This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about a local newspaper going out of business.

On one hand, that’s a reality of doing any kind of business these days.  Not every business succeeds.

But, when we lose local news, does the loss carry implications for democracy as we know it in America?

Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan posits that the answer is yes – and, at least in theory, I agree.

This issue is of interest to me for a specific reason.  My first professional job out of college was as a reporter for a local newspaper, The Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I considered myself to be a journalist interested in keeping readers aware of community issues.

The newspaper, part of a local chain of newspapers owned by one family in Oregon, performed solid local services in and around Astoria.  My job was to cover city and county government, as well as the Port of Astoria, a gateway to the Pacific.

 Am I objective on this point of “performing solid local services.”?  No.

I was part of the provision of such services, so it was logical for me to believe we did a solid, albeit imperfect, job of helping Astoria citizens follow “their” governments.

Media critic Sullivan made the same point in a piece she wrote for the Washington Post this week.  Here is how she started her column:

“’It has been our great privilege to bring you news from Stoneham and Woburn over the years,’ read the announcement. ‘We regret to inform you that this will be the final edition of the Sun-Advocate newspaper.’”

The Massachusetts weekly, as of August, is no more. 

“It is an increasingly familiar story across the United States,” Sullivan writes.  “Already in a sharp downward spiral, the local news industry was hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic. The worst blows were taken by newspapers — businesses that, as a group, had never recovered from the digital revolution and the 2008 recession.

“Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors.  Since covid struck, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications, like the California Sunday Magazine, which folded last fall — and then won a Pulitzer Prize eight months later.”

According to PEW Research Center, papers that survived so far are still facing difficult straits.  Many have laid off scores of reporters and editors.  The newspaper industry lost an astonishing 57 per cent of its employees between 2008 and 2020 — making these publications a mere specter of their former selves.

They are now what Sullivan and others call “ghost newspapers:”  “Outlets that may bear a proud name or yore, but no longer do the job of thoroughly covering their communities and providing original reporting on matters of public interest.”

Sullivan reports that, in many regions of the country, there is no local news coverage at all, or next to none.  These areas have come to be known, she says, as “news deserts” — a term used by academics and researchers to refer to areas where coverage of the community by local news outlets is minimal or non-existent.

For these “news deserts,” a major concern is what happens to the communities they used to serve, and, more broadly, what happens to society and the ability to self-govern when local news dries up.

Sullivan adds this:

“It’s not just watchdog journalism that suffers when news organizations shrink or die.  The decline affects civic engagement and political polarization, too.  Studies show that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote, and when they do, they are more likely to do so strictly along party lines.  To put it bluntly, the demise of local news poses the kind of danger to our democracy that should have alarm sirens screeching across the land.”

Well, rather than screeching, Sullivan’s contentions remind me about the situation in Salem, Oregon where I live.  Here, there used to be two newspapers, the Capitol Journal and the Salem Statesman.  Now, there is one – the Statesman-Journal, and it is only a skeleton of its former self.

I say that because, for one thing, after The Daily Astorian, I applied for a job at the then-Salem Statesman, believing that it would be good to be a reporter in the State Capitol, only three blocks from the Capitol buildings themselves.  I suppose it would have been good, but, in order to live in Portland and avoid a commute, I took a job at Portland State University, which began my career in and around government in Oregon.

When I say the Statesman is a skeleton of its former self, I am sorry about that fact.  It takes me only about five minutes to read it on-line every morning. And I often find out more information about the Salem-Keizer when I read the Salem Reporter, an on-line publication that arose because the Statesman was not doing its job well enough to suit folks in the area starved for news.

As an aside, on-line publications are springing up in many places these days.  The one in Salem is led a quality journalist, Les Zaitz, a former investigative reporter for the state’s major newspaper, The Oregonian, which also is a shadow of its former self.  Salem Reporter does a good job of ferreting out local news and that is a tribute to Zaitz’ journalism, as well as to my friend, Larry Tokarski, a community citizen who funded the on-publications start and still supports it today.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” has called the loss of local news “the essential problem of our republic.”

“It is nothing less than a crisis, he says, and a deepening one. The only way we can talk to other people is with some common understanding of the facts, for example whether or not our water is polluted or whether or not the teachers in our school are on strike.  We don’t have to like what we learn about our communities through local news reporting, he noted, but it benefits us nonetheless. When local news goes away, then our sense of what is true shifts from what is helpful to us in our daily lives to what makes us ‘feel good,’ which is something entirely different.”

Sullivan concludes that “there is no single answer to this crisis.”  Any solution, if there even is a solution, will require a multi-faceted approach, she contends.

That links to what of my contentions in two recent blogs.  As we watch things deteriorate in this country, I prefer to believe that all is not lost as we root for our form of government, representative democracy.  We need to act like citizens interested in the future and do our part to improve government. 

But, it will be harder without local news outlets.