By Al Cross
"There is no sign that the digital market can support local or even regional journalism at anything like the level it had in print."
For journalists and their paymasters, that is the most chilling line in a review of two very important books about journalism and the news business, because the digital market will keep expanding. The books are about big-time journalism, but the chilling line applies to community journalism, too.
For a decade now, I have said community journalism is the healthiest part of the traditional news business, primarily because most people will always be interested in news about their locality, and digital media have not invaded the local-news franchise of most rural newspapers.
But now I wonder. Americans increasingly engage in online, virtual communities, many of which have little or nothing to do with a locality (West Highland White Terrier owners like me and my wife, for example). The flood-the-zone approach of President Trump and the dominance of social media have placed more emphasis on national news, and the shriveling of many local news outlets has only exacerbated that.
There is less interest in local news, and certainly in local newspapers, most of which still emphasize the print product that provides most of their advertising revenue. That leaves them with a disproportionately older audience that is gradually dying off. And I can see a decline in many rural newspapers that I did not see five years ago.
I thought about these things as I read a review of Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, by former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, and Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts. The review, in the March 21 issue of the New York Review of Books, was written by Paul Starr, a Princeton University professor who co-edits The American Prospect, a liberal magazine. At 3,740 words, the article contains one of the best reasonably short summations of the problems of the news business and journalism, particularly political coverage.
Rural journalists need to care about these issues, because many in our audiences increasingly see local news media as part of a national problem. As Starr says in his opening paragraph, "The entire field has been politically reconfigured, as media outlets identified with different ideological positions provide their audiences with alternative versions of reality. . . . Amid the torrent of lies from the highest reaches of government and disinformation on social media, journalism’s leaders are making unabashed claims that their business is 'truth,' using that word without apology or qualification. But because journalism has not been a lucrative business for some time, its ideals of truth-telling have become harder to uphold."
Starr notes the groundbreaking work by Penny Abernathy at the University of North Carolina, which showed that since 2004, "about 20 percent of newspapers have shut down, while many of the survivors have become what Ken Doctor of Harvard’s NiemanLab calls NINOs (newspapers in name only): diminished ad shoppers with hardly any local reporting. Private equity firms have bought many of these to suck the last profits from them."
As an advocate for rural journalism, I am more worried about the latter phenomenon than the former. Most of the 1,800 newspaper closings (or mergers) from 2004 through 2015 were weeklies in suburban areas and non-county-seat towns, especially in areas like the Great Plains that have been losing population. But the portfolios of private equity firms go deep into the county-seat and local-trade-center newspapers that are the heart of rural journalism in America. The canary in this coal mine is (or was) the Waynesville Daily Guide in south-central Missouri, which GateHouse Media bought, shrank and closed. Its sad tale is told by The Associated Press in a story (excerpted on The Rural Blog) as part of Sunshine Week, the annual salute to open government and journalism's role in it.
Those trends are not part of Abramson's book, and that is only one of its shortcomings. "Several passages in the chapters on Vice all too closely follow other writers’ language; Abramson also got details wrong about a number of young journalists, making them appear inexperienced and unqualified," Starr writes. "There is no excusing these failures, but not every damaged vessel should be sunk." I agree; I suspect Abramson's book beats the traditional news media's mess-up average, which I reckon to be about 5 percent. That's also the error rate for Major League Baseball players.
The other book breaks new ground with a study of study of 4 million political stories from 2015 to 2018, from 40,000 online sources, as well as case studies of conspiracy stories, rumors, and outright disinformation. It "contradicts the idea that there are two symmetrical echo chambers on the right and left," Starr writes.
"On the right," Starr says, the book shows "an insular echo chamber skewed toward the extreme, where even the major news organizations (Fox and Breitbart) do not observe norms of truth-seeking. But from the center-right (for example, The Wall Street Journal) through the center to the left, they find an interconnected network of news organizations that operate under the constraint of established journalistic norms. The result is two different patterns in how falsehood travels.
"On the right, major news organizations amplified stories concocted in the right’s nether reaches . . . False stories originated on the left as well, but they were generally not relayed to a wider public. The right-wing media failed to correct falsehoods or to hold their journalists accountable for spreading them, whereas the rest of the media checked one another, corrected mistakes when they made them, and in several cases disciplined or fired those responsible for errors. These differences contributed to the greater susceptibility on the right, not only to home-grown propaganda, but also to Russian disinformation and commercially fabricated clickbait whenever these were consistent with what the authors call the 'tribal narrative.'"
Yes, most Americans have sorted themselves into political tribes, where members suffer when they don't adhere to their tribe's prevailing set of beliefs. A central mission of journalism is to help the country and its communities overcome such divisions. To do that, it should be mainly about facts, not opinion; be a reliable source of relevant information for its audiences, and be seen as such; and explain how it goes about its work. And all of journalism's paymasters, large and small, must adapt to the digital age while being true to journalism's values.
Director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky
"There is no sign that the digital market can support local or even regional journalism at anything like the level it had in print."
For journalists and their paymasters, that is the most chilling line in a review of two very important books about journalism and the news business, because the digital market will keep expanding. The books are about big-time journalism, but the chilling line applies to community journalism, too.
For a decade now, I have said community journalism is the healthiest part of the traditional news business, primarily because most people will always be interested in news about their locality, and digital media have not invaded the local-news franchise of most rural newspapers.
But now I wonder. Americans increasingly engage in online, virtual communities, many of which have little or nothing to do with a locality (West Highland White Terrier owners like me and my wife, for example). The flood-the-zone approach of President Trump and the dominance of social media have placed more emphasis on national news, and the shriveling of many local news outlets has only exacerbated that.
There is less interest in local news, and certainly in local newspapers, most of which still emphasize the print product that provides most of their advertising revenue. That leaves them with a disproportionately older audience that is gradually dying off. And I can see a decline in many rural newspapers that I did not see five years ago.
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| Paul Starr |
Rural journalists need to care about these issues, because many in our audiences increasingly see local news media as part of a national problem. As Starr says in his opening paragraph, "The entire field has been politically reconfigured, as media outlets identified with different ideological positions provide their audiences with alternative versions of reality. . . . Amid the torrent of lies from the highest reaches of government and disinformation on social media, journalism’s leaders are making unabashed claims that their business is 'truth,' using that word without apology or qualification. But because journalism has not been a lucrative business for some time, its ideals of truth-telling have become harder to uphold."
Starr notes the groundbreaking work by Penny Abernathy at the University of North Carolina, which showed that since 2004, "about 20 percent of newspapers have shut down, while many of the survivors have become what Ken Doctor of Harvard’s NiemanLab calls NINOs (newspapers in name only): diminished ad shoppers with hardly any local reporting. Private equity firms have bought many of these to suck the last profits from them."
Those trends are not part of Abramson's book, and that is only one of its shortcomings. "Several passages in the chapters on Vice all too closely follow other writers’ language; Abramson also got details wrong about a number of young journalists, making them appear inexperienced and unqualified," Starr writes. "There is no excusing these failures, but not every damaged vessel should be sunk." I agree; I suspect Abramson's book beats the traditional news media's mess-up average, which I reckon to be about 5 percent. That's also the error rate for Major League Baseball players.
The other book breaks new ground with a study of study of 4 million political stories from 2015 to 2018, from 40,000 online sources, as well as case studies of conspiracy stories, rumors, and outright disinformation. It "contradicts the idea that there are two symmetrical echo chambers on the right and left," Starr writes.
"On the right," Starr says, the book shows "an insular echo chamber skewed toward the extreme, where even the major news organizations (Fox and Breitbart) do not observe norms of truth-seeking. But from the center-right (for example, The Wall Street Journal) through the center to the left, they find an interconnected network of news organizations that operate under the constraint of established journalistic norms. The result is two different patterns in how falsehood travels.
"On the right, major news organizations amplified stories concocted in the right’s nether reaches . . . False stories originated on the left as well, but they were generally not relayed to a wider public. The right-wing media failed to correct falsehoods or to hold their journalists accountable for spreading them, whereas the rest of the media checked one another, corrected mistakes when they made them, and in several cases disciplined or fired those responsible for errors. These differences contributed to the greater susceptibility on the right, not only to home-grown propaganda, but also to Russian disinformation and commercially fabricated clickbait whenever these were consistent with what the authors call the 'tribal narrative.'"
Yes, most Americans have sorted themselves into political tribes, where members suffer when they don't adhere to their tribe's prevailing set of beliefs. A central mission of journalism is to help the country and its communities overcome such divisions. To do that, it should be mainly about facts, not opinion; be a reliable source of relevant information for its audiences, and be seen as such; and explain how it goes about its work. And all of journalism's paymasters, large and small, must adapt to the digital age while being true to journalism's values.
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