Once, newspapers arrived at your doorstep, ready to be unfolded alongside your morning coffee. Now, they lay half-read and abandoned in coffee shops, discarded with the week’s recycling, or even used as kindling.
Local news has lost its place at the heart of the community, buried under the weight of clickbait titles and celebrity drama. Now, local newspapers and media outlets are disappearing.
Since 2005, the United States has lost one-third of its newspapers. The ones which remain are unrecognizable, struggling to survive in an industry where profit — not reporting — dictates survival. Some have transitioned online, but even digital platforms are being stripped down, their resources drained by corporate owners who see journalism as just another revenue stream.
Without financial independence, local news outlets are being swallowed up by media conglomerates or private equity firms that prioritize shareholder returns over hard-hitting reporting. Instead of covering town hall debates or neighborhood disputes, their front pages are now filled with recycled Associated Press stories or syndicated fluff from larger outlets.
When newspapers sell out to corporations, they lose more than their independence. They lose their credibility.
Their responsibility to the communities they once served gets pushed aside in favor of ad-revenue. Once vibrant newsrooms that held local governments accountable have become empty shells of their former selves, with fewer journalists struggling to cover larger and larger regions. The result? Gaps in coverage, fading public trust and a weakened connection to the places we call home.
The impact of this decline is already visible.
The Express Times, the Lehigh Valley’s longest-running newspaper, ended its physical print edition this month, citing rising costs and dwindling circulation as the causes. It now exists solely online, a fate that many other local papers are likely to share.
Money should be kept out of journalism, and local journalism should be kept local. Journalism should serve the public, not corporate overlords. But today’s local outlets are more focused on their bottom line than their bylines.
Their websites are littered with intrusive ads, their stories locked behind paywalls with ever-increasing fees, some subscriptions costing as much as $60 a month.
These papers prey on a consumer with low introductory offers that quickly turn into higher fees. The Morning Call charges as much as $28 per month for a subscription. It should not be that expensive for a citizen to read local news online.
Worse yet, cancelling can be a nightmare, requiring a phone call to a customer service rep who may or may not ever answer — dodging your phone calls to keep you subscribed for as long as possible.
For those who do pay, the return on investment is shrinking. There’s less investigative work, less community engagement and less original reporting. The core of local journalism, holding power to account and keeping the public informed, has been gutted.
These underhanded tactics erode trust in local media, pushing people towards free and sometimes unreliable social media news sources. While influencers and citizen journalists can fill some of these gaps, they cannot provide the level of in-depth, investigative coverage that local newspapers once did.
Social media shouldn’t be a replacement for the profession of journalism. Reporting is a craft which requires time, resources and dedication — things many local newspapers lack today due to declining interest and funding.
When a local paper shuts down, it doesn’t just leave a void in our newsfeeds; it leaves communities in the dark.
The consequences of this decline are serious. Studies show that communities without strong local journalism experience lower civic engagement and higher government corruption. If no one is reporting on city budgets, school policies or local elections, who’s holding decision-makers accountable?
When there is nothing in the community calling for their attention, they may stop paying attention altogether.
Maybe print is a dying medium, and traditional news is unsustainable in an era where people have so many free and instant ways of receiving information. But, history tells us that when people don’t like how something is being done, they find a way to do it themselves.
If corporate-owned newspapers won’t cover local communities, independent journalists thankfully will. Platforms like Substack, newsletters and grassroots reporting are stepping up — proving that journalism doesn’t have to be dictated by corporate interests.
Still, there’s something undeniably important about a traditional local publication with a full staff of professionals and a common goal of serving their community. When local news outlets die out without anything to fill the void, there will be nowhere for citizens to turn when they want to learn about the problems affecting their community — whether that problem is a simply broken traffic light or a significant change to their local infrastructure.
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