The investment to local journalism and the impact on your community

My wife and I recently had a conversation about our monthly bills. Like everyone, we've been paying close attention to our expenses, looking for opportunities to cut expenses in the face of the inflation we're all experiencing.

On that day our discussion was focused on the roughly $20 a month we are paying for my subscription to the local newspaper. I've been an on again, off again subscriber to this newspaper since I stopped working there nearly six years ago. My first reaction after leaving was that I didn't want to give the majority owner of the newspaper one single penny of my money; and that sentiment pretty much still holds true. But I have great respect for the minority owners, and the product that they are trying to put out and serving our community six days a week. My $20 monthly investment is for them. It is also for my community.

Your local newspaper, with all of its flaws is still a vital contributor to your community. I recall a gathering over 30 years ago that I was in. It was a meeting of the Downtown Business Association in Greenfield, Indiana and I taking my lumps as a group of local business owners began ripping the local newspaper I worked for at the time. One older gentleman, Brownie Eagleston stepped up and defended me and the newspaper. "What would our town be without the local newspaper?" his voice boomed at to that crowd at the meeting back in about 1992. His voice of reason was enough to quiet the negative talk and provided me some relief. It also made me forever grateful to Brownie.

So much has changed over the three decades since that day. More and more towns are without a newspaper. Other newspapers are now published less frequently, and many no longer have what you would recognize as a local newsroom. Instead, their content is generated at a regional newsroom largely from press releases that they gather from their email inbox.

There are many articles out there that will talk about the impact on a community when local journalism is gone. Professor Michael Sinkinson and his team at Yale University published a study in 2022 about the diminished interest in local government and local politics when there is no longer a newspaper in the community left to report on the goings on of our elected officials. Another study from around 2018 published by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that the cost of government dramatically goes up when there is a void of journalism in a community.

The Notre Dame / UIC study was especially enlightening. They studied communities that lost newspapers from 1996 through 2015. Since 2004, nearly 2000 newspapers have gone away, meaning these findings are not isolated. Their analysis showed that three years after a newspaper closes, the impacted counties saw increases in taxpayer spending. Their studying concluded that the costs associated with borrowing money also increased. Having someone at that local board meeting to ask questions, to publish the decisions made and then to have that article read by the community keeps our governments more accountable.

In the town I call home, Fort Wayne, Indiana a small ripple just went through our community. An international website known for its journalism, The Guardian, decided to take a look around our regional hospital. Fort Wayne is the most affordable metro in the United States, yet our regional medical provider is perennially among the most expensive in the country.

I wish that the story had been broken by our local newspaper, or by one of the regional TV or radio stations. The fact is, local outlets no longer have the resources to do the kind of deep dive involved in this story from The Guardian. I have no idea how many hours it took their team of journalist to research, do data mining for the analysis, interviews, writing, editing and everything else involved. It was a lot.

In the past, the local newspaper could have sunk their teeth into this type of community watchdog journalism. And to be fair, my local newspaper still does this type of investigation from time to time. But for my city's newspaper and for the hundreds of others across the country, the resources involved in this story on medical costs in Northeastern Indiana would be hard to come by. And it is a shame, because this is important and noble work that we need for the health our our community and for our country.

But back to that $20 a month investment I mentioned before. I cannot fund every newsroom in the country, nor can I subscribe to every newspaper. But I can support the one locally trying to be our community watchdog, trying to be the adult in the room at local government meetings, the one trying to keep local journalism alive.

While they didn't break the story about our local hospital's operating practices, I do believe they will be the ones that will pick up the baton once the national media is gone and keep a watchful eye and see that appropriate and meaningful change will result.

That $20 a month seems like a good investment when you think of that way.