Why your local paper matters more than ever

As a kid, I remember my mom used to get the Sunday paper. I haven’t seen one in a while, but back then, the Sunday paper was a monstrosity. It came in this huge bundle with the newspaper on the outside, but inside, it was stuffed with advertisements, mailers, coupons and sometimes even a special Sunday-edition magazine of some sort.

I don’t remember these Sunday papers because I loved the news. I’m not judging if you were that kind of kid, but I was not. I remember the Sunday papers because of the comics section. My mom would get upset with me because I would rifle through the paper for the comics section before she had a chance to look at it, leaving her to rearrange the paper back into orderly sections.

Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side. Doonesbury. The Wizard of Id. Curtis. Hagar the Horrible. Peanuts. Big Nate. The Boondocks. I could go on.

In school, we would be assigned newspaper articles to read and summarize for the class. Sometimes we were to read an article about a current event and be ready to offer our opinion. Other times, we had to write reports citing newspaper articles in our corresponding bibliographies. Reading the paper wasn’t so much fun then.

I delivered newspapers in high school. It didn’t last long. I didn’t have the discipline to stick to that early-morning schedule.

Fast forward some 20 years later, I was a law school graduate delivering newspapers. I would get up at 11 p.m. or midnight, eventually make my way to the warehouse, pack up my papers, load them into my car, and finish deliveries by 5:30 a.m. After that, I would head into work at the Cleveland Housing Court. Not a lot of sleep those days.

Fast forward some five or so years after that, and I was a community member of the Editorial Board of the same newspaper I used to deliver. Two years after that, I was granted this column that you are now reading.

I say all of that to explain why the newspaper holds a bit of a special place for me. It’s not the same as someone with a journalism degree, or who has been a reporter for their career, no. But the newspaper is, in a sense, a kind of a through line for me. I feel a sense of nostalgia when I think about newspapers.

When I read about the recent mass layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, I immediately felt a sense of sadness. For some time now, the newspaper industry, with some exceptions, has been on a decline. Readership is declining. Circulation is declining. Advertising is declining.

There’s a lot of blame being fairly placed on the internet. It’s simple economics for most people. The newspaper has a cost. Facebook doesn’t.

What I think people miss is that there is a cost associated with the demise of newspapers. It is a societal cost that we are paying every day. And the cost will only increase as the newspaper industry’s decline continues.

One cost that we are paying is the proliferation of misinformation. The internet, in large part, is a scramble for consumers’ attention. Misinformation gets attention. And it can travel 10 times faster than legitimate news stories. Corrections are rarely as viral. This leaves us in a world where many of us have opinions on issues both large and small rooted in “facts” that are not true. And the way our minds process information to confirm our own biases, it is almost Sisyphean to try to convince people of the truth. This problem is so pervasive and harmful that the World Economic Forum recently named false and misleading information as the top immediate risk to the global economy.

Say what you want about newspapers. Yes, they can have political leanings. Yes, sometimes information is inaccurately reported. But no reasonable person can accurately describe newspapers as bastions of misinformation. Their flaws can be easily explained by the fact that they are organizations comprised of people, who themselves are flawed. Misinformation on the internet is fueled both by the economics of the internet and the worst parts of human behavior that thrive under the shroud of anonymity.

Another cost that we are paying is the loss of information: specifically, local information. Said simply, there is no organization that covers local news and politics like a local newspaper. Local news stations, try as they might, don’t quite cut it. A newspaper covers a lot more ground than your local news at 5 p.m. The economics of the internet don’t incentivize attending City Council committee meetings. “Entertaining” things don’t happen during these meetings. Important things do.

The demise of the newspaper industry would be the demise of the watchdog over local politics. It’s cliché to distrust politicians. But behind this cliché are the numerous instances of newspapers catching politicians in dishonesty and telling us about it. In the case of elected officials being less than truthful or outright dishonest, it is indisputable that what you don’t know can in fact hurt you. Without newspapers, that harm caused by the lack of knowledge, that cost, will only increase.

Lord willing, I may be on this Earth 50 years from now. Will there still be newspapers then? If so, how many?

What will it mean to be an informed citizen 50 years from now? Will that include knowledge of your local representatives and their activities? Part and parcel of politicking is trumpeting oneself, but how will we know whether the words spoken match the actions taken?

What will be considered a “fact” to a generation of children perpetually bombarded with misinformation? Will a fact’s virality equal its truth? Finding the truth is harder in a digital environment. Will they possess the patience (or desire, even) to double-check and triple-check information to verify its accuracy?

Only time will tell the answers to these questions. And I don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect some radical reversal where people go back to getting their news from traditional print. But in the meantime, newspapers will always have at least one subscriber: yours truly.