What a community loses when the local paper closes

The first newspapers in North America were established more than 300 years ago in European colonies along the Atlantic coast. In cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Charleston, daily and weekly editions were produced through a painstaking process, printed by hand — block by block, letter by letter — on wooden printing presses the size of John Deere tractors. These newspapers told the stories of local citizens, and crucially, marked the progress of burgeoning colonial governments as they clashed with the monarchy across the pond. From 1775 to 1783, newspapers played a pivotal role in informing colonists of the abuses of the British government, and in effect, fanned the flames of the uprising that became known as the American Revolution.

But let’s imagine a different scenario, one in which the British had foreseen how these institutions would influence the change that was to come, and sought to dismantle them. What would have become of a citizenry left reliant solely on rumor, demagoguery and rare first-hand accounts?

Since the early 2000s, this scenario has become the reality for more and more communities throughout the United States. In a study conducted with the Hussman School of Journalism and Media in Chapel Hill, Penelope Muse Abernathy referred to these places as “news deserts.” In her research, Abernathy found that nearly 1,800 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. “Roughly half of the remaining 7,112 in the country — 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies — are located in small and rural communities. The vast majority — around 5,500 — have a circulation of less than 15,000,” the report reads.

Now the Red River Miner, a weekly published faithfully by local couple Fritz Davis and Kerry Shepherd for just shy of 30 years in the mountains north of Taos, has closed down, too. Red River might not yet be a news desert, but it’s sure to now become a little more arid with a lack of a true local news source.

Speaking with the Taos News this week, Shepherd cited the sharp rise in costs that every operation printing on paper has made note of in recent years, especially during the pandemic. In an article in July of last year, Publishers Weekly noted that just about everything required to get words on the page has become more expensive — from raw materials, freight, to logistics and procurement — “due to pandemic-related restrictions.”

Shepherd compared local papers to institutions as integral as a school, or a church, and we certainly agree with her. A community cannot function freely, a government cannot serve its people transparently, without local journalists and editors dedicating their lives to finding the truth and disseminating it to local residents.

Sure, there are other ways to get your news. There’s your local radio DJ, assuming there’s a station with journalistic interest, and fortunately we have a few very good ones here in Taos County. For better or worse, there’s social media, filled with masses of people often shouting whatever they feel like into cyberspace, many of them presenting their musings as fact, either out of ignorance or with malicious intent. Government agencies using the internet to disseminate their own news is a problem for obvious reasons, which we’ve seen come into sharp relief in the last 10 years. In Russian President Vladimir Putin, or former President Trump, we see how leaders can exploit the fact that everyone now has a microphone to distort the truth. The internet, for all its promise of democratizing us, has become at once a vast resource of valuable knowledge and also a dangerous misinformation machine.

Newspapers, while imperfect, remain the most reliable sources for information for local communities, just like they did three centuries ago — and this one, at least, isn’t going anywhere.

Davis and Shepherd are to be commended for their work over the years, and we hope a new group of local journalists steps in to pick up where they left off, as they did in the early 1990s.

Their paper’s closure is one more reason to pick up your local paper, and be grateful you still have one. Many communities — just like ours — don’t anymore.