Filling News Deserts

Hank Silverberg is a long-time local resident and the newest member of the Advance’s editorial team. He wrote the following piece for his blog, Time to Think.

by Hank Silverberg
CORRESPONDENT

I have begun writing news stories again. This time it’s free-lance work for a local non-profit newspaper serving the small communities around Fredericksburg, Virginia. The online newspaper, the Fredericksburg Advance, is hyper-local, focusing on city councils, boards of supervisors, school boards and other news in local jurisdictions that don’t get the attention of the surrounding big market media in Washington, D.C. or Richmond.  

There is a local newspaper, The Free Lance-Star, but that once-venerable publication may have lost some of its local focus since it was bought out by a large corporation (Berkshire Hathaway), which owns 32 other dailies and a number of weekly papers. This is not a criticism of the The Free Lance-Star. They have to make money to justify their existence.  

Getting back into writing balanced news stories has come easily to me. I did it on the radio and TV for 40 years and frankly, I missed it.  Although this blog remains as always, commentary, my stories in the FXBG Advance are old school. “Who, What, When, Where, Why, How and How Much?” are the focus, but I try to include average people in my stories too, not just the local politicians, political groups or government officials pushing their spin. Serving the people is what journalism is all about.    

There are news deserts across the country these days where you just can’t get local news at all. There’s no one there to report it. The local newspapers have died and the local radio stations stopped doing news. Many of them are now owned by out-of-town corporations who can get syndicated news cheaper than paying their own reporters. There is local TV news if there’s a station close enough. But they only show up for major stories.

A Northwestern University study done last year reports there were 204 counties in the country without any local news coverage at all, and 1,562 counties served with only one remaining local news source, mostly a weekly newspaper. Of those, 228 are on a watch list at high risk of losing that source. Since 2005, the country has lost 2,900 newspapers. There are only 6,000 newspapers in the whole country, and 4,790  are weeklies. 

There are 43,000 fewer journalists working for newspaper since 2005, a 66% drop. 

Outside of major cities, commercial radio has pretty much given up on local radio news. Public Radio has filled the gap in some places, but out of 400 public radio stations, only 213 are currently producing original local journalism. 

For a comparison, when I got into the radio news business in New York’s Hudson Valley in 1977, there were seven commercial radio stations with news, and there were about 15 reporters competing for local news. Today, in that same locale I could only find one commercial station still doing news (WKIP in Poughkeepsie). In Fredericksburg, VA where I live now, only one station does rip-and-read local news, and only in the morning. You can get some local news here from WTOP, the country’s top all-news radio station in D.C. where I used to work. But like the local TV news, they only report this far south of the city if it’s a major story.   

All this creates a news vacuum which can keep the general public ignorant of the decisions that have the biggest impact on their lives. They will get all they need about the presidential race from cable or network television. But finding out what they pay in local taxes and how it’s used, how their kids are educated, what roads need to be fixed and where and when local jobs are being created or eliminated, usually falls to local media. And these days that news source is harder and harder to find in many communities. 

The Washington Post, which writes little about Fredericksburg, is right about one thing. Democracy dies in darkness. 

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