Local news faces more challenges amid COVID-19
HAlready in a precipitous decline, the COVID-19 crisis has dealt another blow to the shaky nancial status of local newspapers, said former Washington Post ombudsman and Rappahannock resident Andy Alexander.
“In the previous 15 years, more than 2000 newspapers closed across the country,” Alexander, a one time Washington bureau chief of a major newspaper chain, told 30 Rapp at Home members in a Tuesday videoconference.
“And the pace even before the [current] economic meltdown was accelerating. We are in a period of tremendous frantic acceleration of experimentation on what to do to save local news. In my view, it’s a race against time to come up with solutions before local outlets go under.”
He de ned local news outlets as “everything from major dailies — like in Denver or Richmond or Cleveland — down to the little Rappahannock News that serves our community in rural Virginia.”
Alexander described these traditional newspapers and others as “editorially independent, non-partisan news sources that are not spouting an ideology.”
“Journalists are not enemies of the state or fake news,” he said. “They are true heroes.”
Reasons for the decline of newspapers, he said, range from lost revenue in an age of free internet sites to rising costs of printing to consolidation of large news organizations.
“Since the arrival of coronavirus about 36,000 employees of news organizations have been furloughed or laid o or their pay reduced and that has accelerated,” he said. “Last week alone, more than 500 journalists lost their jobs.”
All of which impacts the community in myriad ways.
“Studies show that when you lose a local newspaper, voter participation, and voter registration quickly decline,” the journalist gave as one example. “Fewer people run for o ce. And a higher percentage of incumbents are reelected.”
Some studies show that “when you lose a local paper, local taxes increase, government spending increases, not necessarily because there’s corruption, but because there’s no longer a watchdog.”
The result is more polarization as readers turn to political partisanship to form their choices.
THERE IS HOPE
“There has been an explosion of nonpro t news outlets in recent years,” including locally the Foothills Forum in Rappahannock County, for which Alexander is a journalism advisor.
He described Foothills Forum as “a community funded non-pro t which exists solely to provide quality local reporting on issues of importance to the community.”
And it doesn’t stop there.
Foothills Forum Chair Larry Bud Meyer drew attention, for example, to the organization’s essay contest for Rappahannock middle and high school students and the new feature “Life Interrupted” in the Rappahannock News for kids to express how the COVID-19 crisis has a ected them.