Inspiring Local Journalism and Civic Engagement Can Start in Middle and High School

By Ed Madison and Hans Boyle

A recent survey of small newspapers across the country shows reporters in a despondent mood: 61 percent hold a slightly or very unfavorable opinion about the future of their publications.

What’s caused this bleak outlook? For one, the pandemic’s onset didn’t bode well for business operations, even when online traffic increased last year.

After all, local news had never been more essential. From seeing where the latest COVID outbreak hit to finding the nearest vaccination site, visits to local news websites jumped by 89 percent between February and March of 2020. Yet, revenues failed to reflect this heightened demand. Journalists still faced pay cuts, were furloughed, or lost jobs.

Of course, the pandemic only accelerated a decline that began this century, and the ongoing collapse of local papers isn’t just bad news for reporters (pun not intended).

Research continues to highlight the negative impacts of sparse local coverage. The costs of running municipalities rise when reporters aren’t watching how government officials handle taxpayer funds. Turnout for mayoral races becomes depressed, and the races themselves become less competitive when reporters aren’t covering local politics.

Then there’s the more abstract, but no less critical, element that local journalism usually nurtures: community ties. In an Atlantic piece last month, Elaine Godfrey wrote about the hollowing out of her hometown paper, The Hawk Eye, after Gatehouse bought the publication. Not only did coverage of local issues suffer, so did the stories of town picnics and parades.

“These stories are the connective tissue of a community; they introduce people to their neighbors, and they encourage readers to listen and empathize with one another,” Godfrey wrote.

High school newspapers have faced the same resource crunch. An oft-referenced 2013 New York Times piece reported fewer than one and eight of the city’s public high schools had a newspaper or journalism class.

A decade ago, two-thirds of public high schools across the country had student newspapers, according to a 2011 study conducted by the Kent State Center for Scholastic Journalism. Those without newspapers were disproportionately urban schools with higher percentages of minority students. Mark Goodman, one of the researchers behind the report, said in 2019 he assumes those numbers remain largely unchanged — a concerning finding for outlets that want to nurture diversity in the newsroom.

Community ties are fraying in this polarized era. And while there’s no easy solution to repairing our strained social fabric, supporting local newsrooms as well as classroom journalism should be part of the conversation.

One study has shown that when local papers fold, readers turn to national outlets whose focus on all-things-partisan hardens attitudes and drives polarization. Inspired by this finding, Julie Makinen, executive director of The Desert Sun, dropped national stories, columns, and letters from her newspaper in the summer of 2019. According to a subsequent review, that move significantly raised the number of op-eds and letters appearing in The Desert Sun that concerned local issues.

Additionally, action at the middle and high school level can help reengage readers with community matters. The Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit that develops journalism-oriented programs for English Language Arts classrooms, runs an Effective Communicators Course. This unique program allows students to form small reporting groups researching, writing, and publishing stories on critical local issues.

A former Dow Jones News Fund High School Journalism Teacher of the Year, Ellen Austin, says “50 percent of future journalists start in high school, and 75 percent of minority journalists start in high school.” Consequently, if we’re not supporting journalism education, we’re not supporting journalism. JLI’s mission isn’t to recruit future journalists, per se. A founding principle is that all students stand to benefit academically and as citizens from journalism’s skills.

Not only do students acquire essential media literacy skills and see their writing improve, they begin to see themselves as key stakeholders in the community. They become invested in local affairs and confident in their capacity to make a difference.

Perhaps the best way to help our downcast local reporters is to raise inspired and confident students.