Local News Should Be Local

From the Publisher

Cameron, TX - There is a difference between a newspaper that is "in" a town and a newspaper that is "of*" a town — and if you live in a small town in Texas right now, you have probably felt it.

A paper that is "of" a town is written by people who live there. The reporter covering the city council meeting sat next to you at the football game Friday night. The person writing the obituaries knew your grandmother. When a mistake makes it into print, you can find the person who made it at the coffee shop in the morning, and they will make it right — because they have to look this community in the eye every single day.

A paper that is merely "in" a town is something else. Somewhere along the way, a company far away bought it — often along with dozens of other small papers just like it — and started cutting. The newsroom shrinks to a skeleton, or disappears into a "regional" operation counties away. What is left gets filled with wire stories, news from towns you've never visited, and press releases. The council still meets. The school board still votes. Your taxes still get set. But nobody from the paper is in the room anymore.

This is not a Cameron problem. It is an American one, and the numbers are stark. According to Northwestern University's Medill State of Local News report, 136 newspapers closed in the past year alone — more than two a week. Since 2005, nearly 3,500 American newspapers have vanished, along with more than 270,000 newspaper jobs. Today, 213 counties in this country have no local news source at all, and another 1,524 counties have exactly one. Texas is among the hardest-hit states in the nation: 31 Texas counties are news deserts, and another 138 Texas counties are down to a single source of local news.

Cameron nearly knows how that story ends — because we have watched our own paper change hands, each time farther from home. The Cameron Herald was owned for years by a Texas-based chain. In March of this year, it was sold again — one of 32 Texas community newspapers bought in a single deal by Times Media Group, a company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, owned by Steve Strickbine, who now operates more than 100 publications across four states. Since the sale, the Herald has lost staff, and it has moved out of its longtime building into a space in the Chamber of Commerce building.

You don't have to take my word for what that model means. Take the owner's. Profiling his company, Nieman Lab reported that Times Media Group employs roughly 60 full-time journalists across more than 60 newspapers — in the owner's own framing, a little less than one full-time journalist per newspaper — with reporters "platooned" in to cover other towns on slow weeks, and editors overseeing dozens of papers from hundreds of miles away. And asked about holding local government accountable, Strickbine said it himself: "Do we have the watchdog role? Can we do that now in all these areas? No. I think that's obvious."

I was the general manager of the Cameron Herald. I know what a staffed local newsroom meant to this county, and I know what was left as the decisions moved farther and farther away from Cameron. That is why I started the Cameron Community Voice.

Here is what a town loses when its news stops being local. This fall, the Cameron City Council adopted a new city budget and a property tax rate that raises 30 percent more revenue than the year before — the biggest share of it for water-system debt that residents will be paying on for years. Public hearings were held, as the law requires. Not one resident spoke at them. That is not an accusation against the council, and it is not really one against the public, either. It is what happens when people stop hearing about what's decided in their name — when there's no local reporter whose whole job is to sit in that room, take the notes, and tell the town in plain English what it means for their bill. Researchers have put a price on that silence: after a local newspaper closes, a city's borrowing costs go up — one study found roughly $650,000 in added cost on a typical bond issue — because lenders charge more when nobody is watching the books.

And here is what a town gets back when the news is local again. It gets the Yoemen's 7-0 season covered like it matters — because here, it does. It gets a fallen young firefighter's raffle on the front page, and his family helped. It gets obituaries written with care for people who were somebody's neighbor for sixty years, not names in a database. It gets weddings and babies and fiftieth anniversaries celebrated in public, the way small towns have always celebrated them. It gets a reporter who lives here, answers here, and can be found at the coffee shop in the morning.

None of that travels. No content desk in Arizona will ever care about the Milam County Junior Livestock Association's turkey dinner, or the Lady Yoe's playoff run, or whether the appraisal district's new computer system got your homestead exemption right. A reporter who lives here cares about all of it, because it is her town too.

Pew Research found this year that 70 percent of Americans trust their local news organizations — far more than trust national news — and 85 percent say local outlets matter to their community's well-being. People know the difference between a paper that is "in" their town and a paper that is "of" it. They can tell whether the person writing about their home has ever stood in it.

Small towns like Cameron, Rockdale, Thrall, and Rogers deserve local news — real local news, reported by people who live in the community, for the community. Local news should stay local. It should never have been bought out from under us in the first place.

The Cameron Community Voice is free, and it is yours. Send us your news, your photos, your announcements, and your corrections. We will get some things wrong — and when we do, you know where to find us. We'll be right here. We live here too.

— Jillian Morris, Publisher