Daily Trojan Magazine
A LOOMING CRISIS
Your roommate is a local journalist and the world already depends on her
Amid the local news crisis, students in journalism are more important than ever. They shouldn’t be.
By JENNIFER NEHRER
Photos by JENNIFER NEHRER
I. The Northwest Current
“This is the journalism equivalent of climate change,” said Tim Franklin — senior associate dean, professor and John M. Mutz chair in local news at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications.
“It’s not like you wake up one day and 500 newspapers disappear,” said Franklin, also the director of the Medill Local News Initiative. “It’s this thing that happens community by community, year after year, and then pretty soon you wake up, and it’s, ‘Oh my god, what happened to local news?’”
Which is, actually, what happened to me.
I used to read the Northwest Current, a local newspaper that covered my small corner of Washington, D.C. (which is already only about 10 square miles). I would pick it up on my front lawn every Thursday and read about local schools, events, elections and police reports as something of a ritual. But one day in 2019, I had to stop. Like Franklin suggested, I woke up one morning, went to my lawn to pick up the Current, and for some reason, it wasn’t there.
@dailytrojanNews assignments editor Jennifer Nehrer dives into the state of the local news crisis. Student journalists are now more important than ever. They shouldn’t be. Read the full piece by Jennifer Nehrer at dailytrojan.com. Video: Kate Cho / Daily Trojan
I soon learned that the cause of this — and what would become my ongoing obsession — is the Local News Crisis. The Current was just one of now nearly 2,900 newspapers that have had to shut down since 2005, according to the Nov. 16, 2023 edition of “The State of Local News” — a report written by Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill.
But the crisis is much older, and back in 2020 when I began to research it extensively, I realized just how important it is to understand the Local News Crisis and its consequences, but also how important student journalism becomes as a result.
II. Double Duty in Ann Arbor
Student journalists at the University of Michigan, like many of us, balance two equally important tasks: doing well in school and covering their school for the paper. The twist is that these journalists decked in blue and gold have one additional task, one that could perhaps be even more important than the first two: cover the entirety of Ann Arbor.
In 2009, The Ann Arbor News was forced to shut down its daily print operations. With no one to cover the goings-on in a city of around 124,000 people, the Michigan Daily — the university’s student newspaper — stepped in. Since then, Michigan’s student journalists have taken on the task of covering their homework, their school and the city around them. The paper has a city and government editor, and reporters attend city planning commission meetings. They recently covered the Ann Arbor Board of Education, local restaurants and the city itself for failing to implement an unarmed crisis response program.
While local coverage of Los Angeles exists beyond the lovely student journalists of USC, the Daily Trojan still provides its readers with something pretty special: hyperlocal news coverage of campus happenings. And outside of that, we and Annenberg Media both have South L.A. beats and assign writers to bring stories of the surrounding city to campus.
But despite how few people may think it holds importance, local news is becoming something of a rarity in the United States today — and that’s very bad.
I wrote an 18-page paper on this topic. You, dear reader, have been spared its length, but buckle up: This topic is big and I’m not afraid to write about it all.
III. The Local News Crisis — in Full
The Local News Crisis — the mass closure of newspapers in the U.S. and its consequences — is plaguing this country (and the broader world) today. Over the last 15 years, local news outlets in this country have disappeared by the hundreds and caused nearly irreparable harm to our society in the process. While students at USC are blessed to receive all the latest info about their own locality (the school, at least) from sources such as the Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media, others in the U.S. are not.
Let’s get back to that new report: Since 2005, when researchers began collecting such data, almost one-third of all newspapers in the U.S. have shut down. In fact, Abernathy predicts that by the end of next year, this country will have lost a full third of its newspapers, accelerated by the fact that over 130 of them closed or merged in the past year. The report states that newspapers are currently shuttering at a rate of more than two per week, a slight increase from the rate reported in 2022.
Along with acceleration, bigger localities are being hit. In 2019, Youngstown, Ohio became the first city to be without any local paper when the Youngstown Vindicator was forced to shut down. D.C. also lost the Washington Post Express that same year. (memorably, the Express used their sign-off headline to bitterly chide their readers, “Hope you enjoy your stinkin’ phones.”)
As of this year, half of the approximately 3,000 counties in the U.S. have just one local news source — usually a weekly publication — and 204 have no newspaper at all. A new component of this year’s report puts 228 of the counties with one news source on what it calls a “Watch List,” meaning they’re likely to lose that last source of news in the next five years.
“If all of those counties go dark, we will more than double the current number of news deserts that we have in the U.S.,” Franklin said.
The report notes that a majority of these counties are in impoverished areas of the southern or midwestern U.S. with high minority populations.
Gabriel Kahn, a professor of professional practice of journalism at USC, pointed out that while it may not be the only reason, financial difficulties can greatly contribute to the closure of a local paper.
“A local news organization, by definition, reaches a local community, which is small by definition, and the smaller it is, the less money it generates for the news organization,” Kahn said.
Now, some places still do have local news and local newspapers, and I enjoy taking pictures of or with their newsstands whenever I see them. But like I said, local news is disappearing fast — and the consequences can be dire.
IV. The Big Consequences
Franklin, with his apparent penchant for analogies, joked with me that journalists are like traffic cops on the 10 Freeway. If you think a police car is nearby, you’ll probably abide by the posted speed limits or only drive slightly above to avoid a ticket. But if you find no cops in sight, you may push your luck. When a locality has journalists assigned to local government affairs, officials are cautious. But take the journalists away and … you get the idea.
There is — don’t worry — evidence for this. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois Chicago released a study in 2018 that proved local government borrowing costs increased following the closure or merger of their local newspaper. One specific example is the Rocky Mountain News, which won four Pulitzer Prizes before it closed at the end of the 2000s. Being known for its investigative journalism surrounding government dealings, it makes sense that only three years after it shuttered, municipal bonds had increased significantly — by 5.3 basis points, the report said.
Speaking of governments, the loss of local journalism affects voting in a number of ways.
Margaret Sullivan is the woman I immediately think of when someone mentions the Local News Crisis. She is a leading expert in the field and wrote “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” Great read.
In “Ghosting the News,” Sullivan writes that voters without a local news source are less likely to vote by “splitting the ticket,” meaning voting by individual candidate policies, and are more likely to vote strictly by party regardless of individual candidate merits.
It’s also crucial to point out something that both Kahn and Franklin mentioned when I spoke to them: Communities with less local news have lower voter turnout and fewer candidates on the ballot altogether.
“Local news organizations are the glue that binds a community,” Franklin said. “They’re where people see themselves in local news, where they learn about what’s happening at their local schools, with their local businesses, with the local government, with their neighbors, with local health care providers. The best ones are like a mirror, holding up to the community and the community seeing itself back.”
But why the split ticket? Because voters have been getting their information from the next closest source: national news or social media.
The “next closest source” has done incredible damage to anti-misinformation efforts in the U.S.. When someone does not have a local paper, they look to their next closest source for information. Both categories — national news and social media — have their own consequences.
When it comes to national news, the leading broadcast options are often politically skewed or have a history of spreading misinformation, such as MSNBC or FOX News. Without a generally more neutral local paper, viewers will rely on the polarized content that these networks produce because their now-polarized audiences drive up the ratings.
These polarized networks and unreliable sources are also part of disinformation’s “attention economy.” Emily Bell, the director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said in testimony before a congressional subcommittee that while local news is factual, it can often be viewed as boring, while disinformation or sensationalized news is more exciting to read and will get more clicks.
“Big tech sells advertising based off of the amount of time that we spend on these platforms,” Kahn said. “And the longer they can get us enraged, triggered, et cetera, the more time we spend on the platform, the more money they make. As a result, our national news and our coverage of national news has become more polarizing.”
I mean, let’s face it: Reality is kinda boring sometimes.
The problem here, Franklin said, is that many social media platforms do not have an obligation to fact-check every single item they allow on the site or don’t have the capacity to do so.
Not to get partisan myself, but it certainly didn’t help anyone that former President Donald Trump spent a good amount of his presidential career continuously bashing any media outlet he didn’t like. A 2017 report by FreedomHouse summarized Trump’s contempt for the press in disturbing terms.
“No U.S. president in recent memory has shown greater contempt for the press than Trump,” the report said. “He has repeatedly ridiculed reporters as dishonest purveyors of ‘fake news’ and corrupt betrayers of the national interest. Borrowing a term popularized by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Trump has labeled the news media as ‘enemies of the people.’”
Because of him and a few other factors, trust in the media is at a near all-time low. The latest Gallup poll shows that only 32% of Americans trust the media “a fair amount” or more to report the news accurately — tying the record low percentage they reported in 2016. A new record 39% of respondents said they have no trust in the media at all. In 2005, around when folks such as Abernathy started tracking the Local News Crisis, a whopping 50% said they had a great deal of trust in the media.
But specifically in the case of Trump and the disinformation crisis in the U.S., his rampant disparaging of supposedly “liberal” news sources (generally The New York Times and CNN) pushed his voter base towards networks such as Newsmax and the One America News Network. These latter two sources have been known to deliberately spread disinformation to the point of a lawsuit.
When Trump launches these attacks, he subsequently poisons the sources that don’t spread the same dangerous misinformation. The aforementioned Gallup poll noted that only 11% of Republicans trust the media “a fair amount” or more (and earlier in 2016, this number plummeted from 32% to 16%). Don’t trust the sources with good info and suddenly all you have is bad info. See where I’m going?
It’s hard to say which of these consequences is “the worst” or does the most harm, but if I had to, I would say the final one — disinformation — would probably take the cake.
A few years ago, on a random Sunday in December 2016, my father received a call. The mother of my sister’s friend, who was taking both of them home from a birthday party, rang him up to say they’d be late. They were stuck in traffic because, for some reason, there were a bunch of emergency vehicles in front of a pizza place about five blocks from our house.
That pizza place was Comet Ping Pong.
We learned later that day that the emergency vehicles were responding to reports that a man had walked into the restaurant with an assault rifle, wanting to investigate a supposed pedophile ring run by the Clintons in the basement (which the building doesn’t even have). The man pointed the rifle at an employee and later fired one round, which thankfully missed. The situation, which quickly made national news as “Pizzagate,” is a prime example of Trump-era disinformation. If the journalist in me had known what was happening, I’m sure I would have run over to look for myself.
When I wrote my research paper on the Local News Crisis, I opened it with a riddle: “What do the January 6th Insurrection, ‘Pizzagate,’ and the COVID-19 Pandemic have in common?” While that was certainly a cheesy way of beginning a paper to be graded by college professors, it was, in fact, entirely correct. The disinformation allowed to fester in the U.S. and abroad directly led a man to bring a gun into a pizza store, one million people to die from a virus some regard as “like the common cold” and insurrectionists to invade the U.S. Capitol.
In the time since many started tracking the Local News Crisis (specifically 2006), disinformation has been proven to be increasing, and many assert that the spread starts when local news is absent. In “Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation,” a blog post written by Nancy Watzman and Shaydanay Urbani for the Nieman Journalism Lab, the two wrote that “the most damaging misinformation narratives started as local rumors, memes, and misleading photos — repackaged and reshared across the country, sometimes in different languages.”
Alicia Ramirez, an adjunct instructor at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism as well as founder and publisher of The Riverside Record, pointed out another consequence of the Local News Crisis that I had not previously considered. She said that communities with fewer outlets and fewer journalists will overwhelmingly receive news on crime and other “scary” stories instead of positive news, because of a lack of bandwidth to write anything but emergency content.
Jon Regardie, who writes for Crosstown L.A. and contributes to many other outlets such as L.A. Magazine, witnessed another publication he had worked for, the L.A. Downtown News, heavily reduce its circulation and publication frequency when it was sold to an Arizona-based company. Regardie said it takes a very sophisticated and well-staffed local paper to keep a community vibrant and the disinformation at bay.
“It does take trained journalists — committed journalists — to really dig down beyond the headlines, beyond what we see in social media, [to] find out if those rumors we see floating around are true and if there’s more to the story,” Regardie said. “If we don’t have enough journalists invested and enmeshed in their communities to determine what’s going on, it creates a community that’s less informed.”
V. Solutions, in Brief
I’m sure the last four words any journalist wants to hear is “call in the government,” but the thing is, they got called in for this a LONG time ago. In 1967, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB — which you may have heard of if you’ve watched a program on PBS — receives around $450 million annually from the government, which it redirects to its members, including PBS and NPR. By using the CPB as a middleman, the networks are able to remain editorially independent from the government.
But this $445 million barely makes a dent in anyone’s pockets. This amounts to just $1.33 per year per U.S. citizen and accounts for just 0.01% of the federal budget. Pennies on the dollar. Literally. A small price to pay for PBS’s 44.7 million monthly primetime viewers and NPR’s 23.5 million per week.
There is, however, another solution in the works. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act is sitting in Congress as we speak, collecting dust. The act would give subscribers, journalists and advertisers tax credits for participating in local news. But after being introduced to Congress in 2021, all it’s done is exist in our memories.
What can you do? I don’t mean to be cliche but … yeah. Call your representatives. Do what this kid from D.C. can’t. (Yes, we have a congresswoman. No, she cannot vote.) Tell them to vote for the LJSA.
But we all know that congressional action can take a while; so in the meantime, who fills the gaps? Us. USC and more.
Before getting directly to the students, I spoke with Kahn about his extracurricular venture: Crosstown L.A.. Kahn founded Crosstown via a grant from Annenberg as a way to “reinvent the way that journalism is produced and distributed.”
The way Crosstown works, he told me, is by taking compiled data about many aspects of L.A., including service calls and crime reports, and using a website to sort that data into categories that reveal trends worth writing about. What this website also allowed Crosstown to do is craft a newsletter template with a narrative about one dataset and send that template — with relevant data — to every neighborhood in the city.
“Imagine a giant Mad Lib,” Kahn said. “Every week we produce this Mad Lib for L.A., and people in University Park get one set of data and a narrative about it, and people in Exposition Park get another, and people in Silver Lake another and so on.”
In its final form, readers can view data-centered stories on Crosstown’s website or simply wait for the weekly newsletter, which recently celebrated its third year, to give them specific data about their neighborhood.
Kahn said that Crosstown avoids the funding issue that many local outlets face by relying on the data already being easily accessible. Instead of hiring one person per neighborhood, Crosstown can utilize a smaller workforce until local news can regain its footing.
But onto the students …
VI. The Collegiate Angle
Kahn points out that often the first job a journalist may take on is reporting for a local outlet. Without local news, recent graduates have nowhere to practice that skill before being thrown into the deep end.
Christina Bellantoni, a professor of professional practice of journalism and the director of the Annenberg Media Center, said a definition of local journalism is simply covering a community of interest. In that case, she continued, any student paper is a local paper — especially when the university they cover has a wide reach.
“USC is the largest private employer in the second-largest city in America,” she said. “What they do affects a huge number of people — thousands upon thousands of people — through the healthcare system, through employees and students, through alumni, through sports … When student outlets cover that well, they have the place to themselves.”
Ramirez said another benefit of student journalists is that they see the world with fresher eyes compared to those who have been out in the field for many years. She also said that USC students have the unique opportunity to dig deeper into how the University interacts with South Central, a community already rich with stories.
After all, what’s the point of going away from home for four years if you don’t bother to learn about the place you’ve moved to?
Bellantoni mentioned that when national reporting covers a university, often the first local source is a student newspaper.
“L.A. Times journalists might not have the insight into [the community] because they are not on the campus day in and day out,” Ramirez said. “They’re not in the community … and I just think we need a lot more perspective, in general in journalism, if we’re actually going to save this industry as it should be.”
Ramirez said one working solution towards ending the Local News Crisis is having legacy media outlets collaborate more with student journalists to ensure that the same story isn’t being told again and again. She said this because, in her words, student journalists are simply journalists.
“We often see student journalism relegated to ‘It’s just a college thing. They’re just doing this for college. This isn’t ‘capital J’ journalism,’” Ramirez said. “No, they’re journalists doing journalism. Just because the website they publish has a .edu or their email is a .edu does not make them any less of a journalist. The sooner we get over that, the better we will be as an industry.”
Ramirez doesn’t think the Local News Crisis will be solved overnight, as she’s been seeing her colleagues work on it for years, but she said she’s happy to see that it seems like people are finally noticing how dire it is.
I decided to be a journalist for many reasons. I love storytelling. I talk too much. I want to advocate for the little guy and expose the lies from the corrupt, but most importantly, I want people to know. I want readers to be closer to their communities and be aware of what’s happening inside of them. Knowledge is power and it is comforting — usually.
You might be asking: “Jen, does this mean you want to work for a local news outlet?” The truth is that I have absolutely no idea. I want to do what makes me happy, and journalism makes me happy. I’ve applied to work at local outlets in D.C. this summer, ones that I’ve been reading and watching since I was a child, and hey — maybe I’ll stay there a little longer, because local news deserves it.
The crisis is urgent — and newspapers die every day. Just a week or so before I stood in front of my peers in high school to present my research paper on the Local News Crisis, I learned that another local paper in D.C., the print edition of the Washington City Paper, would be closing down. What was previously a – frankly – really bad opener to my thesis presentation was suddenly an announcement of great relevance.
I remember sighing as I uploaded the Twitter screenshot of the City Paper’s announcement to my slides. I made sure to pick up a copy that I could use as a prop for my opener — the last one I’d ever get to touch.
When I pass a local newsstand I take a picture. I do it because it amuses me and warms my heart, but more importantly, I do it because I know the student journalists in that town can now worry about a little less. As much as I love writing, we can’t depend on every student journalist to cover the cities they reside in by themselves. We have homework, too.