All news starts out local with area newspaper

I’m watching this apocalyptic movie about the world as we know it screeching to a halt due to the internet being unavailable and possibly hacked. GPS navigation is unresponsive and planes are crashing. TV channels are mere static and no one can call or contact anyone. Animals in the woods are behaving weirdly. It’s mass chaos. No one seems to be in charge.

Then one of the main characters decides to drive into town. Why? To get a newspaper. He thinks the newspaper will tell him what’s happening when no one else can.

And that’s exactly the point of today’s column. This newspaper, the one you are reading right now, is an invaluable resource for the people who live in the community it serves. That’s because it reports on everything local: events, crises, meetings, crimes, funerals, restaurants, sports, schools, cultural offerings, live performances, opinions, churches, and all kinds of other things relevant to its readers. Local reporters are best able to cover local stories.

Bakersfield is lucky to have The Californian. I’m not just saying that because I get to write for it. The U.S. is projected to lose a third of its local newspapers by 2025. The country currently has 6,380 newspapers, of which just 1,230 are daily newspapers. When a community loses its local paper, it is rarely replaced. More than one-fifth of Americans now live in “news deserts,” meaning they have little or no reliable access to local news.

So, friends, please subscribe to your local paper. If we don’t support local news, we risk losing something precious that we take for granted.

Nationally, since 2004, the number of newsroom staff has declined by more than half, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Over 1,000 local publications have lost more than half of their employees in recent years. Without access to local

news outlets, people often rely on social media sites like Facebook groups for their news.

But misinformation abounds on social media, as do various conspiracy theories and other types of disinformation. Americans find that local news publications are a more trusted source, because local reporters come into actual contact with local residents.

Local investigative journalism has unparalleled civic value, in that it uncovers local corruption and demands accountability from local public figures and institutions. Paying for investigative journalists, however, has become more and more problematic as newspaper revenue from advertising has shrunk.

But one good reason to support the local news is that the New York Times, for example, is never going to cover smaller things like the regular City Council meetings in Bakersfield. The only riveting national news from Kern County recently has been named Kevin McCarthy, but this local newspaper has long covered his political antics far more closely and comprehensively (I’m looking at you, Robert Price.)

The guy in the movie I’m watching never makes it into town to buy the newspaper he’s hoping will make sense of the situation. In the context of the plot, his faith in the daily paper is both endearing and naïve.

But then I think of the local paper, the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Md., in June 2018. The staff gathered in a parking garage across the street from their office, because their office had just been shot up by a gunman who killed five of their colleagues.

Those reporters and staffers didn’t want anything, even unthinkable personal tragedy, to stop

“Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

— Thomas Jefferson in 1786.

their presses. They wanted to tell their story. “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow,” they tweeted. And they did.

After the shooting, the Capital Gazette moved to a new location. It now belongs to Tribune Publishing, which closed their Annapolis newsroom permanently in 2020. The paper still operates, but without a physical location.

Many small newspapers struggle before and after being sold to larger news conglomerates. Some no longer publish every day. Some have gone exclusively digital. Some have folded. The financial support of the local community is often not enough to keep local newspapers publishing.

But local paid subscriptions are a start. More robust public support is also a possible solution, although government control is not. A free and independent press is necessary to a functioning democracy.

“Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” said Thomas Jefferson in 1786. And according to John Adams, “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.”

You could say that the founders of the United States hardwired freedom of the press into the U.S. Constitution. It’s up to all of us to keep it going.