By Andrew Sharp, Delaware Journalism Collaborative
To say the newspaper business is struggling is a bit like remarking that Republicans and Democrats don’t always get along.
Both are obvious, but you might not realize they may also be connected — there’s evidence that the disappearance of your local paper could also be hurting your friendship with the family next door. You know, the ones who belong to that other political party and put up obnoxious signs in their yard.
To address problems like these, extensive efforts are underway to revitalize local news coverage, including in Delaware, where the state has recently seen nearly $4 million in philanthropic investment in news. Here’s why journalism advocates say these efforts matter, and how it all might help you and your neighbors understand each other better.
Two Trends
If you have the pleasure (or misfortune) to sit next to an old newspaper editor at a bar, you may find yourself regaled with tales giving the impression that in the old days, dump trucks full of cash used to pull up to the newsroom a few times a week and unload. While these reminiscences might carry just a hint of nostalgia, it’s true that gathering the news used to be good business. Today, a staggering amount of revenue has vanished, along with jobs, leaving communities small and large without many of the people who used to tell their stories.
“Financial instruments, hedge funds, you know, chain news organizations have cut to the bone and then cut further than that,” said Chris Krewson, executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), which offers support to nearly 500 newsrooms ranging from tiny to small but growing.
At the same time, the rancor and division in the U.S. have reached a pitch that is increasingly compared to the time of the Civil War — a conflict in which more than half a million Americans shot each other dead. We’re not there, but on Jan. 6, 2020, a mob did storm the U.S. Capitol building, and people died.
Delaware has seen much the same kind of polarization as other parts of the country.
“To say it’s polarized would be an understatement,” said Peter Kratofilow, former chair of the Western New Castle Region Republican Committee and currently a history teacher and pastor living in Newark. He sees that trend in both parties in Delaware.
There are lots of reasons for polarization, but believe it or not, the fact that your local newspaper has had to make big staff cuts seems to be a contributing factor.
The financial problems of your local newspaper and polarization might not seem obviously connected. Sure, you’re not reading as much about the fire company’s spaghetti dinner or what the mayor said yesterday, but how is that divisive?
“To build empathy, we have to understand other people’s experiences and stories, and how they got to the values and beliefs that they hold. And that is, I believe, a huge part of what local news and information does,” said Allison Levine, founder of the Delaware Local Journalism Initiative. (Important note to readers: LJI is the parent organization of the Delaware Journalism Collaborative, which is reporting this story.)
National news takes us to the level of 375 million people, but local news brings us back to a human-to-human level, Levine said, and that kind of connection is important to building a healthy democracy and reducing polarization.
Restoring local journalism is not about finding new jobs for a bunch of newspaper reporters, Krewson said. “It’s about healthy, democratically informed societies. It’s about making where you live a better place.”
Locals offer a similar take.
“CBS is not going to cover a school referendum in Laurel,” said Bob Wheatley, chairman of the Sussex County Planning and Zoning Commission, who lives in the area. “When you decide on whether or not you want to support a school tax referendum, well, it’s pretty important to know what they’re going to do with the money, what their track record has been … it’s information for decision-making.”
Less News, More Division
The causes of polarization are nuanced, but multiple studies have found a strong correlation between less local news coverage and divided citizens.
Take voting for example. Researchers have found that when local news shrinks, fewer citizens punch a button for multiple parties in the voting booth — picking a GOP representative and a Democratic president, say. This is one sign of polarization.
Also, over the decades as local newspaper numbers plummeted, polarization numbers veered sharply upward.
Just because polarization worsens at the same time as newspapers shrink doesn’t prove this is the cause. Many factors contribute, but the research does point to less local news coverage being a possible factor.
Why is that? Researchers theorize that ownership of news outlets being gathered into fewer corporate hands resulted in more partisan news coverage.
Researchers also describe a sort of trickle-down division over the years: People became increasingly focused on national politics — where party leaders were ever more divided — and paid less attention to local news. Communities then started reflecting the national schism. If you’re depending on Fox News and CNN rather than your local paper for coverage, your views may start to be more influenced by national opinions.
About 50 percent of revenue for local papers used to come from classified ads for real estate, housing and automotive… All of that went away. And it is not coming back.
— Allison Levine
Wheatley has experienced that impact. He’s run for local office twice, and “The question I got asked more than anything else was, who did I support for president? And my question to them would be, ‘What does that have to do with the job that I’m seeking?’ ”
He added, “You’re running for County Council, people want to talk about abortion. And it’s because that’s what they hear about all day long.” (If you’re wondering, neither Sussex County Council nor your local school board determines state or national abortion policy.)
Local News Outlets Around the Country are on Life Support — or Dead
A thorough review of the state of local news in 2023, led by the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, found the nation has 204 entire counties that are complete news deserts, with no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or the like. Another 228 counties are in danger of ending up that way.
While that’s out of more than 3,000 counties, this is only a list of those with no news outlets at all.
“Residents in more than half of U.S. counties have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source — either print, digital or broadcast,” according to the report.
In Delaware, every county has a newspaper, radio or TV station, and usually several of these. But some towns or regions still have little coverage — rural, northwestern Sussex County up into southwestern Kent County being one notable example. Perhaps even more striking is the absence of a thriving news outlet in the Middletown, Odessa and Townsend area, despite a burgeoning population there. In places where news outlets do exist, the staff has often shrunk to a startling degree.
Kratofilow said when he lived downstate, the local TV station often covered local happenings. But upstate, a lot of smaller stories get missed.
“If something happens in Bear, or Glasgow, or Middletown, if you talk to people, they’ll say, ‘Well, this isn’t going to make NBC, Delaware Online is not going to cover it,’” he said. “It’s not major enough to make it.”
The shakeup of the news industry that has cost many communities their local paper has been driven in large part by the advent of the internet. Media researchers note that people can turn to social media, national news websites, sports outlets like ESPN or the Athletic, and Craigslist rather than the roll of newsprint that used to land on their doorsteps every morning.
About 50 percent of revenue for local papers used to come from classified ads for real estate, housing and automotive, Levine said. “All of that went away. And it is not coming back.”
Outlets had the idea that clicks on online stories might someday equal income. Now, there’s a recognition that simply shifting from print advertising to digital advertising isn’t going to work, Levine said.
“The digital advertising revenue is a joke compared to what we used to see in print advertising revenue,” Levine said.
News organizations have been working hard trying to figure out how to survive this shift, and as the statistics show, it’s often not working very well.
That doesn’t mean the whole outlook is dire.
Christopher Wink, a co-founder of Technical.ly, a Philadelphia-based regional online publication that covers technology and entrepreneurs, is a survivor, a term he embraces a bit wryly. His business has lasted 15 years.
“Someone recently introduced me as having founded one of the, what was the phrase, ‘longest surviving local online news sites,’” he said, which seemed like a sideways reference to the way “a lot of us have struggled to last.”
Levine emphasizes the focus needs to be on saving news, not newspapers.
“Local news is not dying,” she said. “Local news is evolving … I think just in the past three years, we have really seen a shift in the national conversation about this, because it is much less pessimistic.”
Enter Grants, Donations and Other Philanthropy
If money from advertisers and subscribers isn’t sufficient, can donations make up at least some of the difference?
There’s been a shift in attitude on the part of nonprofit funders, Levine said. She’s seen it firsthand through her role with the Delaware Community Foundation, where she worked for years before stepping away to focus on building up local news.
The opening of the Claymont Train Station last fall. A strong turnout for a press event is a rarity these days. Photo by Larry Nagengast.
There used to be a general sense that since the news industry used to make gobs of money, they just needed to get their house in order, she said. “If they just got the right business people in there, and ran it like a real business, they’d be fine.”
Now, she said, “What’s exciting here, I think, is that the philanthropic world, including foundation funders, community foundations, corporate funders, and individual donors have recognized that local news and information is not just a broken business model. It’s a broken business model that is critical to our democracy and our communities. And they are stepping up to make it work.”
Nonprofits make up a slightly growing share of LION Publishers, where about 35% of newsrooms are some flavor of nonprofit, according to Krewson. That’s an increase of about 5% in the past four or five years.
Just because a news organization is a nonprofit doesn’t mean they’re dedicated to charity work. It’s more about tax status than business model or approach, Krewson said. Also, the little for-profit shops in LION aren’t exactly earning fabulous money or spinning off dividends.
Money Coming to Delaware
A portion of the nonprofit money headed to Delaware over the past few years comes from the Solutions Journalism Network, which has allocated money for the Delaware Journalism Collaborative (which means SJN is also indirectly funding this article).
The Collaborative has a two-year, $200,000 grant from SJN to report on solutions to polarization in Delaware communities. Member organizations contribute articles, which all members can share, free of charge, and which are also available to the public at no cost.
The Longwood Foundation is a local funder that has also increasingly contributed to journalism. In the past couple years, it has made grants of $800,000 to DETV, a Wilmington-based TV station founded by Ivan Thomas, and $250,000 to Technical.ly. Both grants aim to enable the organizations to expand what they’re doing in Delaware.
Longwood also gave $275,000 to Delaware Public Media in 2022. General Manager Pete Booker wrote in an email Longwood has been a supporter ever since DPM’s early days, and this grant will help the station expand operations.
The foundation is also contributing $800,000 to the launch of Spotlight Delaware, a new nonprofit newsroom that is also part of Levine’s Local Journalism Initiative and a major part of her efforts to find new ways to deliver news.
Spotlight Delaware also got a major boost in January of this year, when the American Journalism Project announced a $1 million grant to help build the organization.
Levine’s vision is not to compete with existing outlets, but to find stories that these outlets aren’t able to get to, she said. Spotlight Delaware would then make these stories available for free to other news outlets and find other innovative ways to deliver the news to communities.
“There are more stories than any organization could possibly cover,” Levine said. “Our interest for Spotlight Delaware is in helping fill the gaps.”
Philanthropy Isn’t a News Utopia
Just as with the old advertising model, there are challenges and drawbacks to relying on philanthropy to pay for news coverage.
One is ethical. Everyone could tell who was backing newspapers in the advertising days, just by looking at the ads, Media Impact Funders noted. But not all news organizations have developed clear guidelines for how they will acknowledge their donations.
And foundations, like advertisers, have their own motives.
“The risk of conflict of interest has grown alongside funding,” the Media Impact Funders report noted. “More funders are financing journalism in areas where they also do policy work… and four in 10 outlets take money to do specific reporting suggested by a funder.”
That said, most outlets do have ethical guardrails in place to address these conflicts like policies about disclosing their donors, the report found.
Another issue is that while the for-profit model has struggled mightily, it’s not a simple matter of throwing a switch and replacing advertising revenue with donations.
“It’s no panacea, right, just saying, ‘We’re nonprofit,’ doesn’t mean the money automatically flows in,” Krewson said.
However local news organizations are reborn, it will take time and likely an enormous amount of commitment.
— The Delaware Journalism Collaborative is a partnership of local news and community organizations working to bridge divides statewide. Learn more at DeJournalism.org. Reach Andrew Sharp at ASharp@DeJournalism.org.
