right now, especially on the local level, as they have gotten further and further removed from their community .

So to me, I think we could get back and I want to bring it back around to something positive.

I think that you're looking at an opportunity here as well as the challenge, and the opportunity is like, Lee says.

We can reimagine it.

We can reimagine 21st century to what we should be doing, that what we aspire to do in the 20th century and often missed the mark.

And that is the opportunity for entrepreneurs and teaching journalism.

I'm thrilled that unlike my generation, that couldn't wait to get to the big city.

There are a lot of students that I deal with day in and day out who want to go back to their own community in the same way doctors have done it in the same way other professionals have done it over the years and really talk about rejuvenating local journalism.

Jason Hibbs: Is definitely a positive note to end on.

I so appreciate that, and I appreciate each of you for joining us and those of you at home for watching back story.

Thank you so much.

I'm Jason Hibbs.

That's it for backstory.

Announcer: BackStory is made possible in part by KeyBank.

With additional support from the League of Women Voters.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(Music)