A threat that calls for local action

Here's where "Think globally, act locally" can be put into action

America’s local press is on shaky ground, but local care can save it. (Photo by Utsav Srestha on Unsplash)

You wouldn’t figure a Scottish sociologist born in the middle of the 19^th century as the author of a favorite bumper sticker. But it was Patrick Geddes, whose scholarly career ranged from botany to town planning, who originated the concept, “Think globally, act locally.” As industrialization and urban growth began to yield more crime, poverty and illness, Geddes counseled communities to meet those challenges with “constructive and conservative surgery” — that is, small changes in buildings and neighborhoods — rather than “heroic, all of a place schemes” that were growing more popular.¹ Geddes’ one-step-at-a-time approach turned out to be both efficient and effective, and his insights powered the work of leading thinkers for generations.

You can apply Geddes’ philosophy to all sorts of problems in search of solutions — to climate change, for example, a global crisis that won’t be solved until millions of people reduce their own carbon footprints. Lately, I’ve been thinking that acting locally might be the path to restoring the vitality of journalism, which matters a lot to me, of course, since I spent more than 40 years in newspapering.

The scope of the problem is, in fact, global: Across advanced societies, more people than ever before are turning away from the news, just as sources of honest reporting are withering under the stress of the digital revolution. It’s by now an old story that print newspapers are dying, which is seen in the shuttering of two U.S. newspapers each week, on average, leaving 1,800 communities that used to have a local news source without one now.² But the crisis increasingly confronts digital news, too: Almost half of the people surveyed on six continents for the recent Reuters Digital News Report don’t engage with the news at all. News avoidance is growing in almost every country.³

This matters to all of us. Citizens who don’t know what’s going on are vulnerable to manipulation by political and financial forces, putting their communities at risk — meaning that this is a peril that also affects less apathetic neighbors, like the readers of this publication. Researchers have linked a decline of news coverage to higher taxes, more government corruption and increased polarization. Democracies depend upon an informed electorate, and as partisan or commercial messages replace reported truth, the security that attaches to free societies is increasingly threatened.

It's comforting, though, to think that a resurgence of local journalism, one community at a time, could revitalize journalism more generally, and that such a solution might not be impossible to achieve. A small but growing number of local newsrooms are returning to local ownership across the country, sometimes as not-for-profits, which seem likely to be more sustainable than debt-laden chain-owned newspapers. And Steven Waldman, one of the leading architects of possible solutions to the decline of American journalism, suggested in The Atlantic this month that an investment of $1.5 billion a year could support salaries for 25,000 reporters, which is about the number of reporting jobs that have disappeared over the past two decades. That’s roughly two-hundredths of one percent of federal spending, Waldman noted — which, in the context of either charity or public funds on a national scale, doesn’t sound like such a huge sum to raise, right?⁴

Waldman notes how it could be done, starting with a refundable tax credit for news organizations that employ local reporters and a tax break for small businesses that advertise in local news. Those concepts are embodied in a bipartisan bill recently introduced in the U.S. House. Let’s imagine, just for now, that it has a chance of enactment.

The thinking goes, then, that as the infusion of funds would enable the local reporting infrastructure to recover, trust in journalism generally would rebound. Part of the suspicion of national news outlets surely arises from the fact that most folks no longer have neighbors who cover their community’s school boards and sports teams. It’s harder to mistrust people you know, so the credibility that will grow as local newsrooms recover might then attach to people who are doing the same thing as the people you know.

So we might imagine that if Patrick Geddes had confronted the dilemma of journalism’s demise, he would have suggested that small steps here and there — the rebuilding of one local newsroom at a time — could lead to a resurgence of journalism’s financial viability generally, and thus a strengthening of democracy. It’s an encouraging notion.

But then we hear about what happened to the Marion County Record, in Kansas, and The Wausau Pilot & Review, in Wisconsin, and we aren’t so sure. In fact, those stories offer evidence that the challenge confronting journalism really is one that requires a reaffirmation of character more than an allotment of cash. Maybe people need to behave more honorably, simple as that.

In Marion, Kan., police last week raided the home of the editor and publisher of the tiny Marion County Record after a local restaurant owner claimed that the paper had illegally obtained records about her long-ago drunk driving arrest. The newspaper hadn’t published anything about the restaurateur, and there was no evidence of any illegality by the newspaper, but the police had a search warrant signed by a local judge — who, it turned out, had herself twice been convicted of drunk driving. And, surely coincidentally, the police chief had his own gripes about how he had been covered by the newspaper. So the cops seized computers, cellphones, documents and an Alexa smart speaker.  

It is extraordinarily unusual for authorities to raid news organizations in the United States, because it’s rarely constitutional. So the raid in Marion got national press attention, which is surely why the case was quickly picked up by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which two days later returned all the seized items. That was too late, sadly, for the 98-year-old mother of the publisher, who was so upset by the raid that she took to bed, where she died the next day.⁵

In Wisconsin, a different threat confronted the local newsroom. Two years ago, the nonprofit Wausau Pilot & Review — which has a staff of four — reported that a prominent local businessman had referred to a 13-year-old boy with an anti-gay slur during a county board debate over a diversity resolution. The reporting was based on a tip that was later backed up by sworn statements from three other people at the meeting. The businessman, who has since been elected as a Republican member of the state Senate, denied he had uttered the slur, and filed a lawsuit.

This spring, a judge dismissed the senator’s lawsuit, ruling that he hadn’t met the basic legal standard for proving that the report had defamed him. But the senator filed an appeal, which will add to the $150,000 in legal bills that the case has already piled up for the tiny news organization. It’s hard to imagine how the costs won’t push the publication out of business. The lawsuit, the editor in Wausau says, “appears designed to crush us.”⁶

There are plenty of similar stories about attacks on tiny local news organizations, which these days are all operating with limited financial margins that put their survival on the line. These are the newsrooms that keep an eye on local powers — county sheriffs, town justices and business leaders — even as they’re reporting results of local softball games and publishing photos of champion pigs and ribbon-winning pies at county fairs. They’re part of the fabric of our communities.

But let’s be realistic: Big initiatives like the legislation to provide tax breaks to support local news jobs are likely out of reach in a Congress largely held hostage by the right-wing forces allied with Donald Trump, whose attacks on reporters as “enemies of the state” is part of his political brand, making anti-press rhetoric a standard Republican rallying cry. But that’s hard to sustain if it’s directed at the reporter writing about the county fair. So if citizens have the backs of the journalists in their community — standing up for them when local powers try to bully them into silence, and supporting their newsrooms with local advertising and subscription dollars — it’s possible that America’s wobbly news infrastructure can be rebuilt.

In the end, the effort to support local newsrooms around the country from such threats is about more than journalism. It’s essential to sustaining civic life in America. That’s a huge goal, to be sure, and it’s not new: We’ve been worrying about it for decades now, as we’ve noted the decline in civility and engagement in our communities. Yet its very scale makes it the sort of a challenge that a brilliant Scotsman a century and a half ago might have urged us to take on one locality at a time. Maybe that’s the only way that we can protect the freedom we all hold dear.

1. https://www.scaling.partners/resources/articles/think-global-act-local/

2. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/06/newspapers-close-decline-in-local-journalism/

3. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2023

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/local-news-investment-economic-value/674942/

5. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/17/1194392001/judge-who-signed-kansas-newspaper-search-warrant-had-2-dui-arrests-reports-say

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/business/media/antigay-slur-wausau-pilot-review.html

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NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES

Dispatches from our common ground *

Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illumLinating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.

This week, we share reporting published here:

• Belleville, N.J. (Daily Record, NorthJersey.com)

• Fayetteville, N.C. (Fayetteville Observer, fayobserver.com)

• Bartlesville, Okla. (Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, examiner-enterprise.com)

NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes most Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!

NEW JERSEY

Disabled man turns to fundraising for service dog

A trained service dog can radically transform the lives of people whose medical conditions leave them in need of physical or emotional support. But as Gene Myers reports for NorthJersey.com, most insurance won’t cover the cost — which can range up to $30,000. So a 23-year-old New Jersey man’s family has turned to a GoFundMe came paign, which so far has yielded $4,100 in pledges. "We wanted to give him the independence and freedom he deserves," the man’s mother said. "The support we've received has been heartwarming, but there is still a long way to go."

NORTH CAROLINA

Barbecue entrepreneur reaches out to help kids

Carl Pringle is locally famous around Fayetteville for his Flip-Flop Barbecue Sauce — Original, Lite and Fire — but Myron B. Pitts reports in the Fayetteville Observer that Pringle has taken it upon himself to create a getaway for youth on what can be dangerous streets of the city. Pringle is fixing up a deteriorated home in Bonnie Doone, a neighborhood that has historically struggled with poverty, limited development and crime, which he will call Uncle Carl’s Safe Space. “My vision behind it is that whatever’s going on in the street, once you came in that yard, it’s a safe space,” he said. So far, neighbors have been supportive. 

OKLAHOMA

Developer will yank investment if homeless shelter moves in

A Kansas developer has plans to invest $500,000 to rehabilitate a building in Bartlesville into a co-working space, but he has told local officials that the will drop the project if plans move forward for a homeless mission across the street. Andy Dorsett reports in the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise that the developer, Garrison Hassenflu, says the proposed rezoning to allow the shelter would permit “noisy, stinky, air-polluting or eyesores” — so if the shelter “or other objectionable use” is approved, he won’t invest in Bartlesville. However, Dorsett’s story notes, Hassenflu's property is currently zoned as 'multi-family residential,' which doesn't allow for professional offices, according to city zoning regulations, meaning that he would have to petition for a rezoning of his own property to enable it to be developed for professional office space — just as the 'B the Light Mission' has done for theirs.

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And one last note…

Thanks for reading The Upstate American, and for supporting this work that explores *our common ground, this great land. Most weeks, paid subscribers also receive the Midweek Extra Edition of The UPSTATE AMERICAN, exploring the writing of the essay. And if you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the class offered by The Memoir Project by clicking below. We’re taking reservations now for a spot in our first post-summer class.