It used to be that if you wanted to know what happened at the local school board meeting, or city council debate, or even in your own neighborhood, you could open up a local paper and read about it. But cutbacks have hit local newsrooms hard — and now a once robust industry is on its last legs.

People trust what they know — what’s familiar to them. So it only makes sense that as coverage of their local communities has dwindled, so too has people’s trust in the media. This isn’t simply the effect of our current president’s penchant for labeling reporters enemies of the people or our own country’s increasing partisanship. (Though, of course, both of those things play a role.)

The fact is, Americans still prefer getting their news from a local newspaper, according to a 2017 survey from the National Newspaper Association.[1] That’s because local news journalists don’t just report on the community. They’re “part of it,” Meg Dalton wrote for Columbia Journalism Review.[2] “Readers are the same people in your rotary club, church groups, or community board,” Dalton said. When those reporters disappear — the ones who know you and your community, the ones who keep you informed about the issues that affect your life directly — all that’s left are national news outlets. Unwieldy, impersonal, catering to an audience of elites, viewing the everyman like an exotic species. This can cause a certain degree of distance and distrust. Data from a May 2017 Harvard­Harris poll shows that 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news coming from mainstream media outlets.[3]

This year’s Media Insights Project — a partnership of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press­ – NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — found that people are skeptical of the media “in the abstract,” but seem to “trust the news they themselves rely on.”[4] Only 22 percent of Americans believe that the “media in general care about the people they report on.” But when asked about the media they turn to, that percentage nearly doubled. About 41 percent of respondents agreed that reporters care about the people they report on.

The “caring” matters a lot.

A reporter for the East Bay Times, part of the Pulitzer Prize­winning team that covered the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people in Oakland, California, argued that national news organizations can never replace the likes of local papers, particularly in their coverage of catastrophic events.[5] “I have connections to the Ghost Ship through friends who lost friends,”

East Bay Times Reporter David DeBolt told Wired’s Henri Gendreau. “They wanted the stories told by people who understand Oakland, who live here, who are their neighbors. Not by somebody who’s flying in from New York.”

“Not to knock them, but we live here,” DeBolt continued. “We live and breathe the air. We know the neighborhoods, we know the people.” Just a week after the East Bay Times won their Pulitzer, the paper’s owner — Bay Area News Group — announced more layoffs to the staff. The cuts focused in on copy editors and print designers. But that’s always how the end begins.

Penelope Muse Abernathy, who serves as the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, described the phenomenon of folding local papers as the rise of “news deserts.”[6] These news deserts are places where local newsrooms — and their coverage of issues that touch their community — have been left in ruins. “Over the past decade, a new media baron has emerged. Private equity funds, hedge funds and investment groups have swooped into to buy and manage newspapers,” Abernathy wrote. “With the industry in distress and publishers struggling to adapt to the digital age, many communities are in danger of losing their primary source of local news and information.”[7]

What impact does this loss of information have on a community?

In 2009, Lee Shaker, a professor at Portland State University, decided to look at the effect that the shuttering of a local newspaper could have on the surrounding community. He focused on two cities that had recently shut down major local publications — Seattle and Denver. Shaker found that in those cities, civic engagement decreased “in a statistically significant way from 2008 to 2009.” But that across “the other largest 20 cities in the United States there was no significant decrease in civic engagement,” Shaker told Wired’s Gendreau.[8]

Even accounting for variables like disparities in those cities’ economies, Seattle and Denver remained the only two cities where there was evidence of disengagement in local issues. Which meant the relationship was likely causal, Shaker said.

After all: “Other cities had no newspaper closures. Those cities had newspaper closures,” Shaker said.[9]

Shaker suggested that the downfall of local news coverage can have much more far­reaching effects than you might expect.

“You can kind of see this cascading series of consequences,” Shaker told Gendreau. “If people don’t get local news, they don’t know what’s going on in their community. If they don’t know what’s going on in their community, they don’t get involved in their community. If they’re not involved in their community, and others aren’t involved in their community, their government may not actually function very well. If people aren’t involved at the local level, and they don’t know what’s going on, and the government’s not performing at the local level, they start to lose trust. And when they start to lose trust, they start to have concerns about whether or not democracy is working, whether the government is working. And those feelings are naturally then extended to the national government.”[10]

Shaker’s hypothesis is supported by a 2015 study by Jennifer Lawless of American University and Danny Hayes of George Washington University.[11] They found that diminished reporting on local elections decreases both engagement and knowledge of local politics. So people aren’t only losing trust in their local government, they’re also losing an understanding of how it works and what its responsibilities are.

“In other words, it’s possible that further losses in news at the local level could lead to even greater misunderstanding and confusion about what’s going on around you,” Gendreau wrote. “What’s happening in your town, your life. Frustration deepens, isolation increases. You take your anger out at the polls. Or nowhere at all.”[12] Gendreau wrote that the death of local journalism may be “one of the more profound stories of our time — and it’s one the papers themselves are neither inclined nor equipped to cover.”[13]

Carl Hall, who serves as executive officer of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, which represents East Bay Times employees, told Gendreau that the Times in Oakland represents “a pillar of local journalism for much of the Bay Area.”[14] “And if the pillar is not there, it sounds like something’s going to collapse, doesn’t it?” Hall said.

So what can be done to prevent the collapse?

First, as journalists, we must plant our roots firmly in communities. There does seem to be hope for local journalism, if only that people seem to care enough to save it. Report for America, a project launched by the Google News Lab and the GroundTruth Project, has a goal to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms in the next five years. The program, which is devoted to extending the life of public media, borrows from the mission statements of Teach for America, Peace Corps, and Americorps. “The crisis in journalism has become a crisis for our democracy,” Report for America’s website reads. “We are calling on a new generation of journalists to serve in community news organizations across the country.”

“In terms of structure, a national service model can help get boots on the ground, hundreds and ultimately thousands of new reporters into local communities,” wrote Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott for Media Shift. “More important, the approach can also reawaken the spirit of public service in young journalists — or for those many who still have that idealistic drive, give them the opportunity to do the civically ­important work that they’re desperate to do.”[15]

There seems to be an answer: It’s the students who will save local journalism and win public trust.

I’ve seen this in action.

At the beginning of the semester — after spending the summer working for a prominent national news organization — I felt a little resentful to be stuck in a newsroom in Annapolis, covering local politics. I felt like the work I was doing for Capital News Service was such small potatoes compared to what I’d already done.

But what I’ve realized in the past semester is how important this work is. How it’s a privilege to do it. One of my favorite professors, Carl Sessions Stepp, told me that the best stories are often buried in the most boring budget documents, the longest and densest meetings. And if I don’t write them, who will? That type of reporting — local, investigative — is threatened with extinction.

I can’t tell you how many meetings I went to this semester where I was the only reporter in attendance. And it made me sad that really the only people who can afford to do this work are students who have no salary and only a semester to dig, learn, and write.

I imagine now all the stories I am missing — and all the stories I missed by not being an expert. One of my go­to sources on all things Board of Public Works — the board’s Executive Secretary Sheila McDonald — told me on my last day in Annapolis that it was a shame to see me go. I was just beginning to get the hang of it.

She was just beginning to trust me.

_______

[1] Stanley Schwartz, “NNA survey: Newspapers still top choice for local news,” National Newspaper Association. (June 12, 2017).

[2] Meg Dalton, “Sign of the times: A local newsroom aims to build trust,” Columbia Journalism Review. (August 17, 2017).

[3] Harvard­Harris Poll, (May 2017).

[4] “ ‘My’ media versus ‘the’ media: Trust in news depends on which news media you mean,” The American Press Institute. (May 24, 2017).

[5] Henri Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers,” Wired. (November 30, 2017).

[6] Penelope Muse Abernathy, “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts,” UNC School of Media and Journalism. (October 16, 2016).

[7] Abernathy, “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts.”

[8] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[9] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[10] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[11] Jennifer Lawless and Danny Hayes, “As Local News Goes, So Goes Citizen Engagement: Media, Knowledge, and Participation in U.S. House Elections,” Journal of Politics 77(2): 447­462.

[12] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[13] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[14] Gendreau, “Don’t Stop the Presses! When Local News Struggles, Democracy Withers.”

[15] Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott, “Why It’s Time for ‘Report for America,’ a Public Service Program for Journalists,” Media Shift. (September 19, 2017).