The crisis in local journalism has become a crisis of democracy

Worth burning a free WaPo view for the month.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-crisis-in-journalism-has-become-a-crisis-of-democracy/2018/04/11/a908d5fc-2d64-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html?utm_term=.4c147b06b53a

The crisis in local journalism has become a crisis of democracy

By Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott April 11
Steven Waldman is president and co-founder of Report for America. Charles Sennott, co-founder of RFA, is chief executive of the GroundTruth Project.

Shortly after starting as a newspaper reporter in the coal-fields region of eastern Kentucky, Will Wright wrote an alarming article about how residents hadn’t had running water for five days. One woman talked about how her husband’s grandfather could no longer bathe; another said the water hadn’t been safe for a long time: “You turn it on, and it smells like bleach.”

One month later, the man overseeing the troubled water system in that part of Appalachia abruptly retired. Then the state “found” $3.4 million to help fix the problem.

The articles Wright wrote this year for the Lexington Herald-Leader were not months-long investigations. He attended community meetings in this usually under-covered part of the state and interviewed residents. His articles illustrate an often neglected point about journalism today: The key solution is not technology. It’s having more reporters — a lot of them — on the scene.

Journalism faces many problems. Trust in the press is declining. Americans increasingly turn to partisan sources for information.

The editorial staff at the Denver Post took dramatic steps this past weekend to draw attention to the crisis in community journalism. After another round of severe layoffs were announced, the staff published an attack on its owners, arguing that the private investment firm that controls its newspaper chain had no interest in supporting local journalism. An editorial titled “News Matters: Colo. should demand the newspaper it deserves” included a photo of the staff shortly after it won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Aurora, Colo., shooting in 2013 — with more than half of the staff blackened out to indicate that they no longer worked there.

This experience is typical. From 1990 to 2016, the number of newspaper employees in the United States dropped from from 456,300 to about 183,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those numbers understate the decline in many areas. For instance, in the 1990s, the San Jose Mercury News, a major newspaper in Northern California, employed 400 union-represented journalists. But in a recent count by the newspaper union, the number of unionized newsroom staffers in the South Bay for Bay Area News Group, which includes the Mercury News, was down to 41.

The crisis in journalism has turned into a crisis of democracy. In concrete terms, what does that really mean?