Eight Ways to Reclaim The Local News Desert

Hire journalists. Invite the community in. Mobilize the hyperlocal. Understand that audience is more complex than ever. Go for your big story. Stay small.

David Cohea

With print readership continuing to decline and local web traffic crowded out on social platforms by national news outlets, it’s no wonder that many communities across America look and feel like a news desert.

That’s not good news. Studies have shown that when communities don’t have enough local media outlets covering a wide range of issues and presenting a variety of viewpoints, corruption increases, civic participation drops and lawmakers bring in less funding.

As the media goes, so goes community.

And while we’re drumming our fingers awaiting a collective solution — figure out how to really sell digital ads, better monetize content or adopt some new miracle technology for reporting and/or distribution — the task of finding and developing a local news community is something both communities and the media can work together to achieve results that, like all things local, are small but satisfying.

Here are some good ideas currently in circulation:

• Seeing that an advertising-based newspaper business is less and less able to afford journalists (according to Pew Research, some 60,000 newsroom jobs have been cut since 2003) — and, furthermore, that without journalists there is truly no independent, objective and transparent news — Steven Waldman (lead author of the FCC 2011 report The Information Needs of Communities) has recommended a program called Report For America, where foundations help pay to place full- and part-time journalists in a community. Fashioned somewhat akin to community service programs like AmeriCorps and Teach for America, Report for America introduces an ethic of service which may do a lot to restore journalism’s credibility in society. (A 3013 Pew report revealed that only 28 percent of Americans believe journalists contribute “a lot” to society’s health and well being, compared to 73 percent for teachers and 65 percent for scientists.) You can read Waldman’s Report for America proposal here.

Place journalists back into the ecosystem, and get communities involved in local news.

• The battle may have to be fought from the other direction as well, by getting citizens in a community interested in the state of their local news. News Voices: New Jersey is a program by the advocacy group Free Press to foster relationships between newsrooms and communities by using community-organizing tactics. The thinking goes, that if a network of residents, civic leaders, academics and journalists could be formed, could a model of quality, sustainable journalism be revived? Nieman Lab writes about it here.
• Another community-media cooperative is the National Community and News Literacy Roundtable project. Beginning with the community of Newark, news, civic and academic institutions were brought together to talk about a critical issue in the community — for this event, re-development in Newark. But rather than speak as experts, attendees were asked to represent their individual ideas and concerns in the community. The process is invaluable for newsrooms, for it can help journalists discover where the touchpoints of relevancy are. Debbie Galant of the Center for Cooperative Media writes about it here.
• A third community initiative called Curious Nation grew out of a public radio series at WBEZ/Chicago. Jennifer Brandel has been turning newsroom norms upside down by inviting audiences into the story-generation process, so that newsrooms cover what audiences want to know more about. Furthermore, the public is invited along for the reporting. “The power of the press and the access that comes with it should be shared … public access to those who get to dictate the narrative of our societies is critical, ” states Curious Nation’s manifesto. Now a startup venture called Hearken, Brandel is finding that the public is an immense storehouse of ideas, pushing stories forward into the news cycle that might not have been approved through traditional channels. The result has been in huge upsurge in the popularity of stories. Details here.
• Another way to improve the connection with community is to diversify the local offerings. Ken Doctor suggested back in May that a news company should purchase Yelp, the local-business recommendation smartphone app. It’s a truly local, go-to service that has replaced newspapers’ ability to guide consumers. Yelp represents everything that was taken away from newspapers with digital disruption — think Craigslist, Monster, Google search and Facebook social — and could help newspapers find a way to rejoin local news with local market. Whether Yelp is purchased as Doctor suggests or not, the notion of expanding a newspaper from the news to a much-wider source of community information is a sure way of increasing its local visibility and viability. Doctor’s story here.

Diversify the offerings, and find the online tribes.

• Research now shows that as much as 50 percent of a given newspaper market are excluded from the present business model of newspapering. Who are they? Potential readers unwilling to pay for a print subscription or online paywall and who are not loyal enough to proactively visit a news site on an ongoing basis. It may be that these readers are now so thoroughly into the larger news mainstream that they consume news from dozens of news channels via their Facebook feeds. However, they still have an appetite for local news and services. Is there a way that Instagram and Twitter can be better localized? (See Tracy Clark, “The Newspaper industry and the forgotten 50 percent.”)
• Millennials occupy this end of the spectrum, they’re savvy enough to live fluently on- and offline, and may not make much of a distinction between the two. Their notion of local may not much resemble geographical notions of the local legacy media outfits are bound to. “Amazon.com is their local market and Netflix their local theater,” writes Damon Kiesow, senior manager for mobile initiatives at McClatchy. What are the local online tribes, and what are they up to? That constitutes a underserved audience and a strong local beat.
• The Fifty Percent also includes a lot of readers who are not tech-savvy or app-happy. They may have a smartphone, but they use it mostly to check their e-mail and — yes — make phone calls. They’re on the Web, but their numbers don’t show up in the online traffic report. How to reach and engage the dark inhabitants of traffic? One way to think of them is folks who don’t quite fit a niche or demographic the way we’ve been taught to look for. “People are simply more complex than the categories and stereotypes we’ve created for them,” write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism. Social media traffic is driven by strong emotion; it’s not to say that that wider community doesn’t share some of same feelings, but engaging them will require nuance and experimentation.

Understand that people are more complex than categories, and learn how to be small.

• Finally, growing a local audience is a matter of learning how to be truly local, to “be small” as Jim Brady of Philadelphia’s hyperlocal platform Billy Penn puts it. To wit, small newsrooms can’t and shouldn’t compete with the big daily newsrooms. They shouldn’t try to cover everything, nor chase the stories that everyone else is covering. Instead, they should go after the big stories that happen in their own back yard. “You can actually be pretty competitive on an huge story if you’re not that big, because you don’t have all these other things you have to support every day,” says Brady. The focus should be on what you can do, not what you can’t. Finally, being small allows a news site to experiment. “If you try something and it doesn’t’ work,” he says, “it’s not the worst thing in the world, but not trying things and not getting noticed is not an option.” Story here.

There’s an old saying: Twelve miles into the woods, twelve miles out. The local news desert didn’t form overnight — signs of it were creeping in decades ago when newspapers began sacrificing quality news for greater returns. The Internet simply sped the process, leading us here. To become viable in the community again, newspapers need find their market in a step-by-step process.

The future maybe be unevenly distributed, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t lost the local.

David Cohea is general manager of King Features Weekly Service, an editorial service for 700 weekly newspapers. Email David at dcohea@hearstsc.com.