S.O.L.P. (Save Our Local Papers)


Growing up in rural southeast Alabama, I remember how important the local papers were, even to a small child. Our small county had two papers that serviced our two biggest towns. I still have all the clippings of each time I appeared in our paper: there are yellowed images of myself in kindergarten when my class visited the grocery store and bank; in first grade with my friends on the playground; even the times when with my last name was spelled wrong. It was important to appear in the paper, and pre-internet/social media, it was the place where you learned everything you needed to know about the week prior and the week ahead.  

Our metro area daily paper was even more important. I will confess that all the news did not concern me as much as the daily comics page and the Sunday sales papers did. But at our house, that paper was important—my parents would get it first thing in the morning, and it was super annoying if it were raining, and my dad could not look at it until later in the evening when it had dried.  

Fast forward to today—our area has one weekly paper that serves the whole county. The daily metro paper has sold to another company, the pages themselves decreased in size over the years, its local staff reduced, and its printing moved off-site.  


So what happened here is pretty much the same thing that has happened to everyone’s beloved (or now possibly not so beloved) papers. 


The unfortunate consequence of the rise of instant online news and the decline in local publishing is the loss of the local paper. The local paper has long been the backbone of the community, “the only industry mentioned in the Bill of Rights – one that is essential for the functioning of democracy,” according to Steven Waldman, an advocate for the return of the local paper not managed by large corporations but by local owners or nonprofits (Waldman, 2020). 


According to Waldman, many of the issues journalism is facing today can be traced back to local news's decline. In his proposal “A Replanting Strategy: Saving Local Newspapers Squeezed by Hedge Funds,” written for the Center for Journalism and Liberty, Waldman cites studies that have shown that the lack of local news has led to higher polarization, decreased voter turnout, less cross-party voting, and increased corruption and government waste (Waldman, 2020). “Communities do not have the information they need to solve their own problems,” says Waldman (Waldman, 2020).  


Imagine all the issues surrounding journalism today—the accusations of partisanship, the deterioration of editing policies, the click-bait solutions to corporate advertising quotas, the rush to be the first (but not the most accurate)—and then how some of that could be alleviated by the return of the local news.  


Yes, the circumstances that led to the decline of all print still exist for the smaller papers that have fewer resources at their disposal. Waldman’s proposal suggests changing for-profit newspapers into local nonprofit organizations and Public Benefit Corporations (Waldman, 2020). I don’t agree with all his suggestions: a private, nonprofit “replanting fund” for saving local papers is a great idea if the nonprofit granting the fund is nonpartisan; using government incentives leaves me wondering if a paper would not feel some sort of obligation that could bias their reporting. But his general strategy of making local papers for the public good rather than for profit is sound.  



References: 

Waldman, S. (2020, October 18). A Replanting Strategy: Saving Local Newspapers Squeezed by Hedge Funds. Center for Journalism and Liberty. https://www.journalismliberty.org/publications/replanting-strategy-saving-local-newspapers-squeezed-by-hedge-fund 

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