I have something of a tradition each Wednesday evening, rolling our almost 100-gallon trash can up the driveway and leaving it next to the curb. Along the way, or just after parking the dumpster next to our mailbox, I scoop up the local newspaper and add it to the contents. Usually, the paper is soggy, kind of like the roll of paper that your toddler drops into the toilet. I don’t even read the ink headlines visible through the transparent plastic sleeve.
Which is a bit ironic, because I’m passionate about the news. I subscribe to — and read — multiple e-mail newsletters. At work and at home, I compulsively check and recheck news apps. I make a habit of consuming a range of sources.
I’ve even looked into purchasing a community newspaper. It’s feasible — they cost as little as a house, so you don’t have to be independently wealthy. And there’s the allure of owning a business that has social utility. Educating citizens about their community, we’ve all been told, makes the community a better place.
But I continue to come back to my own dismissiveness towards my local newspaper, my weekly ritual of chucking the local print. Especially because I know it’s not just me. Readership of newspapers within the United States is down about half of where it was in the 1990’s. And because of readers’ apathy, one out of every five community newspapers has closed in the past fifteen years.
The prevailing explanation for why community newspapers are dying is that they haven’t, and probably can’t, adapt to the Internet age. Google is a more cost-effective advertising channel than print. Since local newspapers rely heavily on advertising, which has plummeted by about 50 percent, it’s not surprising that US newsrooms have laid off about half of their reporters.
And unlike the New York Times, local newspapers can’t throw up a $199 annual paywall. Because locals won’t pay.
Which gets, I think, to the crux of the matter. Local newspapers aren’t dying because they have poor journalism. They’re going the way of Life because they don’t have a community.
If you think about your social circles, you’d probably describe them something along the lines of work and family and politics and faith and neighborhood. And if you’re like me or many other Americans, these social circles often have little or no overlap. I go to church with families who don’t live near my neighborhood and vote differently than I do, and I work with an entirely different group of people in another city.
And not only are these social circles separate, but they’re also not of equal importance. Work consumes most of our time, especially over neighborhood. I’d go so far as to wager that neighborhood, our geographic communities, often doesn’t mean terribly much, certainly not in comparison to the other communities.
Yes, of course we care about where we live. So much so, that if we don’t like where we live and we have the means, we move to someplace more desirable.
Which is precisely the point. Before WWII, our communities frequently were not so segmented. You worked in the city you were born in, often with individuals who voted like you and were your neighbors and fellow worshipers. Being a Bostonian or an Angeleno meant more than living in those cities; it meant your family and life-long friends were from there too, knew you, acted somewhat like you. And because this was your life — not just the land but the people and the work and the society — a community newspaper mattered because it covered all these things.
Today, we are more occupiers than members of the physical communities in which we live. Of course this is a generalization. But it crudely characterizes our relationship to our neighborhoods. We have far more affinity to those who approach politics the same way we do, which explains not just the pervasiveness of social media but also the success of left- and right-leaning media, than we have towards those who live to our left and right.
And not only do we care more about these other communities — about our companies and our political and religious tribes — but because these communities tend to be separate, we often don’t have the bandwidth to care about both these and our geographic communities at the same time. I toss my local newspaper not because I don’t care about my city, but because I have limited time and choose to prioritize national news and work and family.
Is there a way to reverse this trend, to revive local newspapers? Maybe. The decline in the percentage of Americans relocating within the United States, a trend that has continued since the 1950’s, might ironically cause more of us to care about what is happening where we live, if only because we don’t see a way out.
But I’m skeptical. If community is ultimately about creating friendship circles and a social safety net, then I’m not sure we go back to the golden age of local news, so long as we have the technical means to build virtual communities across other dimensions. Even for those of us who can’t physically move, we’ll still feel more affinity for and choose to invest more in work and faith and political communities that are not tethered to our neighborhoods.
And maybe that’s okay. Because in this post-local newspaper world, the physical will still matter to someone. Although the residents of a city may not particularly care about town hall, the company that has an office building does, as does the church that is interested in constructing a new building, and the bicycle club that cares about sustainable transit. If these communities are vibrant, maybe they’ll keep watch on city hall, will look out for the city in the same way that residents used to.
At least we can hope.
