Pittsburgh’s not yet a news desert, but it could become one
The pervasive decline in American journalism isn’t new, nor is it news. The New York Times reported a couple of years ago that one out of five American newspapers had closed in the past 15 years, and that the number of journalists working for newspapers had dropped by more than half. There’s been wide discussion about the emergence of socalled “news deserts” in our country: places where the absence of credible and comprehensive news and information places a community at risk.
Pittsburgh isn’t a “news desert” — at least not yet — but it’s clear that financial pressures on local news outlets have resulted in fewer reporters on the street, asking the questions for which our communities want answers, and (in the paraphrased words of Finley Peter Dunne) “comforting the afflicted, while afflicting the comfortable.”
While we’ve grown our newsroom significantly at 90.5 WESA (thanks to community support), a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation suggests that in the past 5 years Pittsburgh has lost more than one thousand years of local journalistic experience, as reporters have retired, moved elsewhere, left the industry, or (worse yet) seen their positions eliminated altogether.
We know where this leads. Lost local journalism results in lower civic engagement and higher political polarization. It’s been shown that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote, and when they do, they tend to vote strictly along party lines.
And there are financial impacts as well: economists at Notre Dame and the University of Chicago have shown that when the availability of local journalism declines, the cost of municipal borrowing increases, the number of government employees goes up (as do their wages!), and tax dollars per resident rise as well.
Additionally (and insidiously), when solid, fact-based journalism goes away it tends to be replaced by content from less-noble, lessobjective sources: paid messaging packaged as news, whose goal is to generate profits, often at the expense of the community.
Aristotle tells us that “nature abhors a vacuum” (at least that’s what I recall from physics). The same applies to an information void. Left empty, the void will ultimately be filled by replacement content, often of dubious quality.
This is a price we cannot afford to pay. Original journalism and dedicated journalists are essential elements of a thriving community: one that we cannot afford to lose.
As someone who had been in the news business for almost five decades, I can tell you that it has changed a lot, and my hat’s off to the journalists who do their work here in the ‘Burgh and in communities large and small across the country these days. Make no mistake: the profession of journalist these days is filled with hard work and (often) little recognition.
And while the service these folks provide to our cities and to our nation is essential, by and large they’re underpaid, overworked, and they routinely sacrifice their personal lives (and often their personal safety) in the interest of all of us.
So, it gave me pause when I spotted research this week from the Pew Research Center, based on interviews with nearly 12,000 US-based journalists. They report that nearly three-quarters of the journalists they surveyed associate their profession with negative descriptions, using words like “struggling” and “chaos.”
More than 70% of the journalists surveyed said they thought made-up news and information is a very big problem in America. That’s significantly higher than among average adults in this country. And four out of ten journalists think news organizations are doing a bad job managing or correcting misinformation.
You’d think that in a politically polarized environment like ours, in these days of “fake news,” that given a second chance journalists might well choose another career for themselves: something with a bit more job security, a bit less stress, and a bit more public appreciation for what they do.
But only about one journalist in five says they are dissatisfied with their job and three-quarters say they’re proud of their work. 77% say that if they had a second chance to choose a career for themselves, they would choose journalism again.
As someone honored to lead an organization dedicated to factbased and independent journalism, I’m not just encouraged by these statistics, I’m grateful for them. Grateful to know that the folks who are asking those questions for us every day, standing up for accountability in government, and “afflicting the comfortable” are finding value and selfworth in their profession.
Walter Cronkite once said that “Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was close. I think journalists are what we need to make democracy work.