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| Douglas Burns in his office (Carroll Times Herald) |
The
Carroll Times Herald has been in Doug Burns's family for generations, but the Iowa publisher and columnist feels he's been fighting the newspaper's last stand for several years. The battle has taken a toll on his mental health, Burns
writes in a column for his
Substack newsletter
The Iowa Mercury: "In some of my more desperate days, I talked about suicide, my own, and the summoning of the last traces of resilience in this fight."
Burns' fight and the fight of many other newspapers are detailed in a
new book,
Beacons in the Darkness: Hope and Transformation Among America's Community Newspapers, by Dave Hoekstra, formerly of the
Chicago Sun-Times. Hoekstra spent hours with the Times Herald and many other newspapers, such as
The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Ill., owned by
National Newspaper Association Chairman John Galer.
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| Cover of the paperback book |
Burns told Hoekstra that when he was a teenager, he took a "condescending attitude" toward stories of family farmers committing suicide after losing their farms. "But now, I’ve thought about killing myself. You can quote me on that," Burns said in 2020. "I haven’t, of course, but I’ve spent 30 years of my life on this. We were best paper in the state (named by the
Iowa Newspaper Association in 2013). What for? Maybe I’ll catch coronavirus. I’ve been flying around all over the country trying to find ideas and implementing dozens of them, working myself probably to an early grave trying to keep this paper from going to an early grave."
In that same conversation, Burns also touched on the diminishing status of community newspapers: "I used to be the guy in the room who could pretty much tell anybody they were wrong. I don’t have that leverage anymore. It’s tragic. Because the one person in the room that could tell people in positions of power to do that in smaller rural areas was the newspaper owner. He or she had the credibility of being a big community booster, and also, it’s our job."
The root cause still is a mystery. Local TV websites give away local news because the TV broadcasts are ad-supported. But, local newspapers which were ad-supported struggle to not fail, and print fewer pages of news. Is the readership either uninterested or ignorant or apathetic? Many of these local papers were family-owned so it is fair to assume they were not debt-laden. Their distribution models - paperboys & newstands - are antiquated, but why doesn't their content and reporting translate readily into online formats, which are ad-supported? I grew up watching giant rolls of papers glide through large format printers, then be folded into fourths and compressed into stacks. A news deadline every week, and readers waiting for the paper to be delivered. Hate how that's all changed, or lost irretrievably especially from the standpoint of folks just not having or caring to have a reliable source of news.
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