Can nonprofits or government policies shrink local 'news deserts' across America?

This Memo is about the news biz, not our special corner of it — the religion-news biz.

Here’s the theme: America’s alarming decline of journalists and journalistic outlets from coast to coast endangers a functioning democracy at a time of political polarization, and lack of trust in central institutions that includes a low point in public regard for the news media.

One major aspect of this dire situation is dramatized in the November 15 release of the fifth report by the State of Local News Project, commendably operated by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with support from key media foundations.

“Many news organizations are hanging on by a thread,” this report says.

Much can be said about the failings of the old mainstream media, or of this or that news organization, or of a particular story — and should be said. Solid criticism is fair game.

But something very fundamental to the republic is occurring in the 21st Century.

Washington politics will always get lots of coverage, and likewise for national-level treatment of other subjects that newspaper executives value, such as business, entertainment and sports. The crisis comes with information at the state and local level. The Medill report, focused on local rather than state-level journalism problems, documents the following geography of “news deserts” where coverage is iffy or even non-existent.

Out of the nation’s 3,144 counties, 1,562 have only one surviving source for local news in any format, whether print, digital or broadcast, usually a weekly newspaper. Of these counties, 228 are on Medill’s Watch List, signifying “high risk” that the one existing outlet will die.

Then there are 204 counties without a single local journalistic shop.

At the end of 2018, High Country News, a magazine centering on issues concerning the Mountain West, ran a full issue of pieces on the media scene in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific time zones. Large cities like Denver, Seattle and San Francisco will always have lots of investors, journalists, donors and audiences to support new media startups, it said, but not so much for the empty spaces in between.

One piece showed the “news deserts” of the West; that is whole chunks of states (think central Oregon and eastern Montana) with at best one newspaper. Forty-six counties in 11 western states now lack a local newspaper. My old haunt –- New Mexico -– lost two weeklies and three dailies and saw total news circulation drop 30 percent from 510,000 to 350,000.

Let’s state the obvious: Red ink in many zip codes has all but killed religion-news coverage. Now, we are seeing the growth of “deserts” in which there are no newspapers — period.

Look at the county map of the United States in the above photo. The red splotches outline 171 counties with no newspaper. The beige shows up the 1,449 counties with only one newspaper; most often a weekly.

Nevada’s news industry is probably the healthiest. Weekly newspapers lost 180,000 readers but dailies gained 140,000. All this came from “The Expanding News Desert,” a report from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism. This has been covered elsewhere, but HCN put together a large packet on western media in particular. It said::

In Idaho, weeklies in neighboring counties provide some local coverage, but the hometown, county-seat paper has vanished from the fast-growing state’s rural areas. Meanwhile, many Western counties are at risk of losing their only remaining newspapers. The report identifies 185 such single-newspaper counties in the 13 Pacific and Rocky Mountain states — 34 of them in Montana alone…
Still, Denver and Seattle (and Tucson, to a lesser extent) have potentially high numbers of investors, donors, journalists and audiences to support new media startups. The West’s small towns and rural areas lack that advantage. Instead, these communities risk losing critical information when a newspaper closes or merges with a neighboring county’s publication. Few entrepreneurs or startup editors see their future in the Western news deserts.

So, let’s return to the religion angle. The moment a newspaper starts to lose steam (revenue, reporters), it begins to cut specialty beats. Religion is one of the first to go, which is what happened at the Seattle Times after it reassigned its former religion writer Janet Tu to the Microsoft beat. And once Melissa Binder left Oregonian’s religion beat to pursue other interests, she was not replaced. Despite how faith often flourishes quite well in rural areas, it’s at the back of the pack in terms of incisive religion pieces.