Just days after its 150th birthday, The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, announced Friday that, due to financial hardships, its final edition will be Aug. 31. That will leave Youngstown as the largest U.S. city without a daily paper, according to the American Press Institute. The paper reaches 100,000 readers a day online and in print, and serves a region in northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania with twice that many people, including some in rural areas.
The Vindicator says it tried hard to cut costs and increase revenue in recent years, but when that wasn't enough to keep the paper open, it tried to find a buyer and was unsuccessful. The Maag and related Brown families have owned the paper since 1887, which makes the decision to close the paper "gut-wrenching," write Publisher Betty Brown Jagnow and General Manager Mark Brown. "Our family’s lives have revolved around and been defined by this newspaper for 132 years . . . As the saying goes, we have ink in our veins."
When the paper closes, 144 employees and about 250 paper carriers will lose their jobs, WFMJ-TV reports. "It’s another hit for a region that’s suffered 40 years of industrial job losses and is still reeling from GM’s shutdown of its giant Lordstown assembly line, but there’s a much deeper significance to this news," Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch writes: "The closing of Youngstown’s only daily paper is a blow not just to a struggling city that needs information, but to American democracy."
Residents in communities with no paper or reduced coverage are less likely to get accurate information and more likely to fall prey to deliberately biased or faked info. They're also less likely to vote in local elections, and limited research indicates that fewer candidates tend to run for local office in such communities, and local governments pay more to borrow, perhaps due to less scrutiny, Bunch writes.
Almost all the newspapers that have closed in the last 15 years have been weeklies, mainly in suburbs or small rural towns that are not county seats, like Menno, S.D, pop. 608, where the Hutchinson Herald published its final edition last week, citing "rising costs, diminishing advertising support and declining population and readership. The publishers, who own the weekly Freeman Courier, said they will add Herald subscribers to their list and plan to continue have a weekly section about Menno and Olivet (pop. 74), the seat of Hutchinson County (pop. 7,300), but "Support from the business community, as well as the city of Menno and Menno School District, will determine at what level."
David Bordewyk, executive director of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, told the Herald, "Many small weekly newspapers in South Dakota are facing very significant economic pressures. Those pressures are related, not necessarily to the growth of the internet and social media, but more so to the demographic and economic trends in the rural communities and rural areas of our state. The loss of population, farms, businesses and institutions such as schools and health-care facilities are making it more and more difficult for many of our state’s smallest newspapers to continuing publishing." The story lists some of the papers that have closed recently.
"When we’ve seen the demise of a small newspaper, the trend has been for a neighboring newspaper or a newspaper nearby that has the same ownership to incorporate coverage of the newspaper-less community into its own publication," Bordewyk said. "In other words, more and more newspapers are covering, not only the community where they are based, but nearby communities, as well. That seems to be the model for sustainability of community journalism in South Dakota and elsewhere."
Residents in communities with no paper or reduced coverage are less likely to get accurate information and more likely to fall prey to deliberately biased or faked info. They're also less likely to vote in local elections, and limited research indicates that fewer candidates tend to run for local office in such communities, and local governments pay more to borrow, perhaps due to less scrutiny, Bunch writes.
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| Menno and Hutchinson County, S.D. |
David Bordewyk, executive director of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, told the Herald, "Many small weekly newspapers in South Dakota are facing very significant economic pressures. Those pressures are related, not necessarily to the growth of the internet and social media, but more so to the demographic and economic trends in the rural communities and rural areas of our state. The loss of population, farms, businesses and institutions such as schools and health-care facilities are making it more and more difficult for many of our state’s smallest newspapers to continuing publishing." The story lists some of the papers that have closed recently.
"When we’ve seen the demise of a small newspaper, the trend has been for a neighboring newspaper or a newspaper nearby that has the same ownership to incorporate coverage of the newspaper-less community into its own publication," Bordewyk said. "In other words, more and more newspapers are covering, not only the community where they are based, but nearby communities, as well. That seems to be the model for sustainability of community journalism in South Dakota and elsewhere."
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