I have a big mouth.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or the story behind the Athens County Independent. My disposition for calling out BS comes from my mother, who had a core sense of right and wrong and could (and did) verbally eviscerate brats, brutes and barbarians.
I don’t have Mom’s quickness; I prefer to respond in writing, where I can craft a message and bolster it with facts and data that I often can’t remember on the fly. I’m also one of those women who gets teary under the influence of strong emotions, which tends to undercut an argument.
Lately, I’ve been writing about the local news crisis — more specifically, about responses to said crisis. Over the past two years, I’ve learned a lot about nonprofit and independent news. Some of it is great. Some of it … not so much.
Along the way, I’ve met quite a few like-minded folks — editors, publishers and founders of news organizations like the Independent who are at the forefront of reviving local news for the 21st century. Like me, they worked for newspapers owned by big media chains. Some of them, like me, were fired from their jobs; others left because they didn’t like what their newspapers had become under a big media chain.
We share a conviction that the response to the local news crisis should focus directly on news outlets, not support organizations or companies that develop products and services for journalism. Some of us have taken this message to the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation and other national funders, as well as to associations like the Institute for Nonprofit News.
A few of us, though, are more public with our comments. We see commentators with national platforms talking about the local news crisis and how it should be addressed — but none of those speakers actually work in local news. Some of them have never reported a story; others haven’t worked a local news beat in decades.
And few of them are talking about organizations like the Independent, which serve rural and small markets. When commentators talk about “local news,” they often mean cities and suburbs, not places like Athens County, Ohio — even though rural America is ground zero for the local news crisis. That worries me, and not for purely selfish reasons.
Information is to 21st century infrastructure as telephone and electricity were to the 20th century. The combination of the digital divide and the collapse of local news threatens to leave rural America in the virtual dark, with dire consequences both economic and democratic.
A century ago, it took federal action to bring electricity and telephones to rural areas. Thanks to federal action, we’re crawling toward broadband access. But we still need someone to provide the same stimulus to rural and small-market news, and that ain’t gonna happen unless we start shouting about it.
I’m shouting at the national funders and commentators who will influence the future of local news. I realize that this may come with undesirable consequences; it certainly makes some uncomfortable.
But journalists are supposed to “speak truth to power,” to hold those with power accountable for their words and actions. That must include the powerful in our own industry. We have to ask the hard questions not only of our sources, but also of ourselves.
It’s human nature to react defensively to criticism. The only way to effect change, however, is if we recognize the need to change in the first place. Sometimes, that recognition comes after someone with a big mouth calls it out.
