When the egg lady carried a notebook

The decline of community journalism has a big political impact

Should we look forward to a day when a reporter might carry eggs, too? (Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash)

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In a rural town not far from our place, there was a woman known to locals as “the egg lady” who moonlighted as a newspaper reporter. Actually, she was what newsrooms call a stringer — a freelancer paid by the story, usually a piddling amount. The egg lady also was a school bus driver, I think, and had several kids. Her name was something like Loeva.

It was 30-some years ago that I inherited the services of Loeva when I became the editor of the small-city daily that had hired her and more than a dozen other stringers to cover outlying areas. A longtime staffer in my new workplace assured me that Loeva was an ideal stringer because she knew everybody in the town she covered. “She delivers eggs to the back doors of half the people on the town board,” that newsroom veteran explained. The other half, I learned, probably had kids who were on the high school wrestling team with Loeva’s sons or played in the band with her daughters.

And I must say that for somebody with so many responsibilities — chickens and eggs, kids, bus routes and such — Loeva’s devotion to her reporting was admirable. She showed up at every town board meeting and at a lot of other community events, faithfully filing each story for a payment that I believe was $20.

One day Loeva drove into town and visited the newsroom, and when I met her she proudly noted her fervor for the tasks we assigned, recounting a meeting when a heavy snowfall discouraged attendance and left her as the only member of the public present. The town supervisor at one point had turned to her and said, “Now, Loeva, this next part is off the record.”

“What did you do then?” I asked, perhaps a touch of alarm in my voice.

“Well, I understood,” she said. “I just closed my notebook while they talked about that stuff. They didn’t make me leave.”

This was not representative of the hard-hitting reporting that I had imagined would characterize my career, you know, so it will not be surprising to learn that we soon found other assignments that would reward Loeva’s dedication while avoiding her journalistic reticence.

Still, the residents of that community might be nostalgic for the egg lady’s coverage, however circumscribed it was, because it’s more than they’re getting now: No daily paper regularly covers those local meetings, nor the work of public officials in other towns in the county; nor does a free-circulation weekly still publish reports on public’s business written by local officials, which were of dubious thoroughness, surely, but at least provided some sort of disclosure of the public business.

Even second-rate journalism is better than none at all, I’d say. And it is becoming clear that a key factor in the well-noted decline of civic engagement by Americans — and the disillusionment and hostility that seems to grip a lot of our citizens — is the absence of what that local journalism used to deliver. It’s not just professional reporters whose absence is being felt. We miss the egg ladies, too.

The decline of local journalism across the country is obvious and well-documented. What’s now emerging is the price society is paying for that change — potentially including, we can infer from a recent report, the re-election of Donald Trump.

Nearly 55 million Americans have limited to no access to local news reporting, according to research by Northwestern University, almost all of them in rural areas. One-third of the newspapers published in the U.S. in 2005 have shut down since then, and thousands of newspapers jobs have disappeared. While scores of non-profit local digital news sites have emerged as the for-profit print ecosystem has shriveled, 90 percent of the promising start-ups have been in urban areas — not in the 97 percent of the nation’s landmass that is considered rural.¹

A review of Northwestern’s data by the Poynter Institute, a journalism study center in Florida, revealed a telling detail: In those counties identified by Northwestern’s research as news deserts, the miniscule margin that gave Donald Trump the presidency was a landslide. Trump won 91 percent of the news desert counties, cumulatively by a margin of 54 points, compared to his national margin of 1.5 percent (which was one of the smallest popular vote margins in U.S. history). That is, Trump overwhelmingly won the news deserts and lost to or barely beat Kamala Harris in the places where local news organizations still publish.²

But can the Trump margin really be blamed on the loss of local journalism? After all, few of those now-former local journalists would have been assigned to cover the presidential race, and none of those shuttered newspapers would have bought their staffers a place on the campaign jets alongside TV network correspondents and reporters for major news organizations.

What that question misses is the impact that local journalism has played for generations across the nation: the stitching together of citizens into a shared understanding of community, and the awareness of reporting as a trustworthy source of information about what goes on beyond our own line of sight.

Here’s an example: As a cub reporter at an Indiana county-seat newspaper decades ago, I was assigned to shoot photos of every one of the 16 Little League teams that played that summer in the local parks. Those photos were published on the front page of our little paper, alongside both local news — meetings of the county council and the hospital board, for example, and accounts of speakers at the Rotary Club — and straight-ahead wire reports on issues that faced the country and the state. That mix of news set a notion of priorities in the minds of readers. It reinforced a sense that however divisive issues on the national stage may be, we all shared appreciation of the joy of kids playing ball in the summer, and we all wanted to know about highway repaving nearby or medical equipment installation in our community.

In the absence of a local newspaper, or the thinning of the number of local journalists, the impact is not just in the local news that doesn’t get covered; it’s also in where people turn instead for information, and what they get there. National news outlets, whether on a TV screen or online, increasingly are targeted to audiences based on political affinity, their programming aimed less at informing people than at reinforcing biases. And if people don’t know a reporter in their community, they’re more likely to buy the notion that journalists are “enemies of the people,” as Trump has repeatedly said.

Nowadays, in place of a news diet that includes a healthy dose of what’s going on in town alongside reports from across the country, many people now get only a one-sided account of issues that politicians believe will help them win votes. That’s why this year’s presidential campaign focused so much on the imagined threat of criminals slipping across the southern border and worries about transgender athletes on high school teams — neither of which is important in the day-to-day lives of Americans, nor of consequence to the long-term stability of the nation and the happiness of its citizens. Those were stories pushed by Fox News and other outlets that acted as Trump campaign amplifiers, and by online influencers that depend for financial success on mass audiences.

Research at the University of Chicago has found that access to local news sources increases the likelihood of ticket-splitting – that is, diminishing the intensified partisanship of our neighborhoods.³ And for years, one study after another has documented what happens when local journalism disappears: taxes and public debt rise as bond ratings drop, petty government corruption increases, ambitious community projects don’t get off the ground and social alienation increases as people lose connection to what’s going on nearby — whether it’s the high school sports team or the 4-H members who raise lambs and calves to show at the county fair.

Political progressives miss the underlying message if they harp on the notion that Donald Trump won because his supporters were ignorant. Rather, a huge share of his margin was made by people who are victims of the very pressures that have decimated local news reporting over the past few years. As their local news sources have vanished, their communities have been diminished, leaving less of a sense of the shared goals of all Americans.

The people most harmed by the decline of local news, then, are overwhelmingly Trump supporters. Meanwhile, many people who are horrified by the notion of another four-year Trump term — who are struggling with feelings of sadness, anger, incredulity and fear — are turning away from the news, finding themselves unable to follow accounts that chart one Trump step after another. Both might find a useful antidote in the same place: the promising growth of an ecosystem of nonprofit news organizations that is springing up to replace reporting that used to be done by newsrooms in virtually every community.

Those new news outlets aren’t yet financially able to provide the kind of local coverage that existed a generation ago. That is, there aren’t really jobs just now for the egg ladies — people who want to report what’s going on nearby, to give their neighbors a sense of community. But one of these days there could be a role for someone who takes on a reporting assignment here or there — say, during a break from carpool duties and bus routes and gathering eggs from backyard chicken coops.

Then we will know that American journalism is rebuilding, and that moment will mark the rebuilding of our communities and our shared civic sensibility, as well.

1. https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2024/medill-report-shows-local-news-deserts-expanding.html

2. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2024/12/05/trump-wins-news-deserts-in-landslide/

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/local-news-information-and-the-nationalization-of-us-elections/4AEEA64CB7EC2CF384434AB0482E63F4

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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 illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.

This week, we share reporting published here:

• Sunset Beach, N.C. (Wilmington StarNews, starnewsonline.com)

• Canandaigua, N.Y. (Canandaigua Daily Messenger, mpnnow.com)

• Stockton, Cal. (The Record, recordnet.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!

NORTH CAROLINA

How much development is too much?

The southernmost beach in North Carolina is on a barrier island in the little town of Sunset Beach – named for its golden evening views. But as Savanna Tenenoff reports in the Wilmington StarNews, some residents are fighting a hotel development that they say puts that view at risk. Officials of the town (where the population has more than doubled since 2000, to more than 4,000) are weighing a proposal to allow a six-story, 105-room Hampton Inn & Suites hotel on a 2.4-acre site alongside a shopping center. The hotel would rise above the town’s current height restriction; that, along with the added density, is raising some residents’ concerns. “I love this town. I love the way it looks. And I'm fearful we're about to lose that beautiful town that we have,” one 15-year resident said. Others note that there hasn’t been much commercial growth in the area in recent years. Nearby Ocean Isle Beach, meanwhile, just got its first drive-through fast-food joint, a McDonald’s, which provides something of a warning for the folks of Sunset Beach.

NEW YORK

Death prompts firefighters to demand more help

Canandaigua, a charming little county seat in the Finger Lakes region, faces a problem familiar to many small communities: a choice of how to sustain essential services without burdening taxpayers. Mike Murphy reports in the Canandaigua Daily Messenger that after the death of a longtime residents in a Nov. 30 fire, the City Council seems poised to add funding for two more firefighters and an assistant chief to the paid fire service crew of 18 in the little city. (As in many small cities, volunteers augment the paid firefighting staff, but volunteer ranks are declining nationwide.) Officials also appear ready to fund a study of fire and emergency medical services. The 98-year-old victim died, Murphy reports, despite the efforts of the first crew at the scene: two firefighters in a truck. “We’re putting firefighter safety at risk; we’re putting the public at risk,” said the mayor, a former city volunteer firefighter. The new city budget would add $377 to the annual property tax bill of the average homeowner. “It’s a tough balancing act,” the city manager said. “These are not easy decisions.”

CALIFORNIA

Infrastructure maintenance issues lead to emergency

A local emergency was declared in San Joaquin County after severe seepage was discovered under a crucial levee on Victoria Island, reports Gloria Lorenzo in the Stockton Record. The leak was discovered in late October, but the failure risk is ongoing, and crews estimate that repairs could continue for the next four to six weeks, depending on weather conditions. Failure of the levee could result in extensive damage to agricultural lands, disruptions along busy Highway 4, and compromised drinking water sources for the region, according to the county. But as close observers of government know, any operation funded by taxpayers finds that money for maintenance of public works is harder to come by than when new projects are needed; that’s because there’s less political gain for officeholders in preserving what’s in place than in building something new.

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MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”

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DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS?

If you’d like some training in writing opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Our next class is Tuesday, Dec. 17, at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too!

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH