“People think news deserts are only in flyover country,” said veteran reporter Samuel Freedman, who was quoted in a 2023 article in The Nation. “Local news, local journalism, is disappearing everywhere.”
Evidence of that disappearance on Cape Cod was what led us to start the Independent five and a half years ago. Two formerly thriving newspapers, the Provincetown Banner and the Cape Codder, based in Orleans, had been bought by the giant GateHouse Media (now Gannett), which was in turn controlled by Fortress Investments, a private-equity partnership. Its distant managers were not journalists and couldn’t have cared less about local news. They were interested only in extracting as much profit as possible from a besieged industry by strangling individual newspapers into irrelevance and eventual oblivion.
We saw predatory ownership as the problem and local ownership of the press by people committed to serving the public interest as the solution. We were not the only ones who saw this. Small independent news organizations — many of them nonprofits and almost all of them online only — have sprung up in some places where venerable local papers had been sold and turned into “ghost newsrooms” or shut down entirely.
But that hasn’t been enough. “The great mesh of local media that underpinned our civic life — made up of thousands of newsrooms that tried, however imperfectly, however insufficiently, to tell the story of the United States — has been torn so violently that it no longer functions,” wrote The Nation’s John Nichols.
The threat to journalism has evolved — it’s no longer just vulture capitalist ownership. Tech companies steal content for “summaries” using AI, and the administration in Washington sees the press as an enemy — or a marketing arm for its lies. Then there are self-defeating practices that undermine public trust like the inexcusable proliferation of “sponsored content” — advertising disguised as news.
The path to saving journalism is not at all clear. We know that billionaire owners like those at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are not going to do it. They have failed the test of standing up to autocracy and defending independent critical voices in their newsrooms.
The local newsrooms we admire are still committed to writing the story of this country, town by town. That story is the antidote to dictatorship.
We’ve invited the publishers and editors of three exemplary weeklies — the Falmouth Enterprise, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror — to join us this week to exchange ideas. If you care about this crisis and what can be done about it, come to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown this Saturday at 10 a.m. for a public conversation with this group sponsored by the Local Journalism Project. We’ll be joined by Ellen Clegg, former editorial page editor of the Boston Globe and co-founder of the nonprofit Brookline News.
The title of Saturday’s session is “Can Local Journalism Be Saved?” Hanging on the answer to that question may be a related and more unsettling one: can our democracy be saved?
