After a long year, local news looks back and thinks forward
The local news crisis can be tough to describe in national terms, because no two places are exactly the same. Though it’s been a difficult year for regional journalism, following a difficult decade, it’s a diverse media ecosystem, and though industry-wide challenges are rooted in similar trends, every outlet has faced battles of its own. “Local news” comprises many things: newspapers, public radio, television, blogs, newsletters, and as CJR’s newest digital magazine highlights pirate radio stations, text message chains, internet forums. Different outlets had different fates this year. Radio and television stations fared better than newspapers. Nonprofit publications of all mediums soared while many for-profit outlets foundered. Many communities lost a trusted source of information; others lost outlets that were already on the way out; and, as bears mentioning, some communities haven’t had a local news source for
The local news crisis is a labor story
As the pandemic spread across the world last year, newsrooms worldwide took a hit, as furloughs, layoffs, salary freezes, print reductions, outsourcing, consolidations, and closures accelerated across an already-beleaguered industry. Last week, Axios reported that 2020 yielded a record number of unionization efforts in US newsrooms, a trend that has been intensifying for years. Even as the economic crisis as exacerbated by COVID shows signs of slowing, the union movement is trending in the opposite direction. “It’s going to explode,” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, told Sara Fischer. “This will be a record year for unionization in the industry.”
Addressing the information gap for Black West Virginians
When Crystal Good was sixteen years old, she tried to buy one of the last Black newspapers in West Virginia. “Looking back, I’m not sure how I thought I was going to pay for it,” Good says, laughing. “And of course, they wouldn’t sell me the paper, but they asked me to sell ads for them. And I was like,
Oh, hell no.” Years later, Good is building a publication of her own, one “that allows for Black voices to have their own microphones, not the microphone passed to them and then taken back,” she says.
Weighing different paths to funding local news cjr.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cjr.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Looking for a future beyond print in western Iowa
The Western Iowa Journalism Foundation was formed amid the pandemic to try to address the decline of journalism in the region. The foundation’s goal is to funnel philanthropic aid toward local publications with ever-decreasing margins so that those outlets can survive––and also plan for the future. It looks to do the work of connecting donors and grants to local outlets in western Iowa, so that news publishers can focus on the work of reporting. “After a century plus of the drain out of rural America, maybe there’s a way to claw back, to maintain critical mass,” Kyle Munson, the board’s president said. “A healthy newsroom can be part of that.”