Santos story illustrates demise of local news ecosystem; lots of commentary, but 'No one is ... being paid to run down tips'

The fact that a Long Island weekly's revealing coverage of congressional candidate and now Rep.-elect George Santos wasn't picked up by other news outlets until after the election illustrates the demise of the local news ecosystem, writes Steven Waldman of the Rebuild Local News Coalition.

“If this had run 25 years ago, it would have been gobbled up,” Grant Lally, the publisher and owner of the North Shore Leader, told Waldman. “There’d have been 20 follow ups from Newsday and other publications and the weeklies.” But the weeklies that once served Long Island towns have "mostly merged into larger chains, and many don’t even have editorial offices in the covered towns anymore," Waldman reports. "Another part of this case, though, is the attention economy."

Steven Waldman

Waldman explains, "Succeeding in media today requires doing good journalism and then building your own audience for it, and the North Shore Leader didn’t successfully disseminate their scoop. They didn’t mention their story on their Facebook or Instagram accounts (not updated since 2021), nor did they tweet about it, though that stems more from them not having a Twitter account. Which isn’t really surprising since the paper doesn’t have anyone working social media hard—in part because they’ve shrunk." Lally told him, “We lost half our advertising during Covid and most of it really hasn’t come back.”

Because "the local media ecosystem is compromised, even when someone manages to get a good story, the rest of the system can’t amplify it or pursue it," Waldman writes. "If a small paper broke a story, it would be picked up by a bigger paper, or The Associated Press, which would prompt the TV stations and radio stations to dive in. Now the hyperlocal small newsrooms rarely do investigative work, and when they do, the bigger players don’t pay attention. And in smaller communities, the weekly papers are the entire foodchain, so their demise is even more consequential."

There are stil more than 6,000 weeklies, but many of them, and some dailies, are “ghost newspapers . . . slim papers full of wire copy, press releases and ads," Waldman notes. "One consequence of this hollowing out is that voters have little to no information on which to base their choices in local elections. This would seem to be a fairly significant problem for, you know, democracy. And ironically, the more local the election, the worse the coverage is likely to be. But the harm goes much deeper. Other studies show that areas with less local news have more corruption, fewer competitive elections, less resident involvement in PTAs, and even lower bond ratings. . . . There’s now evidence that the decline of local news exacerbates polarization, too. Studies show, for instance, that in areas with less coverage, voters are less likely to split their tickets. That’s because the vacuums created by the contraction of local news are filled largely by national cable TV, radio, and social media. The contraction of local news accelerates the nationalization of politics while at the same time, we have less of the kinds of information that binds together communities—everything from obituaries to high-school sports. And as "many communities have moved from good information, to no information, to deceptive information, a new wave of “pink slime” sites—often set up by political activists—to impersonate traditional news sites while actively promoting particular candidates or businesses."

Waldman, who runs Report for America, notes the book, News Hole, by media scholars Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, who wrote that most discussions about the problems of democracy “don’t account for the most dramatic change in the civic life U.S. communities have experienced in the last 20 years: the decimation of the local news media.” He promotes his coalition's main cause, the proposed Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which would give tax credits to newsrooms to pay local journalists, to small businesses that advertise in local news outlets and to consumers who purchase local news: "Perhaps Rep. Santos could co-sponsor the bill."

Screenshot from CNN

UPDATE, Jan. 7: On his Saturday morning CNN program, Michael Smerconish said "mythomanic" Santos also benefited from a late redistricting that turned the formerly Democratic district into a marginally Republican one and left little time for other Republicans to organize a primary campaign. But his six-minuite segment is mainly about the "systemic failure that is only getting worse" in local news. He concluded, “George Santos is what you get when everyone with a laptop is a wannabe journalist, but no one is left being paid to run down tips, and that should make all of us nervous. The next time you hear about the closure of a newspaper, or the scaling back of a newsroom, think about George Santos and how many more like him might be getting away with something.”