Stephanie Sy:
Facing deep financial troubles, News Media Corp has decided to shut down 23 news operations, six in Wyoming, seven in Illinois, five in Arizona, four in South Dakota, and one in Nebraska.
The closures by the Illinois-based company are just the latest in a trend contributing to growing news deserts in rural America. Over the past two decades, more than a third of the nation’s newspapers have disappeared.
For more on what this means for the future of local news, I’m joined by Teri Finneman, journalism professor at the University of Kansas and co-author of “Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the U.S. and Beyond.”
Teri, thank you so much for joining the “News Hour.”
I understand that you previously partnered with one of these newspapers in South Dakota, The Brookings Register. The Brookings mayor said that paper is irreplaceable, a town of 25,000 people who needed this local newspaper.
Can you talk about the role of a paper like this in a small town like Brookings?
Teri Finneman, Journalism Professor, University of Kansas: Yes, I mean, it’s absolutely critical.
There’s a reason that, when this part of the United States was settled, a newspaper was one of the first businesses that was established. It made you a real town to have a newspaper. It is a central place in the community, especially in a time when the nation is so divisive.
A newspaper is really that central place to get information about your community that nobody else is covering, to learn what’s going around — on around you, to be covering your government for you, to be covering when your school wins the homecoming game. Those things are really important to community identity.
And so, when you lose your newspaper, especially out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, it was just absolutely shocking to this community and the others for that to happen.
