Johnny, Dick and Danny — the Plot to Save Journalism
“Buy a damn subscription”
It was barely past dawn on a brisk fall Sunday morning. Ten-year-old Danny raced out of his twin bed and made a beeline to the front porch. And there it was, right on the front page of the Sunday Journal and Star — “NU Braces for OU Showdown With 44–17 Win”. Quarterback Jerry Tagge and soon-to-be Heisman winner, Johnny “The Jet” Rodgers, led the defending National champs over Kansas State.
The whole state was anticipating next week’s game against the undefeated Big 8 rival Oklahoma Sooners. The Thanksgiving Day “Game of the Century ‘’ would become known as one of the greatest college football games in history. And provided the spark that led to the glory years of Husker football.
Big Red history was being written. And Danny had a front row seat thanks to his mom and dad valuing the importance of local news. He started reading the paper on Sunday mornings after listening to the game in the garage with his dad on Saturdays.
Danny’s newspaper reading habits evolved during those formative years. From comics and Husker football to the Vietnam War and President Nixon and a “third-rate burglary” known as Watergate. Now he was really hooked. History was recorded every single day and delivered to your front-door. To argue about politics and share happy stories with family and friends.
The now 60-year old Dan — he dropped Danny sometime in middle school — has retrieved that same hometown newspaper every morning for the past 50 years. And he wonders how much longer the “dead-tree” version will exist. Or for that matter, will his local newspaper exist much longer in any form, print or digital.
Are we witnessing the slow death of journalism? According to FiveThirtyEight, From 2000 to 2018, weekday newspaper circulation fell from 55.8 million households to an estimated 28.6 million; between 2008 and 2019, newsroom employment fell by 51 percent; and since 2004, more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed across the nation.
Ad revenues for the largest newspaper publisher in the nation, Gannett, dropped 35 percent from 2019 to 2020. Journalists were laid off, furloughed or forced to accept early retirements or pay cuts.
The New Yorker reports, eighteen hundred communities that had a local-news outlet in 2004 had none at the beginning of 2020. Two-thirds of the nation’s counties don’t have a daily newspaper. Thirty newspapers either closed or merged in April and May of 2020, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave. That decline, says The New Yorker, has been linked to reduced civic engagement and political competition, and increased government corruption.What hope is there in saving the Fourth Estate?
After years of similar staff cutbacks and dwindling readership at Nebraska’s long-established newspapers and broadcast newsrooms, two new nonprofit news outlets have appeared on our collective virtual doorsteps — The Flatwater Free Press and Nebraska Examiner. These newsrooms are part of a proliferation of nonprofit media organizations whose funding is provided by philanthropy rather than advertising.
Bill Kelly, Senior Producer/Reporter at Nebraska Public Media, recently asked Flatwater Editor, Matthew Hansen, “What sustains your organization?”
Hansen replied, “The early indications of success in fundraising have really blown me away. It becomes very clear very quickly, when you got any talk about this project, or projects like this, that people understand the need for this in a way that surprises even me.”
However, as the New Yorker article noted, “…the fact remains that there is no broad national effort to make local news sustainable in places that don’t at least have some sort of viable market.”
Save democracy. Give the next Danny the opportunity to grow, learn and dream. Buy a damn subscription!
Dan Parsons — PR guy. Podcast Host. Drummer. Thought Leader for Thought Leaders. Counselor to senators, governors, & business execs.
