Goodbye, Democracy
Local media and the Age of Trump
The Sunday after election day, the New York Times datelined its front-page election postmortem in Massillon, Ohio. The story had the familiar elements of election-year ethnography: a family divided by politics, a voter who’d swung from Obama to Trump, and a hot take from a former local newspaper editor (“People feel despair when they hear that the economy is getting better but their own personal economy is not.”)
There’s a very clear question driving stories like this: How did our pollsters and analysts get this race so wrong? But there’s a very obvious question that should be getting asked more: What were we doing for voters here before the election?
Until election day, the author of the Times story had been filing from Washington, DC. Before that she’d made her name reporting from places like Iraq, Pakistan, and Russia. Presumably, her editor saw rust-belt Ohio as one more exotic place where she could parachute in and perform well under pressure.
There is a world of difference between being the object of coverage, and being the audience for it. It’s the difference between a story after election day asking why people like you are voting against their own interests, and a story before the election assessing what impact each candidate’s proposals would have in your county. It’s the difference between someone talking about you, and someone talking to you.
Massive shifts in the way news gets produced, distributed, and paid for, are ensuring that, in places like Massillon, there’s a lot less talking to, and a lot more talking about.
Lately, my colleagues in journalism have been wrestling with two very uncomfortable facts: 1) public esteem for our profession has been plunging, and 2) the voting public seems relatively immune to fact-checks delivered by Very Accomplished Journalists such as ourselves. I’m going to make the case that our collective retreat from local journalism has been a major contributor to both.
But wait, you’re thinking. It’s not the job of the Times to write for the residents of Massillon, Ohio!
Of course not. So let’s take a look at who is producing journalism for Massillon, Ohio.
The newspaper editor quoted in the Times piece — Michael Hanke — is a local treasure, widely credited with making his newspaper, The Repository, one of the best of its size. In 2006, the paper went through sweeping cuts to make it more attractive to buyers. The Repository now belongs to a chain that belongs to a private equity firm, and Mr. Hanke is out of a job.
Figures collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of working journalists in the Canton-Massillon area stood at 110 in the year 2000. Last year, that number was down to 50.
It’s a story playing out in news deserts emerging around the country: online news erodes local print subscriptions; when papers try to follow their audience online, giant platforms like Google and Facebook capture the lion’s share of the advertising dollar; and consolidation has left many such papers in the hands of investors whose only response is steep newsroom cuts to prop up profit margins.
But that’s only half the story of what’s happening to news — because the number of working journalists hasn’t been dropping everywhere.
During the same period that Canton-Massillon lost 55% of its working journalists, the number of journalists employed in Washington, DC was on the rise. In 2000, the number stood at 1630. In 2015, it was 2500 — an increase of 53%.
The digital revolution hasn’t just changed journalism, it’s moved it.
Old media technologies organized us into audiences defined by where we lived. New media organize us into national audiences defined by what we believe.
For traditional media, distribution was tethered to a printing press or a broadcast tower — our range was limited to our region.
The internet means your distribution reaches everywhere— and competitors can reach your audience from anywhere. The incentives all point toward scale — and scale means national. For new launches, that’s meant setting up offices in Washington to cover politics, New York to cover finance, Los Angeles to cover entertainment, and maybe San Francisco to cover tech. Everywhere else . . . pretty much doesn’t matter.
So we get starved of local news, and stuffed with national. And if you are in Massillon, Ohio, “the media” is less likely to conjure images of the reporter covering city council, and more and more likely to be some hip urbanite writing for Vox, Fusion, Slate, Politico, Buzzfeed, or a national newspaper like The New York Times — any of whom might occasionally write about you, but none of whom are writing for you.
Old media technologies organized us into audiences defined by where we lived. New media organize us into national audiences defined by what we believe — fueling the rise of the so-called “filter bubble.”
It’s not just happening to audiences. The combination of scarce jobs and concentration in a handful of cities has applied an impressive filter to the people working in journalism as well. Today’s hires are more competitive: they skew towards applicants with expensive graduate degrees, applicants with experience from unpaid internships, and applicants who can afford astronomical rents in an expensive city while they’re trying to break in to the industry. Who gets left out? Almost everyone who doesn’t have family wealth to fall back on. People who once would have gotten their start at one of our disappearing small-city papers.
Research in the UK (which takes the time to collect statistics about things like social class) shows that, on average, younger professional journalists grew up in much wealthier households than their older colleagues. That same research now ranks journalism as the country’s third most socially exclusive profession (just behind doctors and lawyers).
So, why does someone like Donald Trump get so much mileage out of beating up on “the media”? Because, increasingly, we are a bunch of middle- to upper-class urbanites, clustered in a handful of coastal cities, writing about most of the country, instead of for it. As our local footprint has contracted, so has our public service function.
Increasingly, we are a bunch of middle- to upper-class urbanites, clustered in a handful of coastal cities, writing about most of the country, instead of for it.
People trust local news more than national. People who consume local news show higher levels of civic engagement. That translates to political accountability: academic research shows that when media markets have a close overlap with congressional districts (and therefore produce more coverage of a given representative), then incumbents are 1) more likely to be unseated, 2) more likely to vote against their party line, and 3) bring more federal funding, on average, to their districts.
And that’s just what’s measurable. Imagine if we could total up the impact this country’s local newspapers and broadcasters have had on the conduct of city and county officials, on police and housing agencies, how much corruption they’ve prevented — just by creating the expectation it would be exposed. Then ask yourself: what is the cost of stories that we’ve missed as we’ve shrunk?
I got a glimmer of that in someplace I never expected. As a JSK (Knight) Fellow at Stanford, I’m auditing a law school class in which, each week, someone from a different side of the water business comes to present on what they’re doing.
One guest was a representative from a private equity firm. They’re experimenting with privatizing municipal water services. He walked us through their pilot program, in a city of some 60,000 people in northern New Jersey.
To hear him tell it, the arrangement was a win-win: the city got out from under a massive debt load; the private equity firm earns a modest, nearly risk-free, return on investment; and the company they brought in to run the water system does the job more professionally than the city had.
I’m not in a position to assess those claims, because I don’t report on Bayonne, NJ for a living. What I could tell, with a few searches during the talk, was that under the new arrangement, residents of Bayonne had just seen a steep rate increase (12.5%). I could also see that the private operator — United Water — had started making large political contributions to the city politicians who’d signed off on their contract. Toward the end, our presenter explained why his firm had picked Bayonne for its pilot. I wrote down every word: “It’s easier,” he said, “in smaller cities where there’s less press coverage.”
“It’s easier,” he said, “in smaller cities where there’s less press coverage.”
My mind went to Flint, Michigan: a city of 100,000 poisoned by state-appointed officials’ decisions to switch their source of drinking water, then suppress evidence of high levels of carcinogens, dismiss evidence of high levels of neurotoxic lead, and ignore a fatal outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease tied to the water supply.
Flint’s newspaper had ceased daily publication in 2009, before Michigan’s Governor took over Flint’s local government. The mass-poisoning came to light because of the reporting of a investigative journalist no longer employed by a media organization. Curt Guyette had lost his job at Detroit’s alt-weekly during a round of cuts in 2013. When he started collecting water samples in Flint for independent testing, he was working for the state chapter of the ACLU.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We treat the web like it is a force of nature, an indiscriminate engine of disruption, an agent unto itself. In fact, the most important characteristic of the web we know is that everything about it is designed:
- Facebook constantly makes decisions about what will appear in the news feeds of its 1.8 billion users. This year alone, it’s tweaked its algorithm to punish clickbait, reward high-engagement stories, and prioritize personal posts over news links. Those are editorial decisions. Facebook could make the further editorial decision to give increased priority to stories from local outlets (national news doesn’t need as much help getting discovered).
- In audio, roughly sixty percent of podcast listening moves through Apple’s iTunes. People discover new podcasts through the iTunes charts. You know what doesn’t top national charts? Local shows. That’s a built-in bias against local news — and a fixable one.
- The advertising platforms that make and break online publishers don’t distinguish on the basis of quality — which led several of them to discover that they’d been funneling money to hyper-partisan fake-news sites, much to the chagrin of some of their advertisers. The platforms could make that quality distinction, and include “localism” as a mark of quality deserving of premium pricing.
If the platforms will not design themselves to support a healthy news ecosystem, then our government can tax them to do it. The American government has subsidized media since the dawn of the republic. If Google and Facebook have become such efficient profit-extractors that they’ve made it impossible for local publishers to fund their own work, then the government can tax the platforms to subsidize local news (it already has a reasonably effective formula set up to divide meager congressional appropriations among public radio and TV stations.)
Point being: there is a crisis in journalism big enough to create a crisis for democracy. That crisis goes deeper than networks giving free airtime to a demagogue, newspapers using false equivalency to torpedo his opponent, or social media making a fake news a profitable endeavor. It’s a crisis in the local media institutions that link us to the places we live, that can broker honest conversations about what’s not working, and what might — the institutions that report for us, not about us. And most importantly: it is a crisis we can fix, if there’s the political will.
