A journalism professor who has roots in Pekin and Peoria says journalists must do more than cover the news; they must actively build community for local news outlets to survive in a challenging world.
Nick Mathews went to work for the Pekin Daily Times at age 16. His parents met while working there. Mathews had stops at the Peoria Journal Star and Decatur Herald and Review. He's now teaching at the University of Missouri and is the author of the new book Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America. That’s just out from the University of Illinois Press.
Mathews used dozens of in-depth ethnographic interviews to write the book. He said that approach provides a richness of information that study numbers do not offer.
For instance, he chronicled the closure of the Carolina Progress newspaper just a few weeks shy of its 100th birthday. It was a paper deeply ingrained in its community. And that meant a lot to residents.
In a Sound Ideas interview, Mathews said, “Public officials themselves lamented the closure of the news organization, and they did so because they knew and understood the news organization served as a liaison between the public officials and the community. ...Without that voice, for them, it was more of a challenge to actually connect with the people in the community who they represent.”
He said the loss of the paper also changed how elected officials viewed their jobs. They became more intentional building relationships with community members.
“A lot of other folks are using social media as a direct connection to their audiences. It becomes more of a challenge. It gets into issues of misinformation, and the job of journalists to really hold public or hold public officials accountable too, comes into question in that space,” said Mathews.
In the book, Mathews wrote that “without exerting the informational labor of going to websites, attending meetings, and so on, people rely on the informational labor of others. In other words, what they know about their community in a news desert, or a place where a local news outlet is closed, hinges on who they know in their community, highlighting the outsized influence of their personal networks.”
'News desert' classifications lack nuance
Mathews said the term "news desert" is somewhat misleading because it is a simplistic assessment of the presence or absence of a news outlet, measured by county.
“That offers no nuance. It tells us nothing about the relevance of local news…. and what that really means, and how a community feels a connection, if at all, to the news organization in their community,” said Mathews.
Even when there is a news outlet, Mathews said, residents may not feel like it’s local.
“In many ways, that's because of corporate ownership from afar, and the journalists don't live from afar. Too often, the journalism itself is also about areas outside their county,” said Mathews.
A Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism study showed Illinois has lost 36% of its newspapers, or 232 outlets, since 2005. More than a third of all U.S. newspapers have closed in that time. Mathews argued it could effectively be worse than that.
“A Gannett, a Lee… the top five or six news organization companies in the United States are at least partially owned by hedge funds. A hedge fund does not care about a community. A hedge fund purely cares about profit,” said Mathews. “I certainly spent a lot of time in rural Virginia where they felt like, even though they had a news organization in their community, they lived in a news desert.
He said one of his bigger concerns is about the sense of community in rural areas that lose news outlets. He said shaping community identity becomes more difficult and requires people to work together. He said news organizations must do more than simply deliver the news and information of their communities, particularly in rural communities. They must facilitate community.
His example comes from Newton, Kansas.
“A husband-and-wife team who own the Harvey County Now there, do such a phenomenal job. They host a blues and brews barbecue festival. They host events at their newspaper. They bring people together in this community of only about 10,000 people,” he said.
Historically, news organizations used to do more of that, he said, but that outreach has ebbed with ownership consolidation and corporatization.
“It needs to be a more conscious decision about how to actually connect with the community,” said Mathews.
Every Friday night the Harvey County Now hosts an event with snacks and drinks. It’s an opportunity to meet the audience, actual and potential, and to listen.
“One of the questions the husband wife team asks… What is our community missing? What does the community not have? For them, the community didn't have a young professionals’ network that gathered in any way. They built that. The community didn't necessarily have a signature summer event of any sort. This is the eighth year they've done this,” said Mathews.
He acknowledged that’s a heavy lift for institutions with few workers but said it’s worth it to build more relationships with the people in the community.
“Not the stakeholders of their community, but just the people. Listen to them, talk to them, get to know them and understand what's really going on in the community."
Mathews did not write about newspaper consolidation, layoffs and closures in Bloomington-Normal and Peoria but said it echoes what he saw in rural America.
“Especially from the robustness of the media ecosystems when I was a child in the area to what they are now, is very much similar to what I see in Virginia,” said Mathews.
For Mathews, hyper-localism and audience engagement are two pillars of sustainability for news organizations. The economics of it are less certain.
“It's heartbreaking to say this, but not every community wants a newspaper. Not every community wants a news organization. If a community wants one and collectively believes in the significance of journalism, there are finances for it there."
He said he sees that in available advertising dollars, in philanthropy and in a nonprofit model.
