Margin Notes: Letter from the Future

It’s sometime in the future, and you’re reading this on the library’s equivalent of microfilm because newspapers, as long feared, are out of print. Well, not all print. The top two national publications are thriving — and at odds with each other — but local newspapers across the country have published their final issues and are remembered by collectors and the deep archives of the Internet.

People have been predicting this fate for a long time. The doomsayers of print journalism were already sounding cliché at the beginning of the 21st century. After all, hadn’t The New York Times managed to keep their print subscribers loyal while also emphasizing digital platforms like daily podcasts and weekly television shows? And weren’t waiting rooms and hair salons still stocked with magazines like TIME and Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine?

Perhaps the national publications had drawn our attention away too much from what was happening back home. For many, it was a problem we couldn’t actually see and feel until it was too late. Back in 2019, according to Pew Research, 70 percent of surveyed Americans believed that their local publications were doing “very or somewhat well”; only 14 percent had paid for this news in any way. The losses of this dichotomy were already great: A University of North Caroline study from 2018 had found that 20 percent of the country’s metro and community newspapers — totally around 1,800, primarily located in the South — had gone out of business or merged in the previous 15 years. Canada had it right, predicting that this decline would worsen so much so that by 2025 only 2 percent of households would pay for daily print newspapers.

So what are we left with? The national publications have become indispensable — moreover, they have become our identity. Most national newspapers always tried to push against being linked to a certain political identity, but they were never able to do that as well as local newspapers, for they had to cover national issues that carried their well-known baggage of party lines. But local newspapers weren’t as often charged; instead, they were personal, able to bring community news and deliberations to everyone, across backgrounds, who lived in a shared space.

Now, the old jokes about The New York Times versus Fox News feel a little too close to home. In having to cover such a wide spread of issues (the whole country!), these publications have completely forgone coverage of community-based issues, the ones that most closely affect people’s day-to-day lives, so that they can keep up with national politics and, moreover, offer counternarratives to their competitor. Everyone must decide for themselves who they believe.

The battle between good and bad news has been raging for a while. After all, movies like Spotlight and The Post made journalism heroic, glamorizing reporters long before they became the full-on celebrities they are today. But these dramatizations of journalism used to center on searches for the truth rather than just beating the other side. The old Washington Post advertisement from Superbowl LIII, narrated by Tom Hanks, that proclaimed, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” is now nostalgic.

We could have done more, investing in programs that prioritize journalism as a public service, non-profits that invest in newsrooms, or initiatives that create collaboration between local reporters and well-funded, national organizations. We could have bucked our habits and read — and paid for — local news in its many iterations, from print to print-and-digital to digital only, because change is okay as long as it still exists. We could have continued to think of the news as a staple rather than something partisan.

But it’s hard to read these calls (even a call like this one, which maybe you’re actually reading on the hologram screen of your iPhone Z) and feel the impact that it would have. That local news would spread only through social media, and that the only news to make it through the chatter would be about power outages or self-driving car battery failures. That we would learn about the bigger changes — the merging of the churches or the building of a new pool — by word of mouth, the story changing with each neighbor you spoke to. That you would start to feel less compelled to vote in local elections, because it was hard to know who to even vote for unless you were actually going to the public events. That we would feel like less of a town because yet another institution that held us together — created by and for the community — was suddenly no longer part of our weekly or even monthly routine.

Rachael Allen is a lifelong Canton resident and a 2018 graduate of Bowdoin College. She recently completed an editorial fellowship at The Atlantic in Washington, D.C.

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Posted by Rachael Allen on Aug 24 2019. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.