Watching the comment storm created by the HopNews articles on Town Meeting and a pair of Ashley Fogg op-eds has caused me to consider the role of journalism in our community, and specifically the declining coverage of local politics.

Classified Ads: The Golden Goose of Newsrooms

Classified ads first appeared in newspapers around 1704. They provided consumers with a way to browse local deals, typically listed by private sellers. For readers like me, browsing the classifieds over a cup of coffee was a Sunday ritual. I enjoyed seeing the eclectic things people were selling, browsing various job listings, and dreaming about owning a cooler car than the beat up Nova I was driving. 

By the year 2000, classified ad revenue peaked at $19.6 billion, constituting 40% of newspaper industry ad revenue. But by 2012 it had dropped to just $4.6 billion, a 77% decline over twelve years.

This is because Craigslist (and the Internet in general) disrupted this revenue pattern. In the early 2000’s, with classified ad sales falling off a cliff, newsrooms started consolidating and cutting staff. 

From 2005 – 2021, about 2,200 local print newspapers closed in the US. Between 2008 and 2020 the number of newspaper journalists was halved. 

With newsrooms and ad revenue rapidly shrinking, publishers were less financially viable, leaving them vulnerable. Some went up for sale and others went out of business. My hometown of Seattle had two daily papers – The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or the P-I, as we called it). For decades they competed fiercely, but the P-I lost and went to a bare-bones online version in 2009. Locally, the Upton/Mendon Town Crier disappeared last year and the Holliston Reporter will likely cease operation in August.

With the market in turmoil, Gannett Company, which owned USA Today and many others, saw an opportunity to purchase these weakened operations. Gannett now owns more than 100 dailies and 1,000 weekly newspapers. They own 93 newspapers in Massachusetts, including the Worcester Telegram, Milford Daily News, MetroWest Daily News, and the Grafton News.

Part of the Gannett playbook is to consolidate newsrooms to cut costs. Instead of maintaining a local reporter in each town they hire a reporter/editor to cover a region. Some may remember when the MetroWest Daily News had a Hopkinton-based reporter.

The economics of local journalism simply don’t work anymore. Newsrooms like the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, who initially were free in digital version, are now behind pay walls. Nearly all of the Gannett papers are behind a pay wall.

Effect on Politics

State and local political coverage was driven by newsrooms that were funded by classified ad revenue. The resultant effect of this consolidation is less coverage of local issues and more coverage of national issues. There is less coverage of local stories because there are fewer local reporters to write them.

What kinds of stories used to be covered? Road work, town meetings, school board issues, and local elections. The sometimes boring but often critically important stuff. We are fortunate in this town to still have the Hopkinton Independent covering those topics in detail. Mary Ellen and Jerry admirably service this community.

I have interviewed many job applicants over the past decade, and there is one question I always ask: What is wrong with this country? Typically this is met with a long pause (presumably while the candidate calculates how likely they are to offend me with their answer) and then invariably they say something like “No one listens to each other anymore”.

It’s true. There is a divisive discourse, a hyper-partisanship, like we have never seen in the history of this country. And that’s because there are only two dominant national narratives. Increasingly voters are participating in culture wars, even when those issues don’t present to them locally. For example, there are not very many people that identify as “transgender” in Iowa, but there are many voters in Iowa that vote based on where a politician falls on issues that affect trans healthcare.

State and local politicians, who once were free to advocate for the issues that their constituencies cared most deeply about, are now forced to align with the national narrative to receive the financial support of their national parties. Ron DeSantis in Florida is one such example of this. Clearly he has presidential aspirations, and to attract the broader donor base, he has very publicly taken on Disney. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is similarly ambitious. He has embraced many of the left-wing’s culture war ideas in the hopes that he will become a viable presidential candidate. The dominant national narrative now plays out across local politicians too. How this will effect our democracy long-term remains to be seen.

Fortunately, a movement to support local journalism seems to be gaining traction. High net-worth individuals, such as Lauren Powell Jobs (widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs) and several foundations are increasingly investing in smaller news organizations. “I actually think that we should think about [local journalism] as a civic good, a public good that should be supported by public and private entities,” Powell Jobs told Recode’s Kara Swisher in 2019. To that end, Hopkinton voters did their part in approving continued funding for HCAM-TV at Town Meeting.

I think Josh Stearns, the director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund, put it best. 

“Journalism is a foundation for everything else you care about,” he said. “For some people there’s a deep-seated concern about their community being informed. They look at their local newspaper and see it crumbling, falling apart or shrinking and it concerns them. They don’t know where they’re going to get trusted information. For some, that’s their motivation, but for many, media is the secondary issue. Whether you care about climate change or reproductive rights or whatever it might be, making sure there is really good journalism about those things is critically important.”