Local Newspapers Matter, Their Demise Portends Trouble

Headline: “Local journalism made me what I am today. Without it, we’ll all be the poorer”

Sub-head: “For budding journalists and citizens alike, the demise of local newspapers will leave a void that’s impossible to fill”Article in The Guardian by John Humphrys, 3/30/23

“. . . Then there’s the old controversy: how much has the ubiquity of BBC local news been to blame for so many local papers going out of business? As Hall acknowledges, in broadcasting the genuinely local commercial stations have for the most part been merged into larger entities. This has “important ramifications” for reporting on local councils, courts and so on.

“A few years ago, the BBC set up the Local Democracy Reporting Service to head off charges that it was killing off local newspapers. The scheme pays for journalists who can work for any local news outlet. There are 165 of them and about 1,000 individual news outlets are signed up.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/30/local-journalism-journalists-newspapers

 

 

 

Disappearing Local News Calamity is Outlined in this Article.

Article from Nieman Lab by Joshua Benton, 3/9/23

Headline: “The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing”

Sub-head:  “It might not be as mustache-twirling a villain as Alden Global Capital, but its enormous scale has meant enormous losses for local journalism.”

“And its most recent SEC filing reports that, as of the end of 2022, Gannett had just 11,200 U.S. employees remaining (plus another roughly 3,000 overseas).

“. . . Gannett has eliminated more than half of its jobs in the United States in four years. It’s as if, instead of merging America’s two largest newspaper chains, one of them was simply wiped off the face of the earth.

“That’s a cut substantially deeper than the rate of newspaper revenue decline. Why? . . . “

 
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-scale-of-local-news-destruction-in-gannetts-markets-is-astonishing/