Local news keeps communities informed, preserves democracy
This is the Our View, prepared for by the Editorial Board and should be considered the institutional voice of The Record.
Yesterday, the last reporter at the St. Cloud Times left the newspaper. Abdulla Gaafarelkhalifa was the Times’s final full-time editorial staff member, after the parent company Gannett has laid off or bought out every single reporter over the past six months. Now, there are none: an incredibly sad landmark for the 93-year-old newspaper.
Ganett’s decision begs the question: how will the St. Cloud Times continue to operate with zero full-time editorial staff members? The past couple months have offered a preview: among the last articles by Gaafarelkhalifa, the paper currently has stories from MinnPost, USA Today and the AP Wire featured on its website. However, articles by partner news outlets will not replace the on-the-ground coverage provided by reporters. St. Cloud, a metro area home to 200,000 people, now lacks a well-resourced news organization.
Forum Communications, a Midwest media company, has plans to step in and fill the gap by launching St. Cloud Live next month. Gaafarelkhalifa and former Times reporter Stephanie Dickrell will be joining the free website and weekly newsletter set to cover St. Cloud news, weather, sports and more. That being said, the entire St. Cloud Times situation illuminates a national trend: local newspapers are shutting down at a rate of two per week in the U.S. This trend has, and will continue to have, a disastrous effect on information access and the availability of local coverage.
Small-market newspapers with circulations under 50,000 subscribers are the majority of daily and weekly print newspapers in the country. However, they’re too often left out of conversations about journalism’s future. When you need news, you don’t generally go to your front porch, you go to the New York Times or the Star Tribune. Yet, local papers are both an important community staple and important for education and democracy. They’re important for maintaining base level knowledge about local issues, particularly local government elections and decisions that larger papers won’t pick up.
While large-scale papers have teams dedicated to picking up stories from college and smaller papers, without local journalists to find stories in their communities and stay on the beat, crucial stories will be missed. The decreasing trend of local newspapers also creates news deserts. St. Cloud will no longer be covered by daily or weekly newspapers. Recently, the University of Minnesota announced a creation of an additional medical school, CentraCare St. Cloud Family Medicine Residency. In the absence of the St. Cloud Times, coverage of the new Residency specializing in rural and indigenous care will be delayed.
Democracy thrives when citizens are well informed. Newspapers create a key public forum for respectful public debate—let’s be honest, we know this is a key reason why people read The Record every week. The loss of these platforms disconnects us from shared culture and dialogue that was familiar to past generations and suddenly seems so distant. The Pew Research Center cites that civic engagement is strongly tied to local news habits, particularly when assessing quantity of news intake and interest in news.
Furthermore, trends show that citizens trust local media sources more than national news outlets. Their disappearance makes it harder to keep local and state officials and community stakeholders in check without investigative journalism. As political polarization and declining public trust in institutions continue to impact the United States, the exodus from local news will not counteract these trends. Journalism is an integral part of society—at the national, state and local level. Democracy dies in darkness, and we hope to provide some light.