If local news doesn’t survive, neither will local democracy

There is a bumper stick­er that makes my blood boil when I see it. It says, “Defund the media.”

I tell myself they mean the media with a lib­er­al bias, like CNN and MSNBC, not the lega­cy broad­cast­ing net­works and news­pa­pers we’ve depend­ed on for inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism for more than a cen­tu­ry, or the small-town news orga­ni­za­tions that are strug­gling to survive.

But then I won­der if they even know the difference.

Many com­mu­ni­ties no longer have a source of local news. Others do, but they’re a shad­ow of what they once were. I’ve wit­nessed the decline of print media dur­ing my career as a newspaperman.

The coun­try week­ly I worked for after col­lege is gone. The sub­ur­ban week­ly I helped to grow into a mil­lion-dol­lar busi­ness has closed its office, and its only full-time reporter-pho­tog­ra­ph­er is the edi­tor of three news­pa­pers. The dai­ly where I man­aged a news­room of eight excep­tion­al­ly tal­ent­ed jour­nal­ists still sur­vives and pro­vides good cov­er­age with just an edi­tor and a free­lancer, but its print­ing press closed a cou­ple of years ago, and the big build­ing that would shake when its pow­er­ful print­ing press rolled has been sold.

Northwestern University’s 2025 The State of Local News report found that news­pa­per employ­ment has declined by more than 70 per­cent in the last two decades.

Margaret Sullivan, author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, writes that more than 2,000 news­pa­pers closed between 2004 and 2020, and many that remained were great­ly dimin­ished in their abil­i­ty to cov­er their communities.

The sur­vival of local news­pa­pers mat­ters to the sur­vival of democ­ra­cy. Newspapers inform read­ers about what’s hap­pen­ing where they live and hold their local offi­cials account­able. Many radio sta­tions no longer offer local news, and social media is rife with mis­in­for­ma­tion and is no sub­sti­tute for pro­fes­sion­al fact-finding.

Newspaper jour­nal­ism is also a kind of cement that binds com­mu­ni­ties togeth­er and encour­ages civic participation.

A PEN America study found in 2019: “As local jour­nal­ism declines, gov­ern­ment offi­cials con­duct them­selves with less integri­ty, effi­cien­cy, and effec­tive­ness, and cor­po­rate malfea­sance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, cit­i­zens are: less like­ly to vote, less polit­i­cal­ly informed, and less like­ly to run for office.”

Also in 2019, bil­lion­aire Warren Buffett, who once owned many local news­pa­pers, explained why he was get­ting out of the business.

“They’re going to dis­ap­pear” because their busi­ness mod­el had gone “from monop­oly to fran­chise, to com­pet­i­tive … to toast,” he said.

Yet many peo­ple still don’t know that their local news­pa­pers are in dire straits.

There are many rea­sons for the decline, but the main one is that print adver­tis­ing, which once cov­ered three-quar­ters of pro­duc­tion costs and yield­ed mar­gins greater than 25 per­cent, has plum­met­ed. More than half of all adver­tis­ing dol­lars now go to big dig­i­tal media com­pa­nies, includ­ing Google and Facebook, which also use the news con­tent of news­pa­pers and broad­cast­ers with­out pay­ing for it.

I remem­ber con­ver­sa­tions I had with oth­er news­pa­per exec­u­tives about the future of local news in the ear­ly 2000s. The Internet, we said, would espe­cial­ly hurt big media com­pa­nies, but com­mu­ni­ty news­pa­pers would be OK.

Yet we’ve seen the oppo­site occur.

It’s the big com­pa­nies like The New York Times and the Associated Press that have sur­vived by rein­vent­ing them­selves as glob­al online news orga­ni­za­tions because they have a big enough adver­tis­ing foot­print and online sub­scriber base to sus­tain their news oper­a­tions. But local news­pa­pers have either van­ished or are try­ing to do what they can with only a bare bones staff.

While the future of small-town news­pa­pers looks grim, I believe there is hope for local news, and I think that future will most­ly involve non­prof­it dig­i­tal media com­pa­nies, includ­ing some that rely on dona­tions and volunteers.

In February, Pete Koutoulas of WinCity Media and I attend­ed an event at Lexington’s Lyric Theatre host­ed by the Blue Grass Community Foundation to announce the launch of Press Forward Blue Grass — an ini­tia­tive to fund local news cov­er­age, which the foun­da­tion sees as vital to healthy communities.

The guest speak­er was Charles Blow, a for­mer New York Times colum­nist, now at Harvard University. He helped pro­duce a doc­u­men­tary, “Reimagining Local News,” that exam­ines the cri­sis fac­ing local news across the coun­try and the con­se­quences for communities.

Blow was inter­viewed onstage by Melissa Newman, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Press Forward Blue Grass, who also showed the audi­ence a seg­ment from the documentary.

One of the com­mu­ni­ties fea­tured in the film was Jackson Parrish, Louisiana, Blow’s child­hood home. There, just as the local news­pa­per, The Jackson Independent, was end­ing pub­li­ca­tion, an online news source, The Current, was start­ing up.

Founder Christian Mader knew that what peo­ple missed was depth.

“We as a staff will nev­er be big enough to blan­ket the coun­ty, but we can go deep­er,” the pub­lish­er said.

One issue The Current focused on intense­ly was the opi­oid cri­sis, and peo­ple were will­ing to open up to reporters they knew, and who they knew cared about them.

“What sets us apart is hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with our com­mu­ni­ty,” Mader said.

That is impor­tant, Blow said, because when you lose that, the ties that bind start to fray.

“What you lose is account­abil­i­ty, but also com­mu­ni­ty and com­mon sto­ries,” he said.

Blow said local reporters build trust by cov­er­ing the every­day, cel­e­bra­to­ry sto­ries so that when the big sto­ries break, peo­ple are com­fort­able open­ing up to reporters they know as neigh­bors. They are not as com­fort­able with out­siders who only see them at their worst.

“They show up and treat it kind of as a curios­i­ty and explain it to peo­ple who don’t live here,” Blow said, describ­ing the big media journalists.

Asked by Newman what advice he would give the young jour­nal­ists Press Forward is pro­vid­ing fel­low­ships for in part­ner­ship with Report for America, Blow answered in a way that offered hope.

“I would just say that the mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion will always be in flux and will change. The fun­da­men­tals don’t change,” he said.

Go. Report it. Video it. Interview mul­ti­ple peo­ple. If there’s con­tention, get both sides. Request doc­u­ments. Analyze what your sources say. Verify it. Publish it.

“That’s basi­cal­ly report­ing since the time when Frederick Douglass had a news­pa­per,” he said. “It’s the same thing. There’s no difference.”

Here in Kentucky, as across the coun­try, there are small start-ups and larg­er, more estab­lished non­prof­it, online orga­ni­za­tions that are doing good reporting:

The Northern Kentucky Tribune, which is fill­ing the vacan­cy left by the demise of The Kentucky Post.

The Hoptown Chronicle in Hopkinsville.

The Lexington Times.

Louisville Public Media and its Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, which are affil­i­at­ed with NPR and local radio stations.

And my per­son­al favorite, the Kentucky Lantern in Frankfort, which is part of the nation­al States Newsroom net­work and offers in-depth report­ing on state government.

Here in Winchester, what start­ed a few years ago as a blog run by Pete and his part­ner Chuck Witt has blos­somed into WinCity Voices, a web­site with more than 40 con­trib­u­tors who pro­vide com­men­tary, fea­ture sto­ries, fic­tion, poet­ry, art, pho­tog­ra­phy, and, increas­ing­ly, local news.

As WinCity Media Inc.’s only paid staffer, I get a stipend for cov­er­ing news about local gov­ern­ment, pol­i­tics, com­mu­ni­ty issues, and civic engagement.

Pete, a retired infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­al and for­mer news­pa­per pub­lish­er, works many hours each week and has built part­ner­ships with oth­er com­mu­ni­ty stake­hold­ers, includ­ing WWKY and The Winchester Sun, which pub­lish­es some of our work.

A board of direc­tors that over­sees the oper­a­tion also works hard to make this project a suc­cess. We’re now mem­bers of the Winchester-Clark County Chamber of Commerce and have an office in the McEldowney Building that is open two days a week.

We are sup­port­ed entire­ly by indi­vid­ual dona­tions and grants, includ­ing from the Blue Grass Community Foundation, which host­ed the event at the Lyric.

I’m hope­ful about the poten­tial WinCity Voices has to grow this effort to keep our com­mu­ni­ty informed and help it tell its stories.

I wel­come you to be a part of sup­port­ing that effort.

We can­not afford to defund local news; we must defend it.