Local news makes us a community

The abrupt closure of 23 news operations in five states merits considerably more attention that it seems to have received.

Specifically, according to pbs.org, News Media Corp. (NMC) shut down 23 operations: Six in Wyoming, seven in Illinois, five in Arizona, four in South Dakota and one in Nebraska. A letter from NMC to affected workers, posted by editorandpublisher.com, cited “financial challenges, a significant economic downturn impacting our industry, revenue losses and increasing expenses” for the move, acknowledging “recent failure of an attempt to sell the company as a going concern.”

“The closures by the Illinois-based company are just the latest in a trend contributing to growing news deserts in rural America,” PBS reported. “Over the past two decades, more than a third of the nation’s newspapers have disappeared.”

These latest closures included a newspaper in Page, Arizona, operating for 150 years, according to PBS. The report included an interview with University of Kansas Journalism Professor Teri Finneman, who made some points worth repeating in full.

“There’s a reason that, when this part of the United States was settled, a newspaper was one of the first businesses that was established. It made you a real town to have a newspaper. It is a central place in the community, especially in a time when the nation is so divisive.

“A newspaper is really that central place to get information about your community that nobody else is covering, to learn what’s going on around you, to be covering your government for you, to be covering when your school wins the homecoming game. Those things are really important to community identity.

“Losing the community’s history that has been preserved in those newspapers for years is an enormous loss of identity, of being able to go back and learn about your town and what it went through, the obituaries, which remain one of the most popular aspects of the newspaper for keeping a community’s history. I mean, this is an enormous loss to figure out what to do.

“What about the Web sites of these and all of the online material that was there? What is going to happen to that? And so this isn’t just about losing the day-to-day of the news coverage, but really the whole history of the town.”

Citing growing public reliance on social media and other online sources for news, Finneman pointed out:

“But, really, when you look at it, you only have that one local newspaper that is truly covering your community and where you can get local information. And so trying to explain this more to people in the community how important it is to subscribe to your paper, to advertise in your paper, to provide that for your town, I mean, what happened with these two dozen newspapers should really be a wakeup call for others across the nation how critical it is to support local news, so this doesn’t happen in your community.”

Yes, we as a local news media outlet have a business interest in assuring people appreciate local papers, but as Finneman said, it’s about much more. We believe local news outlets are a critical component of what makes us all a community.