When you look at a map of news deserts in the United States, you see a nation dotted red, with counties within larger regions where local newspapers have died. However, surrounding that county, there are others where there may be 6 or more local newspapers – in various states of financial and editorial health.
A map of news deserts in Australia looks far gloomier. Still, Dean Baquet, the former editor of the New York Times, now leading a new local investigative fellowship program at his paper, says there is a crisis in local news and people not only don’t like to hear they live in a news desert, but they are also paying a price. The relationship between a local newspaper, as a source of information and knowledge and the community is profound, he says and when a local paper dies, what people are left with is a swamp of news from national media, all of it focussed on New York City or Washington DC.
A few weeks ago, I attended the International Press Institute World Congress at Columbia University in New York City and what struck me was the extent of innovation that is pouring into the production of local news. This innovation concerns not just the financing of local news outlets; it includes the creation of associations between them and larger city-based outlets to ensure there is a flow of information from the local to national audiences. And that’s very much of interest to us at CMT, because it’s this flow from local to national that we’re looking at in our Rural and Regional Reporting Project (first yearly report out soon!).
The differences in news deserts between the US and Australia are clearly enormous: population in regional centres there and here are vastly different, the size of local or even regional newspapers is vastly different and as a result, the stories or investigations which are or can be written have vastly different reach and impact. However, the focus of mainstream, big city news outlets in the US is very much on what they’re missing when they don’t focus on local news and how important it is for social cohesion in a divided nation for non-city communities to be accounted for in news coverage read by city readers.
The fellowship program that Baquet now leads will induct 10-12 young reporters from the local news ecosystem around the United States to work with Times editorial staff on investigations within their communities. The collaboration starts early. “Local editors don’t have time to craft projects and they need help doing this. It’s not that they aren’t sure they have good projects. They do,” said Baquet. With other New York Times editorial staff, he will travel to local newsrooms to brainstorm investigations and then work for prolonged periods of time with local journalists on the reporting which will be co-published in the New York Times and the local publication.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director
This was featured in our fortnightly newsletter of 30 September - Read our newsletter in full here. To subscribe, click here.