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1、_ yuUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS1gglGHOSTING THE NEWS 11 INAL ISSUEEVERYTOWN U.S.A.PRICELESSLocal Journalism and the Crisis of American DemocracyVsRicelessBy Margaret SullivanGhosting the NewsLocal Journalism and the Crisis of AmericanDemocracyIntroductionBarbara OBriens article was routine-enough fare for
2、a local newspaper. It would not go on to win a journalism award or change the world. It didnt even make Sundays front page on that day in May of 2019. It merely was the kind of day-in-and-day-out local reporting that makes secretive town officials unhappy because of what they cant get away with, and
3、 lets local taxpayers know how their money is being spent.OBrien, who reports on several suburban towns for the Buffalo News, had found that the Orchard Park police chief, who was retiring abruptly, would receive an unexplained $100,000 as part of his departure. A few weeks before OBriens story was
4、published, she had asked town officials for the chiefs separation agreement, but they said it couldnt be released because it included a confidentiality clause. Why would there be such a thing, she asked. The town supervisor referred the questions to the town attorney, who wouldnt comment.OBrien dogg
5、edly took the next steps, as her story explained:The Buffalo News obtained a copy of the sixteen-page agreement after filing a Freedom of Information Law request with the town. Keeping such a contract private is in violation of the Freedom of Information Law, according to Robert J. Freeman, executiv
6、e director of the state Committee on Open Government.“The contract is public, notwithstanding a confidentiality clause/ Freeman said.“The courts have held time and again that an agreement requiring confidentiality cannot overcome rights conferred in the Freedom of Information Law.”Examining the agre
7、ement, OBrien came across the $100,000 payout, and wrote the story. And she would, of course, keep digging-because that is what diligent local reporters do. But there are fewer and fewer of them all the time.The Buffalo News is the regional newspaper where, until 2012,1 served as top editor for thir
8、teen years. Its the largest news organization in New York State outside the New York City metro area. Like virtually every other newspaper in the United States and many around the world, its struggling. In the internet age, circulation volume and advertising revenue have plummeted, and the newsroom
9、staff is less than half what it was when I took the reins, down from two hundred to fewer than a hundred journalists. That sounds bad, but is actually better than most. American newspapers cut 45 percent of their newsroom staffs between 2008 and 2017, with many of the deepest cutbacks coming in the
10、years after that. In some places, the situation is far worse. (I use the term newspapers as a shorthand for newspaper companies, and mean to include their digital, as well as print, presence.)It mattersimmensely. As Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, put it: If we do
11、nt monitor power at the local level, there will be massive abuse of power at the local level. And thats just the beginning of the damage thats already been done, with much more on the way. As a major PEN America study concluded in 2019: “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct the
12、mselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office. Democracy, in other words, loses its foundation.The decline of local new
13、s is every bit as troubling as the spread of disinformation on the internet Cries of “fake news!” from President Trump and his sympathizers may seem like the biggest problem in the media ecosystem. Its true that the publics lack of trust in their news sources, sometimes for good reason, is a great w
14、orry. But intentional disinformation, media bias, and the disparagement of the press for political reasons are not the subjects of this book. While these may grab the publics attention, another crisis is happening more quietly. Some of the most trusted sources of newslocal sources, particularly loca
15、l newspapersare slipping away, never to return. The cost to democracy is great. It takes a toll on civic engagementeven on citizens ability to have a common sense of reality and facts, the very basis of self-governance. So fll be clear: Im not here to address the politicized fake news problem or the
16、 actual disinformation problem. This book is about the real-news problem.Welcome to Ground Zero/1 said Mark Sweetwood, managing editor of the Youngstown Vindicator, when I told him, in the center of his newsroom (one that no longer exists), about the book I was researching on the troubles of local n
17、ews. I came to the Ohio city only four days after a stunning announcement that an already battered community took like a sucker punch: Their daily newspaper was going out of business. August 31, 2019, would be the last day it published.The Vindicator is far from alone. More than two thousand America
18、n newspapers have closed their doors and stopped their presses since 2004. And many of those that remain are mere shadows of their former selves. Consider Denver, where the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News boasted six hundred journalists twenty years ago-a robust group to cover a city, surrou
19、nding metro area, and much of Colorado as a whole. Both papers won Pulitzer Prizes. That situation has changed radically. The Rocky； as it was known, went out of business in 2009. And the Denver Post, owned by a hedge fund fronted by a group called Digital First Media, is down to under seventy in it
20、s newsroom. Its painful-theres a knot in my gut to see what we built up over time torn down in this relentless way, Greg Moore told me in 2018. He was the Posts top editor from 2002 to 2016, when he stepped away, disheartened by what he called the ownerships harvesting strategy/1My old paper, the Bu
21、ffalo News, is facing an existential threat. It lost money in 2018 for the first time in decades. This development was frightening to its employees and management, though unknown to almost all local residents. Why would they think the paper was hurting? After all, there were so many years that the N
22、ews would send a million dollars a week to its Omaha-based owner, Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway. (Until early 2020, Berkshire owned dozens of papers, including the Omaha World-Herald And though Buffett； who bought the paper in the 1970s, says he loves newspapers, he had made it clear that he wa
23、s not inclined, over the long term, to support papers that are losing money. He believes in the purpose of journalism but is not a newspaper philanthropist; the interests of Berkshires shareholders come first. And the famed investor is extremely bearish about the future of local newspapers.Theyre go
24、ing to disappear, Buffett said in a 2019 interview with Yahoo Finance. In a particularly memorable description, he said the newspaper business over the past few decades “went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to . toast. Its not hard to see the results of that trend: From 2004 to 2015, the U
25、.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets as a result of closures and mergers, a study in the Newspaper Research Journal found. Since then, the pace has only quickened, and the future looks grimmer still. These days, there are hundreds of counties in America with no newspaper or meaningfu
26、l news outlet at all, creating “news deserts/ as theyve become known. And many of those that do remain are “ghost newspapers一phantoms of the publications they once were, and not much good to the communities they purport to serve.New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet joined his voice to the dir
27、ge a few weeks after Buffetts interview, with even more specific doom-predicting: I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire/ he told an audience at the International News Media Association World
28、Congress.But, theres a serious perception problemAmerican citizens dont know about whats happening to local news, or they choose not to believe it. As with issues like the global climate emergency, it is hard to convince a significant chunk of the public that they ought to care deeply about this, or
29、 do anything about it. There are plenty of news sources一free, after all一on the internet, though relatively few that dig into local news with the skill of seasoned newspaper reporters like Barbara OBrien. People may believe that their Facebook friends will tell them what they need to know, without th
30、e benefit of professional reporting. Their thinking seems to go something like this: News will find me if its important enough. A Pew study in 2019 astonished many journalists, who live with the ugly reality of their drain-circling news business: Most Americans-almost three of every four respondents
31、believe that local news outlets are in good financial shape. And fewer than one in six Americans actually pays for local news, which includes having a subscription, print or digital, to the local newspaper. Apparently, only a small percentage of the public sees the need to open their wallets for the
32、ir local newspapers or other local news sources, and they arent accustomed to doing so. As newspapers decline in staff and quality, they see even less reason to do so. Overcoming those factors is a steep climbwith very little time to crest the hill.Since becoming the media columnist for the Washingt
33、on Post, Ive made it a practice to talk to local news consumers wherever I travel. Often, the takeaway is not encouraging. Many of the people Ive interviewed, or simply chatted with, are disenchanted with their local news sources. They see local TV news as frothy-empty calories. Many of them mostly
34、watch it for the mainstays of weather and sports. What about the local newspaper or its website, if they have one? Its a shadow of what it once was, they often observe; it doesnt cover as much as it used to, and it seems to be chasing clicks most of the time. They also complain bitterly about inaccu
35、racy or political biaseither seeing the paper as in the pocket of local business or, frequently, too far to the left (occasionally, too far to the right,A Northern California man named Jeffrey Miller emailed me after Id written a column about the withering of the Denver papers. Miller wanted to expl
36、ain that he was struggling with his own conscience about maintaining a subscription to his greatly diminished local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, which is owned by the profit-sucking Digital First Media, controlled by Alden Global, a hedge fund: The paper has become almost useless to me, and
37、 it feels like paying for it is only helping a hedge fund instead of advancing journalism/ Miller said he would sometimes see articles repeated in the same edition, that sports coverage from the night before rarely made it into the paper, and that the quality of the reporting overall had dropped pre
38、cipitously. There were a few local columnists he still enjoyed reading, but that was about the extent of it. The Mercury News, once a powerhouse local paper, owned by the high-quality Knight-Ridder chain, with a staff of more than three hundred journalists, has changed almost beyond recognition. Mil
39、ler asked me whether I thought he should quit or keep subscribing. I sympathized with his quandary, but asked him to stick with the paper, despite his legitimate complaints. As I explained, the Merc, even in its enervated state, is probably the only hope for regularly covering city and county govern
40、ment and the public schools, and for maintaining something of a village square for the region. Miller, who is an avid news consumer and subscribes to national newspapers, agreed that he would do so, at least temporarily. But many subscribers make a different decision: They bail out. And their depart
41、ure perpetuates the problem that seems to have no answer, but that does have a serious cost to citizenship and democracy.When local news fails, the foundations of democracy weaken. The public, which depends on accurate, factual information in order to make good decisions, suffers. The consequences m
42、ay not always be obvious, but they are insidious.The tight connection between local news and good citizenship became abundantly clear in 2018 for Nate McMurray, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a heavily Republican district in western New York. Although McMurray, the supervisor of the town o
43、f Grand Island, was battling a party enrollment skewed against him (the district is the size of Rhode Island and spreads into eight counties, he did have one monumental advantage: His Republican opponent, incumbent congressman Chris Collins, had just been indicted on insider-trading charges. One wou
44、ld think that would be disqualifying. News of Collinss indictment did make a difference in the election, especially in the parts of the district where local news was strong. The Buffalo Newss Washington correspondent, Jerry Zremski, had broken the insider-trading story and the paper followed develop
45、ments diligently for months. Many who would likely have voted for the incumbent crossed the aisle to vote blue. But that wasnt always the case in the more far-flung parts of the district, ones less served by strong local news.The problem, as McMurray saw it, was that in some parts of the sprawling c
46、ongressional district, voters were shockingly uninformed. The largely rural and suburban district includes Orleans County. It was identified by the University of North Carolinas Penny Muse Abernathy, probably Americas leading expert on the subject, as a “news desert, a rare one in New York State.Td
47、be going door to door, or meeting with people at a diner or a fair, for example, and in the most isolated areas, a lot of people had no idea that their own congressman had been indicted/1 McMurray told me. Orleans County was, he said, “one of the toughest places/ Some people didnt even know who Coll
48、ins was, but many were incredulous when he told them of the federal charges.“People told me I was making it up； said McMurray. That shouldnt have been the case, given that both Rochester and Buffalo television news were giving plenty of airtime to the scandal as it developed, and those stations were
49、 available throughout the district. But there was a time when almost everyone in the district had ready access to the print editions of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, a Gannett paper, or the Buffalo News, or were within easy reach of smaller local papers.Meanwhile, Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president, was taking full advantage of the decline of credible n