I grew up in a small town in northwestern Ohio called Findlay. Findlay is a collection of grocery stores, a handful of elementary and middle schools, a high school, and neighborhoods surrounded by corn fields and other towns that are so small they are technically considered villages. That being said, it didn't ever feel like there was much to do. So, growing up I was always very excited to take a trip to the mall. When I was little the mall felt so big. It had a pet store, a movie theater, restaurants, department stores like Sears, Elder-Beerman, J.C. Penney, T.J. Maxx, and the classic Great American Cookies. Then, in August of 2007 a major flood hit Findlay hard. I woke up that morning and saw a man canoeing down my street. Houses and businesses were ruined. Kids at one of the middle schools had to split up between the other two while the water damage was fixed. Before Findlay could recover from the flood, the 2008 Recession resulted in a lot of people losing their jobs.
Sure enough, the mall which had also sustained significant water damage started to shrink. Suddenly, there was no more movie theater. Then the pet store left and eventually most of the restaurants closed their doors for good. The final nail in the coffin for our mall was the rise of online shopping. People didn't need to go to the mall anymore and they would probably have more luck finding what they wanted online than in person. When Sears closed, the town was shocked but now with J.C. Penney, Elder-Beerman, and most recently T.J. Maxx also gone, people are more surprised when a store opens up in the mall. The day Great American Cookies leaves will be the end of an era indeed.
Now, assuming you read the title this blog, you're probably wondering what a mall in rural Ohio has to do with the "collapse of local news." Well, dear reader there are a few interesting parallels between the sorry state of Findlay's mall and the transition from print journalism to digital journalism.
Before shopping online became possible the places people usually bought their clothes from were physical stores that were close to them geographically or through mail-order catalogues. Similarly, the only daily news available to people used to come from their local newspaper, large newspapers like the New York Times, and whichever channel of evening news they chose to watch on TV. These sources of news were regarded as credible and presented one singular truth. Now, when the information we receive updates every time we refresh our social media feeds there is no way to keep up to date with every kind of news.
Not only does this create an almost instantaneous need for journalism, but it directly attacks the kind of quality journalism that may take months of research. Furthermore, digital journalism gives people access to numerous conflicting views with varying degrees of credibility. With the ability to find support for almost any side of an argument online (whether that support be fact or fiction) it can be difficult to navigate what is true and what is fake. Instead of a singular truth from a collection of reliable sources, multiple versions of "the truth" exist on the Internet.
The modern multiplicity of the truth is what philosophers like Zygmunt Bauman call 'liquid modernity.' The truth has more than one meaning and people aren't all paying attention to the same headlines like they used to. Now we choose our own headlines or the algorithms that run Google and our social media choose them for us. This gives us all different versions of the news and, therefore, different definitions of the truth.
What's more is when people receive their news online, they are generally reading this news on participatory platforms, which, was not possible in an analog world. Because people can comment on posts it's possible for the same amount of weight to be given to the comments as to the news article itself. The implications of this are that even when someone reads something from a credible source the opinions from someone anonymously trolling the post may also visible. These comments which are generally unregulated have the potential to be equally as influential as the news story itself. (For more on the power of anonymity check out another one of my blogs here.)
Just as the flood in 2007 marked the beginning of the decline of Findlay's mall, the downpour of information available online is responsible for a sharp decline many sectors of journalism. According to the Pew Research Center, "In 2008, there were about 114,000 newsroom employees – reporters, editors, photographers and videographers – in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and 'other information services'.... By 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs." Not surprisingly, the newspaper sector is being hit the hardest in the news industry. A closer look shows that, "The number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 51% between 2008 and 2019, from about 71,000 workers to 35,000."
These mass-layoffs do not bode well for small newspapers in the rural parts of the country. In fact, some are calling it 'the collapse of local news.' Julie Bosman a writer for the New York Times wrote an article about a report by PEN America describing the decline in the newspaper industry. Bosman writes how "The authors of the report spoke to dozens of journalists, elected officials and activists, who described how cutbacks in local newsrooms have left communities in the dark and have failed to keep public and corporate officials accountable." Without absorbing local news, not only are people kept in the dark about what is going on in their own towns but it is also more difficult for people to feel like they are a part of a community.
Though not always consciously, I have noticed a dramatic shift in the last ten years in how many people back home in get our local newspaper, The Courier, delivered to their house. When I was younger, if my name was mentioned in the newspaper for various reasons, usually sports-related, the next day at school at least a few people would have a copy of the newspaper to give to me "just in case my parents or I wanted an extra copy" (my mom, an avid scrapbooker, always did). However, by the time I was in high school, if I did the same for others, their response was almost always a strange look and then "thanks, I didn't even know I was in this, we don't get the newspaper anymore." With local news outlets struggling to adapt to a digital world where they must compete for people's attention, I'm not sure how much longer newspapers like The Courier will be in circulation.
For better or worse, change is inevitable. Malls empty out and laptops replace newspapers. With both of these outcomes opportunities for a shared experience with others in your community slowly fade away. Trips to the mall with friends and family where you may run into an old acquaintance become almost nonexistent. Without reading the local news one tie to your community is severed. Instead of engaging with their community people do their shopping and read their news individually online which creates a more isolated existence. As more aspects of the world shift from analog digital expect that this kind of isolation will only become more extreme.