Disappearing Ink
Creating a future for local news that's not about revival, but reinvention
A lot of people lately are trying to figure out what to call this historic, chaotic, cacophonous, rumor-riddled and increasingly disinformed era we’re living in, so we’ve been collecting some of the buzzier suggestions making the rounds.
The Age of Unhingement is one, shared by Los Angeles writer and social strategist
, in her Substack newsletter, . Another? The Assholocene, coined by German climate activist . Amusing, it lost no time going viral after Kyle Chayka, who covers tech culture for The New Yorker, mentioned it in his 2023 year-end review for the magazine.A few days ago, I received another suggestion—not nearly as clever nor as amusing but sadly, spot-on about the disappearance of local news, whether in paper or digital form. It was emailed to me by one of my graduate media students, whose husband just lost his part-time gig covering local government for a small local news outlet outside Chicago. Despite aggressive community support and some awards for investigative reporting, the newsroom went belly up in December. For 2024, he quipped, “call it The Year the Truth Stood Still."
This year—when half the global population going to the polls will have autocracy on the ballot and be challenged by disinformation, AI-generated agitprop and increasingly fiery debates over the future of democracy—it is ironic that many news organizations, once the defacto watchdogs and facilitators of local truth and public discourse in democracies worldwide, are still struggling to keep local journalism both hyper-relevant, and afloat. “People are becoming increasingly alarmed,” says Alberto Ibarguen, past president of the Knight Foundation, an American nonprofit which awards grants to support journalism and democracy. “There is a new understanding of the importance of information in the management of community—and in the management of democracy in America—that I believe simply wasn’t there 15 years ago.”
The Crisis
More than 20 percent of Americans now live in what are called news deserts, areas that have little or no independent news sources nor journalists covering local issues. Some 2,500 U.S. newspapers have shut down since 2005, and more continue to close. Declining revenue from print advertising and subscriptions has made it nearly impossible for struggling local papers to survive in the States, and those still around have a small fraction of the staff they once had—some without reporters. New digital news start-ups, many created as nonprofits, have begun stepping up to provide new models for coverage, but there are not enough of them yet to fill the gap.
When local news evaporates, democracy also takes a hit, says Mike Blinder, publisher of New York-based E&P magazine. “It is, ironically, the only industry—journalism—that our U.S. Constitution says is necessary to keep democracy alive.”
According to a 2022 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, economically struggling rural communities in America have been hit the hardest. Without an independent local news source, the report said, voter participation dips. Residents often don’t have the kind of information they need to make informed decisions about civic issues and governance. That information void, says Alberto, formerly at the Knight Foundation, “leaves the door wide open” to misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, local rumors and more.
And that’s not all. Expansion in the number of news deserts—communities no longer covering local news in any form—also tends to catalyze increases in local corruption. Not everyone wants to be monitored. Some years ago, the low-income town of Bell, California, after its local paper shut down, raised the city manager’s annual pay to $787,637 and that of the police chief to $457,000. “But the really amazing thing,” says American journalism entrepreneur Steven Waldman, “is that they didn’t do it behind closed doors. They did it in public. They voted for it during an open meeting. There just wasn’t anyone there to cover it.”
Innovation Strategies
The good news? Nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, universities, independent journalists and business entrepreneurs are starting to come to the rescue with a combination of dollars, support for new forms of journalism and funding for new business models that seek to reinvent the local news ecosystem. Many of the new projects now underway are designed to cover and cultivate more diverse communities, innovate local funding models and create new forms of coverage and citizen-driven community projects intended to rebuild trust and provide local communities—including many previously overlooked— with the news they want and need. “We’re calling it relational journalism — new ways for journalism to connect with people to enrich reporting and encourage their participation in the public sphere,” says Paula Ellis, the lead author of News for Us: Citizen-Centered Journalism, the foundational first guide to this form of new journalism. Citizen-centered journalism, she says, offers the industry the potential to revitalize local journalism and in the process, help to revitalize democracy, itself.
“We’ve got to do more than simply think we want to support the news that was,” says Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. “We’ve got to invent the news that will be. We can’t just be up to date on things. We need to be up to tomorrow.”
Journalism for a New Age
Here, at a glance, are some quick-hit examples of some of the local news start-ups and innovation models, programs and new coverage forms already being tested and developed in the U.S. and abroad:
New coverage models. Outlier Media in Detroit, City Bureau in Chicago and Signal Cleveland in Ohio, all local news startups created as nonprofits, do more than listen to community members to find story ideas or to gain new perspectives. These new newsrooms use what they call a “Documenters program” that both trains and pays local citizens to attend local public meetings and monitor elected officials in collaboration with local journalists. Outlier Media uses SMS messaging—asking Detroiters to text “Detroit” to 67485 to let editors know about any issues that impact their quality of life, promising “to follow up” to learn more about what people in the city want and care about, then respond to them one-to-one. Signal employs 25 journalists and has four “community listeners” focused on collecting story ideas in Central, a city neighborhood in which more than two-thirds of residents live in poverty. So far, the Signal newsroom—its motto is “Local News and Resources for Clevelanders, by Clevelanders”—has raised more than $7.5 million from funders, including the Knight Foundation, the local Cleveland Foundation and other local philanthropies. Says Darryl Holliday, a journalist who co-founded and led City Bureau in Chicago: “The goal is not to try to breathe life back into deeply challenged news enterprises but to hasten the emergence of new enterprises and new ways of thinking about the links between local media and healthy democracy.”
New service models. Spaceship Media, another startup, was founded by two experienced media professionals in 2016 after they became disheartened by the vitriol that had overtaken the public sphere during Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House. Spaceship has been pioneering what it calls ‘dialog journalism’ to bridge across differences and reduce polarization, creating what it calls “triangles of trust” between divided communities and the media organizations that serve them. “Connection has to come before the facts,” says co-founder Eve Pearlman.
User-driven revenue.
, a local digital newspaper housed on Substack and delivered to U.K. subscribers as a weekly newsletter, has created a successful new subscription model to both fund and digitally deliver local journalism to readers in Manchester, and now sister titles in Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham. Launched on Substack during the COVID lockdown in 2020, “there are now more than 85,000 readers getting this new brand of local journalism in their inboxes, and almost 6,000 are paying for it, with income from subscriptions topping almost half a million pounds across the four titles,” says founder . That translates into funding 11 staff jobs and dozens of freelance writers, editors and designers. Before The Mill was launched, local news was absent in these areas. “This kind of (newsletter) journalism gives us a sorely needed sense of shared reality in an atomized age,” says Herrmann, “and now, stories are being told that might not otherwise.”TikTok anchors and columnists. A Gallup-Knight Foundation study last year found that while trust in the news media was at an all-time low, about a third of respondents under 30 said they regularly get their news from TikTok. Edison Lopez, known as ‘Senor Edison’ on TikTok, has 57.4 million likes and 907,000 followers on the popular social platform. He shares funny takes on what it’s like being a Puerto Rican and also offers more informative and educational news content that keeps followers current on culture and politics affecting them.
Partnerships. Your Voice Ohio is a collaboration of 53 news organizations in and around Ohio that shares coverage of issues identified as being important by citizens in community discussions; the Solutions Journalism Network, a New York City-based nonprofit, is developing and spreading the practice of going beyond reporting and training local journalists to work with local citizens to identify problems and cover how they work to solve their common challenges, together.
Local news mergers. When Chicago Public Media, the parent company of public radio station WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper in January 2022, it created one of the country’s largest nonprofit news organizations while establishing a new template for combining a local public radio station with a legacy newspaper. Now less reliant on print and more reliant on memberships and community support, CEO Matt Moog says the Sun-Times has seen significant audience growth, chiefly on digital platforms. He says it now has about 650,000 subscribers for email products; a year ago that number was about 350,000. He also said the audience for the Sun-Times website is up about 70 percent, year over year.
Philanthropic support. Press Forward is a national coalition of 22 U.S. donor organizations— including the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Democracy Fund— which have pledged more than $500 million over the next five years “to reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions.” The effort, spearheaded by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, will give grants to support newsrooms and start-ups in historically underserved areas and help news outlets that did not have enough revenue to sustain their businesses.
“Democracy in America is in crisis,” John Palfrey, the President of the MacArthur Foundation told this week’s gathering of news, philanthropy and community leaders attending the 2024 Knight Media Forum in Miami.
Times are tough, and could get tougher still. Much more money and work will be needed, he said, adding: “We can come out on the other side of this crisis in our democracy with a more robust, more sustainable, more equitable local news system than we’ve ever had in this country. But to do so, we can, and we must, envision something better and brighter than we’ve ever had before in America."