The online discussion took place on February 22, at 4:00 PM. During the discussion, we explored the main characteristics of media deserts, how necessary research data is collected, which types of local governments are more likely to experience media deserts, and why. Additionally, we delved into the political orientation of people living in these areas. We attempted to compare situations in America and Slovakia and understand how to prevent the emergence of media deserts in the future.
Michal Piško (director of Transparency International Slovakia): The topic of today’s discussion is relevant to us in Slovakia and our organisation. The format of our discussion is going to be very simple. Firstly, we will briefly introduce Sarah and ask her a few questions about her research and the topic of local media deserts from the perspective of Transparency International Slovakia. There will be an opportunity for all of you to ask questions too.
I would like to mention in a few words our pilot project related to the topic of local media deserts that was published over a year ago. We have identified almost a third of the Slovak districts as print media deserts in Slovakia. These regions are hardly covered by almost any independent print media having a significant impact on the quality of local democracy. It furthermore creates space for power misuse, corruption, and spreading of disinformation, which is also why this topic is so important from our point of view.
We are currently trying to expand this map to include more websites, together with local radio and TV stations. But we have to say that the situation has not really improved in these areas. Approximately 10% of the Slovak territory continues to be identified as local media deserts, meaning that no media body covers them. The existing coverage is deemed as insufficient in a third of the Slovak territory. We are very curious to hear about the U.S. experience, where the issue has been addressed for much longer. We would like to compare it to the Slovak one.
A few words about Sarah and her background. Sarah Stonbely received her PhD from the New York University in 2015 in Political Communication, Media, Sociology and Journalism. She has been designing, managing and executing local news related research at the Centre for Cooperative Media for more than 7 years. Her work there has included producing research reports on the effects of changing media ownership, media policy, and local news ecosystem. Sarah’s expertise is in journalism culture and practice, local news ecosystem, media policy, and research methodology. Currently, Sarah is the director of the State of Local News Project in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois, United States. The State of Local News Project is part of the Local News Initiative. Its mission is to sustain journalism and engage citizens.
Now we can start with the discussion itself. But first of all, thank you, Sarah, once more for your time and will to discuss this important topic with us today. Have I missed anything important during this short introduction?
Sarah Stonbely: No, it was perfect! Thank you so much for having me. I am really thrilled to be here and as I was saying just before we started, I am a big fan of Transparency International’s work. I am very happy to be speaking with you today.
Thank you, I am glad to hear that. The pleasure is ours. I would like to begin by asking a bit of a broader question. Could you give us an overview of the media environment in the U.S. and also name the most crucial trends related to this area?
To answer your question, I need to give you a brief history of the project and the work first. It really began with Penny Abernathy’s work more than 15 years ago. She was at the University of North Carolina. She started looking at local journalism at a time when it was not something that many academics were looking at. If anyone was studying journalism, it was rather journalism on the national level based in Washington, DC. Essentially, she started looking at it at a time when people were not really thinking about it and brought this local news crisis to everyone’s attention. In that work, she dates 2005 as the last year of ‘normal’ local media operations. It looked like very healthy profit margins – often 15 percent or higher. It was when local news outlets had a monopoly on local advertising and audience attention. Thus we sort of date all of our data back to 2005. What we have found is that since then, we have seen a lot of very bad changes. We have seen the fragmentation of the audience. Everyone has now more options with the Internet and social media. We have seen the unbundling of what used to be in a local newspaper as you would have the weather, sports scores, and stock market there. Nowadays, there are dedicated outlets for all of those things.
We have seen drastic decrease in revenue from advertising. For legacy local news organisations, more than 80 % of their revenue was usually from print advertising. Because advertising is now digital, it struggles to make up 20 percent of revenue for such an organisation. This is a drastic decrease primarily due to the platforms like Google and Meta taking those profits but that is a whole other conversation. So that has been a huge hit.
Since 2005, we have seen the closure of almost 2,900 newspapers in the U.S. Almost a third of all newspapers have closed and there are roughly 6,000 remaining. We have also seen the loss of approximately 43,000 journalism jobs, which are almost two thirds of the journalism jobs that were around in 2005. We have seen those drastic changes in the macro context and in terms of the numbers as well.
Regarding ownership, we have seen the takeover of a lot of news organisations by hedge funds and corporate chains, which has meant that these properties have become purely for profits. A lot of independent owners often view their journalism outlets as for the public good instead. That in turn has resulted in the rise of ghost newspapers, which Penny identified several years ago. What this basically looks like is a newspaper chain like Gannett or Alden in the U. S. will buy several newspapers that are adjacent to each other in different regions. They will fire all of the local reporters and the ad salespeople. While the newspaper is technically still around, the content is repurposed from regional to multiregional, national, or press releases. Till there is very little original reporting left that is about the community to which it is supposed to serve. That would be the overview of how drastically things have changed in recent years.
It sounds as a real crisis. I would say that it has been dramatically shrinking the media space. Have the national media been affected equally to local media from your perspective?
Local media are certainly more vulnerable. We have seen that the main national U.S. outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, etc. have been able to become profitable from subscriptions and audience revenue. We have seen that they have done a very good job of maintaining the numbers of journalists, of maintaining their ability to do investigative journalism, and leveraging the audience size that they have. It is not only national but often international as well. So those outlets are fine. It is really the local news outlets that are struggling the most because they have a defined area of interest. They have a community or region that they serve that is bounded by geographic boundaries in a way. Then there is a limited number of audience as well as businesses that might advertise. What that has enabled is actually looking at different solutions, such as philanthropy, public funding, and that sort of thing. Based on all that, there is a much bigger crisis at the local level than the national.
But if I understand it correctly, there are still hundreds of local media in the U.S. and some of them quite influential ones. Can we talk a little bit about their quality? What is their journalists’ background? Do they also have space for investigative journalism? What would you say is the overall state of local media in the U.S.?
You are right. It is a good point. There are very good regional newspapers, for instance, in Seattle, on the West Coast, in Washington, Minneapolis, and the middle of the country. There are some in Florida too. As I said before, there are approximately 6,000 local newspapers throughout the country. That is still a solid number of outlets doing very important work. They go to local government meetings. They go to school board meetings. They report on economic development and hold people accountable. The watchdog function is especially important.
We have increasingly seen academic research that has looked at towns and communities that have lost their newspapers. They have shown that there is a direct causal relationship between the increase in local corruption when a newspaper disappears. Voter turnout tends to be lower when a newspaper disappears. There tend to be more incumbents due to less knowledge about candidates, so people keep getting re-elected rather than new people entering into the field. All sorts of effects have been identified. I am happy to share a bunch of links and resources related to this afterwards.
You mentioned 6,000 local media, which are still active. That is a huge number from the perspective of a small country like ours. But the U.S. is a huge country so there could be some local and regional media deserts as well. Can you tell us something about these areas? How big is this of a problem?
Yes, certainly. There are roughly 3,100 U.S. counties that might be the equivalent to municipalities in Slovakia. We have found that we have just over 200 counties, which have no local news outlets. Those are true news deserts. Another 1,500 have only one outlet. I mean, counties can be very large areas and roughly half of the country has only one outlet serving it. Generally, that is insufficient. I think I saw in your study that that one is generally pretty good but the municipalities are smaller. The measurement is slightly different, which is an interesting methodological difference.
The counties that are news deserts have a lot of things in common. For example, they have a lower average household income and educational attainment. They have a higher-than-average percentage of the population that is in poverty. Their median age is higher. They are often less densely populated and more rural. Then they have less access to broadband internet. These are some of the clear structural characteristics of news deserts, which differ from places that have a lot of robust local news.
Is it based on your observation or are these characteristics somehow related to the media deserts creation?
It is statistically related. When we look at the areas that have no local journalism, these are the characteristics that recur over and over again. In contrast, the places where we find robust news oases, defined by having 10 or more outlets, it is the converse. They are largely very wealthy communities often urban or suburban. They have high average educational attainment and tend to be a little bit younger – all the things that are the opposite of what we find with news deserts.
One more technical question. Are you only referring to print media or also some online portals, TV stations, radio stations, or this other type of media?
The sources we looked at for the 2023 report were print media, digital native, then public media. In the U.S., there is a very small number of public funded media. There is PBS, which are television stations, and then NPR, which are radio stations, both public funded. There are also thousands of ethnic media outlets in the U. S. Those are the four categories that we looked at for the 2023 report to determine and identify the news deserts and oases.
What would you say is the role of print media in this environment? Because as I mentioned before, here in Slovakia, we try to extend our research also to online media in terms of TV and radio station. We have seen that mostly new online media, which do not have a print version, are in some regions even more active in comparison with traditional print media.
Yes, we see the same thing. We can see that there are some excellent digital native startups and outlets that have now been around for 10+ years. You have probably heard of ProPublica. That is a national outlet. There is a lot of really good digital media outlets. I will get to the print in a second. The problem is that there tends to be a high turnover rate for the digital outlets. We think that there are roughly 550 digital media outlets across the country and approximately 20 open and 20 close every year. They are harder to count because there is not one repository for all of them. It would seem that they cannot open fast enough and be sustainable long enough to fill the voids that are left by the closure of the print outlets. Even now, the print newspapers tend to be the newsrooms that provide the most local original reporting that many of the other outlets simply pick up and amplify. Especially radio and television, they are very often taking reporting from a print newspaper, less so for the digital ones, but that is still the case. The print newspapers are really like the cornerstone outlets of the local media ecosystems.
In Slovakia, we also have so-called alternative media. We call them alternative media because they spread disinformation, they are very much biased, and some of them spread pro-Russian narratives among other things. Some of them are specifically focused on regions. Do you have also this kind of alternative media on the local level?
We do and it is a huge problem. To be honest, we have not really gotten into looking at that. It is a whole other level of outlets. The Columbia University did a great study, which has been updated recently. They call them pink slime outlets. A lot of them are funded by countries outside of the U.S. and spread a lot of disinformation. Oftentimes, they are specifically made to look exactly like legitimate news outlets.
I was just at a conference recently, where someone was talking about how these digital outlets will open in communities and they will even take a similar name to the newspaper that has just closed. They will pretend to be legitimate. They will have a headline, they will have a byline, they will look and sound like a legitimate news outlet. But then the content is just complete garbage. It is a huge problem but we have not looked at in our report.
Can you see any problems related to the ownership of local media from the perspective of their bias or something like that?
Right. In the U.S., we do not have the equivalent of the local government owned outlets. So, in general, we do not have political affiliation with the local outlets. They will try to present both sides if there is a political article or something like that. Not the pink slime outlets though. Nevertheless, ownership does not make a difference. It has to do more with the economics in this country of the outlets in this country. The independently owned outlets still tend to be very much driven by the idea of journalism as a public good and journalism serving a community rather than providing profits for the owners. While they need to be profitable and sustainable because the people who run them and journalists need to be paid, they are not really in it for the money. However, we do see, sadly, that eight counties became news deserts last year. Four in Texas and four in Tennessee. All of those outlets that closed were newspapers that were independently owned. It is still very difficult to be an independently owned outlet and be sustainable and profitable too.
It is a little bit different from the European and especially the central European experience. In Slovakia, in some regions, the space of traditional media is occupied by, let’s say, municipal media. They are something like weekly or monthly outlets or newsletters financed by the local administration or municipality, you know. So, obviously, it is quite a problem in terms of the public oversight because they tend to be biased. When they are financed by the municipalities themselves, they often promote local mayors and MPs. Then they are not independent and critical, for example. But for many people, it is a relevant source of information not thinking about their bias and a lack of critical thinking.
The second type of media, which is quite frequent is something like free media distributed to the P.O. box that are based on advertisement. They are distributed to every household in the region for free. They can contribute towards the spread of some problematic narratives. Their goal is usually not critical journalism or public oversight. They follow their commercial interests instead. Thus these two types of media somehow deform the environment of local journalism in Slovakia. What is your opinion on that? Can it be compared to the U.S. environment?
I would say that everything you are describing happens in the U.S. but at the national news level. We have Fox News, which is a Rupert Murdoch owned outlet that has been extremely successful on the conservative side. Tons of misinformation and giving oxygen to politicians, who are spreading lies, that sort of thing. Primarily, the Donald Trump’s big lie that he won the election in 2020. We would certainly have that sort of bias and that whole scene at the national level. Then there are outlets on the left as well.
But I was thinking about what you said and it actually is coming to the local level to some extent. There is a television company called Sinclair that is buying up a lot of local television stations and promoting conservative viewpoints, together with the Republican viewpoints. Yet we have not really seen a liberal or democratic equivalent of that. Then we have local outlets funded by people with political interests or advocacy organisations, among others. We always try to look at who is the owner and where is the money coming from? So it does happen in the U. S., it is just not as much of a widespread practice to have the local government have its own channel.
My point was that, of course, there are some local media deserts with no independent media, which are important for public oversight, controlling of local democracy, and so on. But in some regions, it is even worse as there are no independent media. There are only biased media deforming the environment. Maybe it is even worse in these regions with no independent alternatives.
I think we talk about that a little bit in the report as well. Where in these news deserts or in counties where there is very little access to local news, people will turn to national news, which is much more partisan. It is similar to what you are saying. When they do not have any local sources, they will look at the national outlets. Those are going to be much more political, much more partisan, and in that way, it sort of distorts the political field. Recently, there was a story about something that came up in the 2022 midterm elections. There was the critical race theory and some of the conservative talking points, and people would show up at their local school board meetings talking about these issues that the national politicians had been using to get people worked up, when it had nothing to do with what was happening at their local level. We certainly do see that in the U. S. as well.
Could you explain to us what is a media desert from your perspective? What is the impact of it on the local democracy in these regions? Any negative consequences?
We define news deserts as communities that have very limited access to independent news and information about the local institutions on which they rely to live their lives and participate in their communities and democracy. Basically, it will either be a news desert that has no local journalism, or it might be one outlet that is covering several regions. It definitely impacts people’s lives as they don’t have the information they need. Certainly, in a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, local news outlets were so crucial in talking about what was happening on the local level, with hospitals, and schools. When areas without outlets just did not have that information.
I referred earlier to the academic research that has shown what happens in news deserts. As I said, there are fewer people running for office. In these counties that have no local journalism, we have seen that the costs incurred by local government increase because there is a lack of scrutiny. We have seen lower voter turnout. Greater partisanship as I was just mentioning. Local companies tend to get more violations for violating regulations. There are all sorts of ill effects when a community is a news desert.
It is also about misusing of power and ineffective use of public resources, and so on. At the beginning, I also mentioned two different points. I would like to ask if they are relevant from your perspective, and it is a bigger space for corruption and wider spread of disinformation. Are they relevant risks in these regions as well?
Absolutely. There have been, again, several instances that are well documented by research and other journalism. So there was a community in California, I think the name of it was Bell, California, where the local politicians were granting themselves pay increases, and just increasing their own paychecks year after year. As there was no local journalism in that community, no one knew what was happening. Then someone finally realised it and it became this huge national story because it really showed what happens when you do not have local journalists paying attention.
There are many other examples like trains carrying chemicals and if they derail and spill the chemicals, and there is no local alert system, people will not know about it, they will stay and get sick. Then we had an example of a Congress person from New York named George Santos. I do not know if this story ever made its way onto your radar but he was horribly corrupt, ran for office and ran on a bunch of lies. And there was no journalism to speak of. There was one outlet that was covering him but no one really picked up on it. He eventually got elected and it was shown later that he was just this huge fraud. For certain, there is a ton of space for corruption and misinformation when there is no local journalism.
It is even more important concerning the risk of corruption and we can see that here in Slovakia as well. Slovakia is a relatively small country so this type of research is time-consuming and rather small in comparison with the U.S., I would say. Can you please tell us something about this research? How difficult was it to research such a big country?
It is going to be time consuming no matter where you are because of the challenges. I saw that the Minister of Culture has a list of periodicals, which is good. That is helpful. We have similar lists. As I said, there are more than 3,100 counties in the U.S. and over 50 states. We try to look at the county levels. There are 50 different press associations, which keep lists of newspapers. That is how we gather the lists of newspapers. Some of them put their lists online but some do not. We have to contact each one. We get the digital outlet lists from two main sources. One of them is the Institute for Nonprofit News, which is a national organisation, and the other is the Local Independent Online News organisation (LION). Then we get lists from several other smaller industry organisations. The ethnic media – we are really just starting to build our resources from those. In 2020, we had a list that came from a university, which had done a national survey of ethnic media including around a thousand ethnic media outlets. We built on that. Regarding public media, we get a list of them from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio sources.
Overall, we look at different industry organisations. It is a lot of different sources of information coming together plus each list has to be cleaned and de-duplicated. We have an army of student workers. We have like seven or eight of them helping us with all this and it takes us months and months to put such a list together. We also have to verify to the best of our ability that they have actual journalists working at those outlets and are not a ghost newspaper or something like that, then where the funding is coming from so that it is not just a political organisation. We try to look at the quality of the content as well. Are they covering government meetings? Are they writing about the town that they say they are covering? It is quite an extensive process indeed. Not to mention doing the analysis and putting together the maps as you all know. It is a ton of work and it takes a team.
I can imagine. Could you describe to us the final output of this research? Where can it be found if our participants are interested in viewing it?
Absolutely. I would be happy to share a bunch of links afterwards. It is localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu but, again, I will share the link after. The State of Local News Report is prominently featured there as well as the map. There are a bunch of different elements. The online report features a couple different maps, one of which is a watch list map. I talked earlier about the characteristics of news deserts, such as lower household income, higher average age, and higher percentage of people in poverty, etc. We looked at the 1,500 counties that have only one outlet and within those, we looked at which counties have structural characteristics similar to what are already news deserts. Turns out that within the 1,500, there are another 228 counties that we put on a watch list. That map is there basically saying that we need to pay special attention to these counties that only have one outlet left but already have structural characteristics very similar to news deserts.
Another map we have is a bright spots map, which is a new feature this year. This is looking at different layers, one of which shows all the digital startups since 2010. I believe it is 2010 or maybe 2020. Next, we show 17 different outlets from around the country that are doing something interesting in terms of their business model to be sustainable. It basically consists of interviews and profiles of 17 different outlets that are doing something we think is worthy of maybe copying or at least trying to think about how it might be duplicated elsewhere. Then we have a bunch of case studies, and we have state level maps and national maps. There is really a whole number of components to look at.
It sounds very impressive. We are very much interested in that. Do you intend to update it on a regular basis or what is your approach?
Yes, it is updated every year. We would like to provide updates on a quarterly basis. We are thinking about ways to do it but are unsure if we are going to because it is really the annual update. It just takes a lot of resources and time to go through all those different lists and figure out what is closed and what is opened, and what is merged and what is under new ownership, and so on.
You mentioned a couple of times the term ethnic media. Can you tell us more about it? In Slovakia, we have Hungarian-speaking media, for example, because we have a Hungarian minority. Is it something similar or totally different?
I think it is similar to your Hungarian media. These are the media outlets of diaspora communities in the United States that are from elsewhere. Often English is not their first language. The largest percentage of ethnic media in the U.S. are Hispanic and Latino because we have so many immigrants from Spanish speaking countries from all over the world, but mostly from Central and South America. So roughly 20 percent of all ethnic media is Hispanic or Latino. Those outlets are based in communities where the majority of the population is Hispanic or Latino. They speak Spanish and they cater very closely to those communities? They serve those communities. They know their communities. They often hold events and rely on the businesses in town to support them. We saw a lot of closures after the pandemic as the businesses that were supporting those outlets closed due to the pandemic. They lost all their advertising and then the news outlets had to close. We have ethnic media outlets representing dozens of other ethnic communities in the U.S. as well. There are actually a lot of Polish. I do not know about Slovakian but Hungarian as well, I believe, especially in New Jersey where I am sitting now. Also Italian, Filipino, all sorts of different, which is what we mean by ethnic media outlets.
Maybe in Chicago because there is a strong Slovak community if I’m not mistaken.
Yes, you are right. There is a Ukrainian population as well.
Were you able to do a content analysis of these ethnic media outlets as it can be quite difficult in foreign languages?
That is a great question. A content analysis is like the next step, not only for ethnic media but for all of the media we look at. It would be so valuable to know at scale what the content is about of these outlets. Because we can say like this is where they are located and what their business model is. This is who owns them and how many journalists they have. But the content is really important. But that is something that we have not really been able to figure out how to do at scale. There are certainly more tools now, such as different advances in computer science and coding, scraping, and obviously the AI, so we’re working on it. There would be definitely an extra layer of challenge for ethnic media. Although the translation software is pretty good so we would probably just try to use translation software to translate it into English and then run the code on the content. But that is the natural next step for sure. That is something we have really wanted to do.
Same here. We have not been able to provide a content analysis. We have only focused on the quantity of the articles related with individual communities or districts but have been unable to evaluate the quality of the articles or journalism in general so far. It is simply too time-consuming and would be another layer, another challenge.
Exactly.
Is there any viable solution for mitigation of these risks for the quality of local democracy’s sake? Are there any meaningful incentives for local media in the U.S.? What would be the solution for this crisis?
We do see some solutions emerging. I think that it is going to require a combination of solutions to get local journalism back where it was before. Because we do not presume that the money is going to come back from advertising revenue. It requires a combination of solutions. We have a new consortium of philanthropies that just pledged 500 million dollars to distribute around to local news organisations in the country. It sounds like a lot of money but is actually not that much once you start giving it away to all the places that need it. Certainly, it is very expensive to start a news organisation from scratch, hire journalists, etc. That is philanthropy, then there is public funding or public policy. The U.S. is far behind a lot of our friends around the world in terms of public funding for journalism. While we do have some public media, we definitely do not have the level of public funding that many European countries have, for example.
There is actually a momentum at the state level and even at the city level. Probably not at the federal level because of how dysfunctional and partisan our politics are. But at the state and city level, we have been seeing a lot of great ideas and I can give you some specific examples. One of them would be tax incentives to organisations for hiring journalists. Next would be vouchers given directly to people to buy subscriptions of local news organisations. It means that the state would basically buy their subscription and people get to choose whichever news outlet they want. Then tax refunds to small businesses that advertise in local outlets to encourage more advertising. There is a lot of government advertising that goes on around COVID-19, censuses, and elections to name a few. The government places ads in journalism outlets and a lot of times they will just go to the biggest outlet because that is easiest. In reaction to it, cities like Chicago and New York City have now mandated that 50 per cent of local government advertising needs to go to community and ethnic media outlets, for example, which gives them a lifeline – a nice little source of income that is steady.
There is a very interesting project in California that funds fellowships and loan forgiveness for students just out of journalism school because oftentimes the problem is that young journalists do not want to go to these rural places and smaller towns. They want to go to the big cities or more prestigious outlets. So incentivising people who might not otherwise go to serve at these local very small rural outlets for two or five years is another practice. Finally, help for the printing presses. Printing has become so expensive. A lot of printing presses have shut down. It has been a huge problem. Then increasing broadband access. There are a lot of areas of the country, especially rural areas, but sometimes pockets of cities and urban areas that do not have good internet access. That is another way to help local news organisations as well.
You have provided many great ideas and all of them could be discussed at length. But I would like to ask about one in particular. With public advertising, public administration can use it as some sort of leverage to control them and make them less critical towards public institutions or so. Is it a risky tool or not?
That is a concern for sure. The programmes that have been put in place are very carefully constructed so that there is a strong intermediary. One of the things that has to be in place in order for that specific type of programme to work would be a journalism adjacent support organisation or university. It needs to have a centre that can act as an intermediary between the government funding and the local news organisations. Moreover, the government cannot pick and choose which ones they want. There is a list that everyone agrees on and then the advertising just goes to all of them. So that there is no possibility for them to pick and choose because exactly, like you say, that would be very problematic.
Unfortunately, we have this type of negative experience here in Slovakia. Now, I will give the floor to our participants. I can see some questions. This one has been received directly: ‘’In addition to the pink slime outlets that you have already mentioned, if you have any insight into the slip over effect, readership of online foreign media in Slovakia, could you please comment on that?’’
Sarah: Slip over effect?
Daniela: Hi, Daniela here. Spillover effect if what i meant. The question was more for you, Michal. I also think it has been answered previously with the Mexico example. So thanks for that.
Sarah: If you are talking about disinformation polluting the mainstream or the other journalists, the problem is that these pink slime outlets will look perfectly legitimate. They will often base their stories on something that actually happened for it to be believable just enough. What sometimes happens is that a local outlet, if they are under-resourced and they have a journalist looking around for stories or content, they will pick it up. It can be rater insidious how this misinformation gets into the narrative.
Michal: I can see more questions. ‘’How about helping local media with volunteers, bloggers, or NGOs running a news portal without adverts perhaps using crowdfunding?’’
Sarah: This is something I have looked at closely as well. In the U. S., it mostly goes under the banner of collaboration. We talk extensively about local news outlets collaborating together on a story. For instance, they decide that they want to cover the upcoming local elections and will put their resources together so that they can look at all the angles of this event. They will share all the content that they produce. Likewise, there are many instances of collaborations between journalism organisations and NGOs. It might be not as frequent in the U. S. as elsewhere because there is this perhaps outdated reluctance to partner with organisations outside of the journalism fields, who can provide rather valuable resources in terms of investigations and stuff like that. So circling back to the question, that is a great suggestion because collaboration is one of the ways that local news organisations become sustainable again for sure.
Michal: Perfect. Another question: ‘’Is there any state program supporting local media?
Sarah: Yes and I will also include it as one of the links, which you can hopefully share out to everyone who is here. To answer your question, there are a few, the one I would mention is in New Jersey, which is where I live. It is the only state of the 50 in the country that has a civic information consortium. Basically, this organisation gets anywhere between 500,000 and 2 million dollars a year to redistribute to local news organisations around the state. It has been really successful. It is in its fifth year now and keeps providing a huge lifeline to these small organisations that are serving communities around the state. What is so nice about it is that it is very close to the ground. It knows the people and it knows the work. Therefore, it is very able to choose partners granting or grantees that will make a difference for their communities.
Michal: I can see one broader question. ‘’How do you see the future of local journalism?”
Sarah: I am optimistic. I am kind of a default optimist. I am hopeful that it will turn around. I saw this in your report as well but one of the things that is so important is to educate the public about how much it costs to produce local journalism, the importance of local journalism as a civic and public good, and then how much money can be saved. There is a great book by Jay Hamilton called Democracy’s Detectives, where he talks about how for every one dollar that is put into local investigative journalism, it saves taxpayers around a hundred dollars because it helps government run well and efficiently. It helps tax money be spent well too. There are plenty of benefits of having a quality local journalism. I just hope it happens quickly enough as we are losing more than we are gaining at this point.
Michal: Yeah, that is true. Two longer questions from Matúš and Pavol. Could you please ask your questions? Or do you want me to read them?
Pavol: Hi, my question is that I understand that the main issue is the local media business model sustainability. The end industry disrupted the local news due to the fragmentation and they now cannot compete with the main repository. I think that this was also evident during the pandemic. I would like to know what can be done about the business model issue. How can local news update their business model so that they are not so reliant on ads revenue repositories? Furthermore, is there any effective alternative to government and association funding? Because these kinds of actions that come from the government can be done and undone as we have seen in Slovakia with the change of the government. The moment the new government had a chance to revert some of the policies, they did it. Currently, they are trying to hurt the NGOs, for example. So how shall it be done in order to support the development of their core and sustainability?
Sarah: That is a great question and I think you are exactly right about public funding. In the U.S., it is the same. Every year, it needs to be renewed and usually it is, but it also might not be. That is not something to truly rely on as a main revenue source. It is a very difficult question though. Two things: the business model for local journalism in communities that have disposable income, meaning that they have higher household income, where they are rather densely populated, like cities, they have a lot of businesses that want to advertise. You have network effects from having different organisations that can provide or distribute your content. So those communities are going to be okay. There we see that local news is in some cases thriving. You have news oases. You have more than 10 outlets serving these communities and they are fine. It is a combination of audience revenue, advertising, perhaps philanthropy, even public funding, and events. There is a lot of different ways that you can leverage and monetise your content in those types of places.
The real problem, and what is still the big question, is how to monetise news in the communities that are less affluent, that are rural, very sparsely populated, do not have many businesses that are profitable and can actually advertise, do not have local philanthropies, or broadband internet access either. These are the communities that are quite problematic because unless there are donations or philanthropy from outside of the community, or public funding, it is really hard to see where sustainable revenue source can come from.
Michal: There is another question from Pavol: ‘’I see that people are less interested in local government themes, especially after COVID-19. Maybe it is related to younger generations being more focused on different global themes. How is the situation? Are people still interested and engaged?’’
Sarah: Another great question. You can produce all the amazing local journalism, government accountability journalism you want, but if no one is paying attention, what is the point, right? I think that, fortunately/unfortunately, only a small percentage of any community is going to pay attention to those types of things. Stories are sort of all it takes as you do not need a lot of people to be reading them. Actually, there has been a couple of stories, which have shown that even if they just get published and no one reads the stories, it still provides a check on the local government to some extent. At least they know that their actions are being watched. But if there is no demand for those stories, are they going to get funded and published? That might be less tangible.
What I think about that is that some people are just called to be journalists. They simply have that drive. I think we can all here understand that more than most. I assume that there will always be people who will want to be journalists, who want to keep a check on power, make sure that government is running well, and do that work. It could be the most important thing that the work is being done. Then the question is funding it. There has to be some demand but there does not have to be a ton of demand. I know that it might sound as a bit squishy answer, maybe more optimistic than is warranted, but it is an important point.
Pavol: Thanks a lot.
Michal: We are almost out of time but still have maybe one or two more minutes. If you want to ask something, this is the last chance.
Sarah: There is one more in the chat: ‘’Does the U.S. have mandatory rules for disclosing and publishing of government information? Are there any penalties when they fail to do that?’’ Yes, we have a system of legal notices, which is, in fact, one of the revenue streams that local news outlets continue to rely on. It is similar to the government advertising where they pay to place their ads in local outlets. The difference is that legal notices are required to be published. There definitely have been challenges to this requirement by conservative lawmakers, who have tried to get it to be exclusively online so that there is less revenue for outlets that they may not favour or so. It is a requirement though. There have not been any instances where they have refused to release or publish them. A lot of times the local outlets will fight over that privilege because it means also another source of revenue. So that is actually a really good point. Yet it does not provide a huge amount of money.
Pavol: This could be a business model for sustaining local news too. So local government should pay for legal notices in the news.
Sarah: Yeah, and they do pay for them. That is one of the revenue streams for sure. As I said before, some local outlets will even fight over who gets to publish the legal notices because it does provide a source of revenue.
Pavol: Okay, thank you.
Michal: Perfect. It is 5 o’clock so we have to finish this discussion. It was a truly great and interesting discussion and we are very happy about it. Thank you very much for your time spent with us and for sharing all the information. Fingers crossed for local journalism and the quality of local democracy in both the U.S. and Slovakia.
Sarah: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really admire your work and I hope we can all keep in touch. I will send some links after that you can share.
Michal: Yeah. We will share the links with our participants, of course. So have a nice day.
Everyone: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.
We would like to thank, our volunteer Valéria Fajnová, for transcribing the audio recording.
The discussion was financed by the U.S. Embassy in Slovakia as part of the project “Mapping the media environment in Slovak regions and supporting local journalists.”