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A pillar of journalism falls
THE Post-Gazetteone of the oldest newspapers in the United States and winner of several Pulitzer Prizes, was founded in 1786. With a paid circulation of 83,000 copies printed twice a week and news published online daily, it was a crucial news anchor in Pennsylvania.
The company behind the daily, Block Communications, claims to have lost US$350 million in 20 years publishing the newspaper. She directly points to the “financial pressures” of local journalism in her closing statement. But the long strike of its unionized employees, started in 2022 and which lasted more than three years, also contributed to this decision. Some critics accuse the owners of adopting more pro-Trump positions in recent years, which is said to have eroded the trust of some readers.
IMAGE FROM THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE WEBSITE
The Pittsburgh metropolitan area has a population of 2.4 million. The closure of the Post-Gazetteannounced on January 7 and scheduled for May 3, constitutes the most important in the country since that of Tampa Tribune in 2016.
Free fall for 20 years
Since 2005, Americans have lost nearly two out of five local newspapers (39%), shows the Medill Local News Initiative, a research project at Northwestern University in Illinois. No less than 2,800 publications closed down during this period, contributing to 70% of total journalism jobs being lost. This sector, which had 365,000 positions two decades ago, now has around 91,500 positions.
Result: today there are 212 counties – territorial divisions between a municipality and a state – without local media (6.5%), and 1,525 counties which have only one (47%), again according to Northwestern data.
Democracy under attack
“Research shows that when a newspaper closes, fewer people vote or get involved in local politics, and then corruption and extremism increase,” notes Victor Pickard, a specialist in media studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with The Press.
Losing local journalism directly and unequivocally hurts democracy.
Victor Pickard, professor at the University of Pennsylvania
The contrast is worrying: according to recent polls, the majority of Americans “do not know or do not understand” the crisis in local media. For what ? “With social media, they feel like they have access to more information than ever,” says Pickard. But many fail to distinguish between the credibility of a simple Facebook post versus an extensive dossier, researched by a real media outlet.
“It’s a huge problem,” says Andrea D. Wenzel, a journalism professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “We have such a fragile democracy…I can barely say we have one. It is at the local level that people are looking for a democratic system, because the national level does not work,” she says on the phone.
Economic model in turmoil
In the eyes of Victor Pickard, it is “lazy” to attribute blame exclusively to the Internet to explain the decline of traditional media. The root of the problem was planted in the 1880s, he says, when the press became a largely commercialized enterprise.
Thus, the dependence on advertising revenue, once a profitable recipe, has changed into a complex adventure for the owners. Digital ads bring in very little, paid subscriptions only work for huge companies like New York Times and non-profit formats are only successful in a few large cities like Baltimore or Chicago.
“No business model can viably support a local journalism ecosystem,” worries Professor Victor Pickard, who has authored several books on the subject.
Towards solutions?
In the short and medium term, “things will continue to get worse,” says Victor Pickard. And for his colleague Andrea D. Wenzel, the gradual decline of traditional media represents an opportunity to reimagine how information is transmitted.
In New Jersey, for example, the Civic Information Consortium created in 2018 brings together several universities and finances local journalism initiatives with public funds. In recent years, other states have also launched programs to retain and hire local journalists.
More broadly, the two experts consulted by The Press demand a structural addition to the United States: a true public media subsidized by the federal government, like Radio-Canada.
But under the second presidency of Donald Trump, precisely the opposite is happening. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a company founded in 1967 which partially financed the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), ceased to exist on January 6, following a vote in Congress. A national and publicly subsidized strategy is therefore clearly not in the plans.
