Saturday Essay – How the ghosting of local news is a tragedy for society and good government

Here is the news. For many across the United States and the United Kingdom, there is no news about your locality and all things trivial and important that touch it. Whole swathes of dwellings and communities have become “News Deserts.” The news that comes the way of many will be a meld of fact and fantasy from apps and online media, peddling their version of the world from a remote glass-bound palace complex. You will hear it in the ranting of Fox News, or in the UK the patronising tones of the BBC, possibly the most powerful news and information machine on the planet, from its “hubs” in the post-Orwellian New Broadcasting House, London, and at Salford Quays, Manchester.

Local news, vital, important, human, and entertaining, is going out of business fast. Newspapers, and broadcasters and apps, have suffered a fall of revenue and audiences since the onset of Covid, but the effect has not been as bad as feared. The UK Press Gazette, trade mag for the UK news business reports that circulation hasn’t got down by all that much since lockdown began in March.

But, it’s all on a general slide. The extent of the damage is revealed in a sparky monograph by Margaret Sullivan, now a senior editor at The Washington Post, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” In this decade alone, the US has lost more than 1400 local newspapers and journals; between 2008 and 2017 news staffs across the newspaper industry have been cut 45%.

Covid-19 has been the excuse, though not necessarily the underlying cause for cuts across the UK news and information sector. The Guardian is shedding up to 180 jobs, the Sun, once the paper with the largest circulation in Britain, is cutting. So, too, the mighty Daily Mail group, regarded by friend and foe as a brand leader, is dropping 100 posts across the group’s operations. The BBC is undergoing another restructuring spasm and a slew of middle ranking jobs are going – apparently in the very areas that they shouldn’t. In house field reporters are being axed from the BBC’s uniquely influential radio Today show, and the renowned radio World Service is locked in a perpetual dance of death over budgets.

No news is good news, some used to say. As Margaret Sullivan points out, this only holds true for crooks, sleazebag officials and corrupt politicians.  “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked,” she writes. Patient digging by a local reporter on the Buffalo News, where Sullivan spent her first 32 years in journalism, rising to be managing editor, turned up a payment of $100,000 for a police chief’s early retirement, entirely unexplained and unaccounted for. The same diligence uncovered the extra-curricular financial dealing of Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump. Collins squeaked re-election, but then went to jail for insider dealing.

Meanwhile the Buffalo News had hit choppy waters. Its owner, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway group had decided to sell on the stated grounds that he could see no profit in papers. Staff were cut, yet again, and a recent return visit by Sullivan to the newsroom was a walk through a Death Valley littered with the skeletons of redundant computers, desks and phones.

Sullivan’s study is echoed by the inquiry and report for the UK government, “A Sustainable Future for Journalism,” led by Frances Cairncross, which was published last year. It pointed out the dramatic decline in circulation of all print newspapers, local and national, in the UK in the past ten years alone. Circulation has more than halved. Audiences for radio news, surprisingly, had also fallen. In ten years from 2007 to 2017 advertising revenue for newspapers fell by some 69%.

The change in advertising is crucial, but it is only a part, albeit a big one, of the story. Online advertising, starting with Craig’s List in the 1990s, to Google, Facebook and the like has taken vital income away. Local papers lived on local ads, large and small, and some still try to make this work.

Unique to the UK news landscape is the BBC, currently with an annual income a little short of £4 billion. The big boa constrictor in the road, with a seemingly voracious appetite, is the BBC website, especially the news pages. It is one of the most read news sites in the world in the English language. Purportedly, it is free – though not quite as free as it may seem, owing to the inevitable presence of hidden sponsors and special interest groups. Competitors charge with pay walls at their peril. The Guardian website, also a global brand, has to follow the BBC in offering a free news service.

The BBC set out to offer a national network of local radio news coverage. With the latest cuts, it can’t hope to do this.  It also offered local training and placements for young newspaper journalists – and much of this, I suspect, has also hit the auditor’s shredder.

“Keep it local, keep it human,” was the news editor’s instruction to the cub local reporter, at least when I was setting out with BBC local news in 1968. A heroic example of this, writes Margaret Sullivan, is Ohio’s Vindicator. It persistently reported the wrongdoings of those in high and low places in the notorious Mafia roccaforte of Youngstown, Ohio, one-time haunt of James Traficant, the celebrity mobster of the day. Now the Vindicator is a ghost of its former feisty self.

“Journalism is finding what people don’t want you to know,” runs the old adage, heavily endorsed by Sullivan, “the rest is advertising.” Which is too true – up to a point. Local news also tells you who is wed, dead and born, where the doctor is and if and when the bus is coming.

Sullivan blames “unimaginative chains – such as the one that succeeded Berkshire Hathaway in Buffalo – whose answer to every financial problem is to cut staff, and private equity firms that buy struggling papers and asset- strip them before selling them off.”

One of the most brilliant portrayals of the process is by the eco-warrior turned novelist and one-time star reporter of the Miami Herald, Carl Hiaasen. In “Basket Case,” the best laugh out loud novel on the world of hackery since Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop”, Hiaasen’s alter ego Jack Tagger observes the slide of the once venerable Union-Register – a thin disguise for the Miami Herald – fall to the ripoff tycoon Race Maggad III.

“Good newspapers don’t die easily,” muses Tagger, by now busted for insubordination from news reporting to the obituaries desk. “After three years in the bone-cold grip of Race Maggad III, the Union Register still shows sparks of fire. This in spite of being stripped and junk-heaped like a stolen car.”

As a final assignment Tagger is tasked with the obituary of the venerable Mac Polk, who began the Union-Register in 1931, as a weekly serving “as the conscience of our community.”

The obit is plain sailing until the final par, which reads:

“But in May 1997, conscience and class fell victim to slavering greed when Polk sold the Union-Register to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million. Almost immediately the newspaper took a screaming nose dive into the shitter…

“Behind me I hear a gasp and spin on my chair. It’s young Evan Richards (trainee sub/reporter) ever the early bird.

“Jack, can you say that in the paper? ‘Shitter’?”

Le mot juste, I suggest. I doubt if Margaret Sullivan, or Dame Frances Cairncross, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch himself even, could put it better.

Sullivan and Frances Cairncross come up with some tentative answers to the problem. Local newspapers, news sheets and printed and online, are vital for democracy and good government and for local communities knowing and understanding themselves.

Sullivan reports on some local partnerships where broadcast stations and papers work together. A favourite is the less than vibrantly-titled “Community Impact Paper” of Pflugerville Texas. Working on a revenue base of local advertising and sponsors, it covers 34 locations across four states. Contributors get paid around $50 a story – which is something, after all.

Pew Research, rather astonishingly, concluded in 2019, pre-Covid, that three out of four surviving local newspapers and stations were still viable businesses in the US. Of course, during these dog days in the year of the coronavirus plague, it is feared that once advertising has fled newspapers, it won’t come back. Yet, astonishingly, there are several projects afoot that say this may not be quite the case.

The London Evening Standard enjoyed a huge turn around in fortunes when it went free in print and online – with a circulation in the London Olympics 2012 reaching above of one million. The collapse of commuter travel during the coronavirus pandemic has hit newspapers hard across the board – no travellers, no readers, no buyers. But now the London free sheets are looking at targeted advertising, for particular campaigns and causes – especially green and humanitarian campaigns – and for specific markets like property, furnishings and transportation. It seems that in these areas, the internet, the Googles and the blogospheres aren’t having it all their own way.

This is echoed by the most remarkable startup of a national paper in Western Europe this year. The veteran Carlo de Benedetti, 85, former CEO of Olivetti and former Chairman of La Repubblica, is funding a new online/print hybrid “Domani” (tomorrow), in which he is investing €20 million of his own fortune. Fed up with the way his sons were running la Repubblica, he sold out to Elkann-Agnelli, also large stakeholders in the Economist.

As Benedetti explained: “Today, the scenario of Italian newspapers is characterized by the point of view of the owner, one who has prevalent economic interest outside of the paper – this for me is wrong. Also, in Italy, newspapers are either rightwing or centre, there is no longer a newspaper that reflects the liberal world…it’ll be facts, not chatter.”

Domani will be edited by Stefano Feltri, 35, with a team of only 17 journalists, one of whom is fluent in German.

Though cut from different cloth, I suspect that the Standard and Domani have spotted a key feature of their metropolitan readership in London and Rome.

“We are finding that a lot of the older generation like to read their news in print, in a paper,” a senior Standard manager explains. “There are an awful lot of baby boomers around with us for a long time yet. They like to read a paper.”

Government must be prepared to offer some kind of subsidy for the public service aspects of local journalism. This could embrace some form of training academy – now desperately needed in the face of the tsunami of online illiteracy, and even some public trusts for very local paper groups. This is one of the main conclusions of the Cairncross report.

Another main conclusion is the role of the social media giants, especially Facebook and Google. They are beginning to offer subsidies and a variety of training and investment initiatives – but it is only a small beginning and the offer is modest given their vast reach and fortune. The trick is for national legislatures and governments to list the them not as passive platforms but to make them behave and legally conform as news and information publishers. That means paying tax where they sell.

“Local news depends on local support,” Frances Cairncross tells me. “It is very difficult to know how to distribute public money locally. But there are organisations who are very much engaged already – such as the Local Democracy Reporting partnership between the BBC and the NMA.

“I think national journalism will survive. But we have got to change our approach. I think this may be beginning with the Times, FT and Economist, especially in their online subscription services. They must be less like the old department stores, the Debenhams of the past, offering a bit of everything. Most (readers) don’t want the whole buffet now offered by big newspapers.

“Many of us are happy just to read the first 50 words of a news story. As some cynic once said “All they want is the billboard.””

The British government gave a wordy response to the Cairncross report. Mainly they invoked the procrastinator’s charter: most of the report’s conclusions were to be put off “for further consideration.” The plan for a press trust to subsidise public service journalism, unsurprisingly, was turned down flat.

The response to Cairncross, over the signature of the then culture secretary, Nicki Morgan, was of a piece with government inquiries into media to date this century – the exceptions being the singular essay by Frances Cairncross and her team and the report into Disinformation and Fake News by the Commons Committee headed by Damian Collins.

The reports into the Iraq debacle by Lord Hutton and Sir John Chilcot, and phone hacking by Sir Brian Leveson, showed little understanding of the national and international geopolitical landscape of news, and news reporting.

Leveson picked the wrong targets, and did not address the whole nature and dynamic of the news industry in Britain. The report opened with a spectacularly dull and inaccurate account of the history of news and news organisations. The promised second part of the Leveson Inquiry was summarily cancelled by David Cameron.

The Hutton report was as full of interior contradictions and strategic malapropisms, as many as the holes in your average geopolitical gruyere cheese. Chilcot, more exhaustive and thorough, was more interesting in its chosen lack of journalistic understanding. Any professional journalist, working from records and notes could, and perhaps, should have pointed out much of the testimony was not what the witness said, officially or unofficially, at the time. A curious sidelight on how the UK and US persisted in reinforcing failure, digging deeper into the Iraq quagmire.

This brings up a point not raised by Cairncross or Sullivan, at least not offensively so, as Damon Runyon used to say. Reviewing Sullivan’s “Ghosting the News” in the Wall Street Journal, the veteran editorialist Barton Swain, decries the thin perspective and palate of much local news journalism in the US today. Because of the pre-eminence of outlets like Fox News, too much media effort is concentrated on a referendum on Donald Trump. “Reporters at regional papers often appear to believe that the most important thing about the state’s governor or the local congressman is his attitude to Donald Trump, not his position on a subsidy for a local company or plans to build a highway extension.”

House styles, and group think, are also a problem for the UK’s larger news organisations. The BBC has a collective memory approach to news and news values which to some outsiders seems almost cultish, as if it were product of some subliminal doctrine, perhaps.

But great local reporters and local reports still have their place in the sun, and are a lot better than Mr Barton Swain seems to think. The Miami Herald – think Mr Carl Hiaasen – uncovered the first inklings of the Watergate scandal that upended the Nixon presidency in 1974, by diligent working of the expat Cuban underworld in Miami. Similar digging by a Herald reporter persuaded the victims of the late Jeffrey Epstein to talk for the first time. Think also of the ground-breaking investigating of the pederast clerics of Boston led by Martin Baron of the Boston Globe, now editor of the Washington Post.

It was a reporter for the now troubled Philadelphia Inquirer, David Rhode, who almost single handedly uncovered the true extent of the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. It was a great service for journalism, and even more for humanity.

And so, as the great Homer might have promised, the story continues. The current plight for British and American local newspaper journalism, and news, real, local and international, looks pretty dire, true. But it isn’t terminal. It isn’t yet on life support.

The will, the need and the drive to do reporting – the real thing – are still with us, and robots and algorithms won’t stop them. The spirit of why we still do it is epitomised by the octogenarian Carlo De Benedetti: “My generation has contributed to ruining the world. I want my final venture to be a contribution towards not repeating the mistakes of the past.”