Ghosting the News
In an upcoming Washington Post Perspective column, Post opinion writer Margaret Sullivan takes a heartfelt and hard-to-turn-away-from piece about the decline in community newspapers over the past few decades. In the article — “What America’s local news crisis means for our democracy.” Sullivan builds on a theme she began last year with the publication of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, a must-read for anyone (which should be everyone) who is affected by the demise of local weekly and daily newspapers.
To those of us who have been in the news business for the past 30–50 years, the acceleration delta with which locally-sourced and produced news publications have disappeared from mailboxes, driveways, front yards, and roofs has been breathtaking, particularly within the past 12 years.
Sullivan writes, “Already in a sharp downward spiral, the local news industry was it hard by the covid-19 pandemic. The worst blows were taken by newspapers — businesses that, as a group, had never recovered from the digital revolution and the 2008 recession. Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors. Since covid struck, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications, like the California Sunday Magazine…
